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I dream of you in ten shades of blue,
belly as beastly as the moon as tarred as the rounds of your eyes, I bud feathers beneath the bulbs of my lungs as your chin creeps down to the sun, I dream of you as the cold bites my blossoming cheeks, palms as big as the sky, as bold as my tongue during a spat over and over again, love and hate and versa and versa, I dream of you during my wake as I lay shaking...
- Marie Niege.
“You could come back with me. If you want to.”
He’s never seen Satoru so…hesitant. It’s awkward. Like nothing he remembers but. It’s been a long time. Things change. People? Even more. He should know. He does. It’s what makes him keep his arms to himself, instead of reaching out to hold. He has no idea if Satoru’s going to fit against him anymore, just like a slate of sunshine against a tree bark. He has no idea of what to do if Satoru doesn’t.
“Or…or not.” Satoru offers, quiet. Edgy as a feral cat found crouching in a corner of an alley, when Suguru doesn’t answer for a beat too long. He waves a hand at the school’s premises; the empty corridor. “They’re gonna want to keep you here, y’know. They’re saying it’s for security reasons. They still don’t trust you.”
“And you?”
Satoru laughs once, harsh and brittle.
“They never trusted me in the first place.”
“No…no, I meant, do you? Trust me?”
Satoru stares at him.
“You could come with me. Or you could tell me where else you wanna go. But you’re not staying here. I won’t leave you here with these old vultures vying for scraps from the living.”
Suguru hasn’t known the meaning of trust for over a decade now. He thinks it perhaps has something to do with how Satoru lets him see past the brilliant, fierce blue of his eyes, to the faint lines of fatigue etched onto the skin beneath them.
Even now.
“I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
And hasn’t that been the complete truth of his life? Nowhere else to go, except here.
“Okay. C’mon, then.”
Satoru sheds his hesitance like a cat shedding fur, leaving behind specks of it over Suguru’s clothes.
Satoru has a scar.
It’s right on his back, the tip peeking out like a tongue of fire from below the collar of his jumper. It’s different from the one that bisected his throat open several years ago, stark and taut skin that stands out against his snowy complexion, in that it is new.
It’s similar in that the same bloodline keeps coming close enough to snip the thread that measures Satoru’s life. In how, even now, Satoru does not seem to care about this in the least, phone pressed between his ear and the juncture of his shoulder as he talks, pacing up and down the length of his living room.
“…ow much longer do you think he’ll need before he wakes up?”
He’s quiet, listening to whatever Shoko says on the other end of the line. Suguru watches the impatience making his toes curl. How he taps his foot.
“I know. I…I just don’t want to have been too late for him, for them, too. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Thanks, Shoko…huh? Oh. Oh yeah, I’ll tell him.”
Satoru hangs up, tosses his phone aside. He comes over to stand before Suguru, blotting out the early colours of dusk.
“Shoko says hi.”
“Mmm.” Suguru responds, focused on the how the broad lines of Satoru’s shoulders are hunched together. Tight with tension. Idly, he wonders if Satoru is still as sensitive to being touched there as he was when they were sixteen. “How’s the kid?”
He presses the flat of his palm against Satoru’s stomach; feels it moving, like a heaving fish.
“Asleep. Shoko said he’s going to be okay. But it’ll take time. He didn’t have the same physical strength that Yuuji…”
Suguru feels the hitch in his own breath in the way that Satoru’s gone rigid, the skin beneath his palm going still as death.
His head feels stuffy, throat burning. Blunt fingernails are digging into Satoru’s skin, but he doesn’t move away from Suguru. He never did. And isn’t that the problem? With Satoru. With the…
Suguru swallows back bile.
When he had brought them out of that village, small and terrified and trembling, he had promised to look after the twins forever. He had turned his back on everything good left in his life and promised them the future he had planned with Satoru. He had abandoned one promise but everyday, Suguru had given, tried to give, his all to keep the twins happy.
They were his girls. His…family. They had loved him enough to believe blindly in his dream. If he had asked them to, they would’ve burned down the world for him. They were foolhardy enough to want to go up against Satoru only because they had wanted to help him build his world the way he saw it.
And then they’d died. Bargaining with a monster, trying to save his corpse.
I don’t even have their bones, he thinks, the suffocation inside his head overwhelming.
“Hey, I…uh. I’m sorry.”
He looks up at Satoru’s quiet murmur. If the eerie, alien silence across the front of his mind is like night in an unknown forest, Satoru is the wind blowing through the tops of the trees.
Filling the air with familiar sounds.
His eyes are a whirlwind of tormented, conflicting emotions when Suguru looks at him. He cares for the boy. This much Suguru knows.
He, of all people, also knows what it’s like to lose control of your body, to be locked into your own mind, to wake up and find blood that you haven’t spilled colouring your hands.
Satoru himself is living proof of that.
And still, a wave of nausea churns in Suguru’s stomach. He doesn’t hold the boy accountable, not when he wasn’t even Sukuna’s vessel by the time Suguru finally regained control over his own body, but to face him right now feeling anything but rage and the urge to kill, is impossible for him. So, he’s kept his distance. From him and the other brat.
The one Satoru raised. The one who grew up to be a threat even worse than his father was. The one who almost succeeded in doing what his father couldn’t.
He squeezes Satoru’s hand gently.
“Not your fault.”
“Not Yuuji’s either. Nor Megumi’s.”
So, Satoru can still read him like a book, huh? Before Suguru can say anything, Satoru takes his hand in both of his.
“Listen, he’s…he’s a good boy. So is Megumi. I know you…I know what you see when you look at them. I don’t blame you for that. But I mean it. It’s not their fault. If anything, I should’ve been more careful…”
“Satoru, don’t.”
“No. No, I should’ve been more careful. I should’ve watched out for something like this happening and–”
“Satoru, no. There’s nothing you could’ve done.” Suguru swallows back the bile that rises in his throat. “I am furious. But I don’t think I have the right to be angrier at anyone else more than myself. You weren’t there, because of me.”
Satoru turns his mouth downwards.
“Now that’s just dumb. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
He mumbles and Suguru has to smile.
“Right. You sure about that?”
“Always was.”
“You can sleep in my room, okay? I’ll take the guest bedroom. If you need anything, call me.”
“Sure.”
“I mean it, Suguru. Don't hide anything from me.”
“If you’re so concerned, you could just sleep here.”
Satoru blinks.
“What?”
Suguru stares right back.
“What.”
“You changed your shampoo.”
Suguru tells him, front to Satoru’s back. He can’t smell green apples anymore. Only smoky teak and damp hair. Satoru fidgets, fingers plucking at Suguru’s hands laced on his front like he’s trying to play a harp.
“Yeah.”
Suguru slips his hand beneath the thin t-shirt. Finds skin warmed by shower and then, linen.
“It’s nice.” He tells the baby hairs growing on the nape of Satoru’s neck. “I like it.”
It’s also nice to feel how Satoru’s torso jumps under his fingers. The bobbing of his throat as he swallows. How his back twinges like lyre strings against Suguru’s chest. The broad, imposing shape of him curled up to fit within Suguru’s arms.
Goosebumps, like a sudden wash of blooming flowers. Intimacy, more winding and steep than the easier, well-traversed roads of arousal. The breeze through the curtains.
Satoru. Satoru.
How he nestles backwards till his ass is pressed flush to the flaccid weight of Suguru’s cock in sweats that he gave him from his own closet.
“Let me sleep!”
Suguru kisses the back of his neck.
Watches it redden, one tint at a time, till it’s bright like the last of the bruised autumn apples.
Thinks:
Still the same Satoru.
“Sleep.”
“Can’t sleep?”
In reply, Satoru only reaches for his hand across the bed.
They’re both lying on their sides, facing each other. The moon always makes Satoru’s eyes look almost haunting, but he keeps them shut now. When Suguru places his free hand on Satoru’s face, the skin beneath it is clammy with sweat.
“I woke up. My head hurts...”
Satoru whispers.
Suguru moves his hand to place it over Satoru’s trembling, shut eyelids. Satoru relaxes almost imperceptibly under his touch, some of the rigidity leaving his shoulders. Suguru lets go of his hand only to feel for the back of Satoru’s head.
“Worst here?”
He asks, tangling his fingers through the hair till he feels the scalp, the hard bone beneath it, kneading gentle circles onto the flesh till he can feel the pulsing pain in Satoru’s head on the tips of his own fingertips.
Satoru shuffles closer to him, sighing quietly.
“You remember.”
Suguru looks at Satoru’s eyelashes peaking out from beneath his hand, like snowflakes on his cheeks.
“You never let me forget.”
It grows quiet for a while after that.
“Do you have them too?”
Satoru asks quietly, after a while.
Suguru nods. He knows Satoru can still see.
“Yeah.”
Convalescence has been more painful than any of his wounds ever were. Stark, like the stitches on his forehead. Dreadfully lonely, sometimes. Scabbed over but with raw, bruised flesh beneath.
Suguru still looks in the mirror on some days and sees a face he cannot recognize. Sometimes, he has to stare at his own hands and feet till he can remind himself that they’re his. Sometimes, the itch between his stitches grows so hideous that he has to seek out Satoru and press his forehead to cold skin in order to remember that this is him, Getō Suguru.
That he’s not going to wake up the next day locked away in his own body, with Satoru locked away beyond time and space, because of him.
“Hey Suguru?”
“Hm.”
He feels Satoru blink, eyelashes fluttering against his palm and Suguru takes his hand back so he can look at Satoru’s eyes. Watch them opening, like morning light bringing the sky back into focus.
Blue. White. A reflection of every sky Suguru’s ever been under.
“I don’t wanna go back to sleep.”
“Okay.”
“Stay up with me?”
“Mn.”
It makes two of them, anyway.
“Leave me alone. Please, Satoru.”
Satoru stands at the door to his own bedroom, eyes slits of shocking aquamarine. Horizons upon horizons inside them.
“No.”
“What...?”
“I said no. I won’t leave you alone. The last time…last time you said, ‘I’ll be okay, Satoru’ I believed you. I thought, ‘It’s alright. I know he’s not okay but it’s alright. He just needs space.’ But you? You went so far away from me that I couldn’t even catch up.”
He shuts the door behind himself.
As it latches with a soft click, Suguru knows that the last of his will to send Satoru away, to hide his pain from Satoru, has been locked away forever. Out there, on the other side of the door. He can’t stay without Satoru; he’s never going to be able to. It’s why walking away never worked.
Not in life. Neither in death.
Suguru only walked away from one life to the next. Not from Satoru, who he carried everywhere with himself like a heartbeat, tucked inside his clothes; in touches he felt on his scalp, the roots of his hair. In those places of himself, hidden and dark and made of night, that only Satoru kissed and touched and made light of. Like the sweat in summer, leaving his body in the daylight; crawling back under his skin at dusk; breaching him again, at midnight.
It’s why he kept coming back, over and over and over again. Each time, for another part of Satoru to wear on himself. Satoru was in everything Suguru had been walking around with in his arms, trying to hold on and make room for his new life, yet unable to let go of him.
Now, he doesn’t really have anything else left to hold onto either. His head screams with voices not his. Memories he’d kill to forget. It’s like he’s tearing at the seams.
But then, Satoru settles next to him. Runs a thumb, like a needle, over the stitches on his forehead, before sitting down.
Right there on the floor at the foot of the bed. He starts to talk and keeps talking, words falling from his lips like filling a glass all the way through.
Filling the clamour inside Suguru’s head with silence instead.
Satoru is dreaming.
It takes him a while to realise this because of how rarely Satoru sleeps, let alone dreams. Through each night they’ve ever spent together, Satoru’s mostly stayed awake, talking to him in the dark, eyes lit up by the moon.
He sleeps rarely, only when he wants to. Only when Suguru holds him long enough to press the sleep from his own bones into Satoru’s.
He’s dreaming now, face to the door, all twitching limbs and restlessness. Quiet, in a way that’s unlike him. Quiet, in the way he only is when it’s a shade of good he does not have words or sounds for.
Suguru rests his cheek against the convex swell of Satoru’s arm where it slopes downwards to form his shoulder, watching, fascinated.
He’s half-hard, but content with only this for now. To watch as Satoru falls apart in his sleep. With spring almost gone, it’s been getting warmer. Even with the air-conditioning on, Satoru’s kicked off the bedsheets. The front of his boxers is tented, a patch as dark and misshapen as a rose staining the fabric.
Satoru’s lips part, on words and air. Suguru leans in, hair falling onto that pale, flushed face. He hears familiar syllables. Watches as Satoru shivers, once. Just once.
It’s beautiful. Satoru always is, with how the powerful shape of his arms, the sinews on his skin, stand out from all his tossing and shifting against the bedsheets. Without how his lashes curl against his cheeks, melting snow.
Suguru’s not completely heartless. His chin digs into Satoru’s shoulder as he leans over, hand slipping past the waistband of Satoru’s boxers. He can’t watch from this angle but Satoru’s cock still throbs in his hold, blood pounding where skin meets skin.
Satoru trembles. Suguru feels it like an earthquake in his own blood. They haven’t done this; not since he came back. Not since they started living together here, among shattered pieces of the past, present and future, constantly sidestepping, trying not to cut themselves.
How strange, Suguru thinks now as Satoru arches his back and spills immediately in his grip, warm and thick. To have been scared of a little blood.
“I want to cut my hair.”
He says, staring distastefully at the fraying, damaged tips in the mirror. It’s almost the length of halfway down his back now. The split ends gape between his fingers where he holds them. Fall shut when he lets go. Like thin mouths, opening and shutting soundlessly. It’s hot inside the bathroom, sunlight creeping in through the tiny, opaque window.
Humidity makes the roots of his hair stick to his skin as Suguru begins gathering half of it together to tie it back.
Satoru, brushing his teeth at the same mirror, turns to look at him then, foaming minty and green at the mouth. Blue eyes slightly bleary from sleep even now. Cute. He spits into the sink, some of it clinging to the corners of his mouth like a day's old kiss.
“‘kay”.
“How short do you want it?”
Satoru asks, knees knocking into Suguru’s back, scissors callously dangling from his fingers, metal glinting at Suguru’s throat. His other hand runs through the dark, heavy hair, like sure footsteps through a maze.
“Short as you remember it.”
Satoru hums, fingertips pressing against the nape of his neck. He lifts the scissors, reflecting sunlight that Suguru has to squint against.
As the music of the blades criss-crossing through the air fills his ears, locks of raven hair falling onto the white sheet on his lap like a rain darker than summer brings, he remembers lifting a phantom pair of scissors to snip off the delicate thread at the end of his pinkie finger. Living with the imprint of its presence like a scar even after it fell away.
He holds out his hand, flexing his fingers. Satoru leans over his shoulder, brushing his hair away from where it falls across his forehead.
When the sun flashes again, fractured and scattering from the glass windows, he thinks he catches a flash of red on his pinkie.
The knot secured twice over where he'd cut it.
“Hey, you okay?”
Satoru stares at him, hand poised mid-air where he holds the fried mackerel over Suguru’s plate. He’s never had a palate for fish in all the years that Suguru’s known him.
“You barely ate.”
He puts the fish down on the plate.
Suguru remembers his mother’s hands. He reminds himself, on those days when he still wakes up feeling like he has no right to have slept through the night in this body. Like today. When even Satoru’s ankles around his own under the dinner table, don’t feel like enough gravity to keep him tethered.
My hands killed her, he tells himself, when the figments of the parasite’s voice try to make him remember these same hands, but not his, poised to fight the one person he never fought in life or death. Mine. Mine. Not yours. Not anymore.
He remembers her face vividly. He remembers everything about her.
Her hands, scallion-scented. Small fingernails coated with drying buckwheat. Teaching his smaller hands to pick up his chopsticks. Even before, teaching them to curl and uncurl around her own fingers.
Suguru, Suguru. Such a beautiful baby. Mama’s beautiful little boy...
He flexes his fingers.
An inward curl of the knuckles. His. A loosened fist. His.
The thief that stole his corpse was capable of great horrors but Suguru’s unlearned a lifetime of curling his fingers around air. He’s used his own hands to saw through his anchors, leaving himself unmoored at sea. There’s no greater horror than snapping the placenta in half with one’s own hands.
He tears the fish open, its soft belly turning to flakes of steaming snow that melt in his mouth. He nudges Satoru’s ankle, bone over bone where that little star-shaped birthmark is. Smiling.
“I’m good. Your cooking’s improved.”
It’ll take a lot more than just great horrors to make Suguru forget himself again.
The water in the shower is warm and it does the work of getting the glazed, feverish look out of Satoru’s bloodshot eyes, the blue slowly returning to its usual startling brightness.
A sleepier sky, Suguru thinks, helplessly fond, but it’ll do for now.
He's been quiet since he got out of bed and now, he’s leaning heavily into Suguru, arms around his waist, resting his cheek on Suguru’s shoulder. His chest is against Suguru’s and under the film of water, which is the only barrier between them, Suguru feels Satoru’s heart beating, warm and steady.
Satoru feels larger in his arms. Suguru’s arms welcome the strain.
So many stories left unfinished, he thinks, running his hand over a small, jagged one on Satoru’s right shoulder. One he does not know. He still can’t fully look at the nebulous one that takes up almost the whole entirety of Satoru’s back, but he does rub his hands over it. Feeling the scar tissue; the ridges in the healed skin.
All the while, Satoru stays quiet in his arms; so quiet that Suguru thinks he might’ve fallen asleep again. He can feel Satoru’s breathing, warm on his skin. Then, he feels Satoru carding his fingers through Suguru’s hair.
“Hey, Suguru.”
“Mm?”
Satoru’s quiet a while. Suguru waits.
“Are you gonna leave?”
He doesn’t sound angry. Or even apprehensive. That’s not something Satoru expresses well. God, he expresses nothing well, other than when he’s being brutally selfless and loyal in his own brash, abrasive way. He just sounds…sad. Almost nervous. As if saying it out loud might just convince Suguru to do it.
Suguru sighs.
“Satoru.”
“No, I was just asking and I thought–”
“Satoru, listen I–”
“I didn’t mean it like–”
“Satoru.”
The intensity in Suguru’s voice makes Satoru quiet immediately. He stops fidgeting and goes still in Suguru’s arms. His voice is measured; quiet.
“I just don’t want to keep you here if you don’t want to stay. I…I don’t want you to be hurting again and act like I don’t see it.”
“Look at me.”
Satoru shuffles on his feet, complying. He pulls away reluctantly from Suguru to meet his eyes. The shower is fogging up now; water runs into Satoru’s crystal blue eyes, falling like rain from his thick, snowy lashes.
Suguru takes his face between his hands.
“I came back from the dead for you.”
He brings their faces closer.
Satoru’s heart hammers against his chest. He can smell the minty sweetness of something on Satoru’s breath.
“Yeah, you did. Freak.” Satoru whispers, eyes fixed on Suguru’s.
Suguru leans his forehead to Satoru’s; runs a thumb along the skin under Satoru’s eyes.
“I’m not leaving again. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”
“I…oh. Okay.” Satoru whispers, closing his eyes.
He closes the distance between them and Suguru laces his fingers at the base of his spine, eyes fluttering shut at the feeling of Satoru’s lips seamlessly fitting into place over his.
Satoru reaches for his hair, gently pulling on the thick strands of raven. He tastes so sweet it makes Suguru’s teeth ache in a way he’s always loved.
Suguru kisses him till he can feel the pounding of Satoru’s heart easing between his own ribs. Till Satoru forgets the last of whatever strange, terrible dream drew him out of bed in the first place.
He kisses him till he remembers what love felt like. The beating of his own heart.
He thinks:
I know you love me. You’ve always said it enough in the ways you knew how.
Thinks:
Only, I was hungry to hear you say it more.
It’s why he couldn’t even stay dead.
With nothing left to do, Satoru chooses now to catch up on years and years of not needing sleep. One of the first things Suguru had noticed when he came back to Satoru’s the first time after his defection were the rows upon rows of unlabelled white bottles inside the medicine cabinet.
Still there, he sees, when Satoru brings him here from the school.
“Thought you didn’t need to sleep?”
“I don’t. But I like to, sometimes.”
Suguru immediately reduces the three pills he takes to one, inspite of Satoru’s whining. Between that and Suguru himself, Satoru sleeps like the dead. He’ll sprawl on the massive bed, steal all the blankets, kick out in his sleep and is generally as much of a terror to be in bed with now as he was a decade ago.
Suguru needs him more than he needs air in his lungs or blood in his veins. He barely sleeps after Shibuya, not when sleep only means recollection of old lifetimes through nightmares, but holding Satoru is rest enough in itself.
Enough to keep his mind quiet and, more than that, his own.
Sometimes, Satoru gets nightmares too. He deals with them as he deals with every terrible thing that was ever done to him. Rigid limbs; stiff spine. Heart hammering against Suguru’s hands. Quietly, without a murmur or complaint.
But mostly, it’s good.
Satoru stays asleep and Suguru holds him till sleep comes, memorizing his scent, his scars, old and new, the shape of him, like the only home Suguru has left in this world.
Sex is a threshold they haven’t crossed, yet. Not formally, not since that one night caught between sleep and dreaming, even if Suguru always wakes up wanting and stiff, craving a cold shower. Even if he can always hear Satoru’s stifled gasping through the walls – when he’s finally in the ensuite, blinking against the ice-cold water – and knows that that’s how Satoru sounds when he touches himself.
They don’t talk about it.
It’s another bridge to cross when they get there and Suguru...well. Suguru’s got a whole lifetime ahead of him. He’s willing to wait.
The room is heavy with the smell of sunshine. What a strange thing to be able to smell, but he can. It’s what wakes him up. Dust motes and too-warm linens. Sweat, drying where the back of his neck is pressed to the pillow. Salt on his skin, little invisible grains.
Three months after he moved in here, Suguru wakes up, exhausted from how well he slept, smelling the sunshine like a bouquet of flowers thrust into his face, suffocating him.
It’s the heart of summer and while the air-conditioning needs to be fixed in this bedroom, neither of them had been willing to move to the other one. The ceiling fan runs in circles above them, like a cat silently chasing its own tail.
There’s no breeze outside, the trees still. Caught in the sunlight like bugs in sap. He feels the heat against the sides of his neck. His armpits. Roots of his hair.
Satoru. Who’s half-pressed to his side, a column of fire, sprawled on his front, legs askew. His face is turned towards the open window, the shock of white, snowy hair like dandelion fluff facing Suguru.
Who doesn’t stir when Suguru pulls away and sits up. Nor when he rests a hand against that broad back, sun-dried and warm, feeling its rise and fall. Suguru’s hand traces the dip where his spine is; where the scar that almost killed him runs from Satoru’s right hip to his left shoulder like a fierce pink starburst.
Up and down, Suguru moves his hand, and still, Satoru does not move an inch. His skin breaks out in ripples and Suguru gets to his knees, moving to straddle either side of his hips.
He’s careful not to put any of his weight on Satoru, even as the bed dips under their collective heaviness. Suguru bends to kiss him between the shoulders and Satoru sighs in his sleep. His hips jerk forward, the barest movement, into the soft mattress beneath them as Suguru reaches inside his own sweats, pulls them down to the tops of his thighs and takes himself in hand.
The skin is dry and the friction painful. He’s used to Satoru using his tongue to get the palm of his hand wet but. Beggars can’t be choosers. He’d really rather not wake Satoru, who’s twitching so sweetly in his sleep, brows furrowed, mouth pressed into the pillows.
He spits onto his open palm instead, choosing to watch the steady rise and fall of that pale, endless expanse of back over the way his own flushed cock disappears into the hot tunnel of his hand.
It doesn’t take long, not with Satoru beneath him. He feels alike to dry, scorched bits of tinder, susceptible to burning apart at the spark of a single matchstick. His skin burns, made of lightning; the animal of his body paces, restless and growling. When his hand catches on the fat, swollen head of his cock, Suguru’s breath hitches around laughter.
He doesn’t let it past his lips, swallowing it back down. His thighs are aching with the strain, wrist burning with the pain. It’s been a long time. And yet not so long, without half his soul away from him but always lingering in the back of his mind like a phantom touch.
Satoru stays asleep throughout all of it, his bright bluebell eyes shut to the world, to sunshine and birdsong and Suguru alike.
He stays asleep when Suguru comes with a stifled grunt, sudden and sharp, and has to bite down onto the meat of his palm to muffle himself.
It seems endless, the twitching of his hips, powerful snaps forced out from him as thick, sticky ribbons of white spill over his fingers and all across Satoru’s back. He forces the breathlessness down his throat, knees trembling. The bed quivers under the tremors still wracking his spine but Satoru only arches his back, shifting a little to settle more comfortably over the pillows.
If Suguru were feeling poetic, he’d think there was something beautiful in how the white upon white resembles a scattering of seashells on sunlit sands.
He’s not, so he settles for nipping another kiss behind Satoru’s ear, at the juncture of his shoulder, before he carefully moves away from Satoru and off the bed.
His feet fall on a patch of sunlight on the floor. Warm, when he flexes his toes.
It’s past ten and he’s in the kitchen, making his way through a batch of carrots and leeks when he hears the bedroom door open.
The knife comes down, just as Satoru storms into the kitchen, separating the whites of the leeks from the greens.
“Oh. You’re awake, huh? Get washed up. I’ll make breakfast.”
He says, never looking away from the chopping board. Satoru fumes beside him, a blindingly beautiful thing, even seen in periphery.
“You’re horrible.” He announces.
“Mm.”
“The worst.”
“Right. How do you want your eggs tod–”
Satoru knocks the knife out of his hand, grips him by the forearms. It falls with a clatter to the tiles and Suguru looks at it, amused.
“I don’t want breakfast!”
Satoru exclaims, turning him around so they’re face to face and oh, of course Satoru’s naked as the day he was born, wearing only daylight on himself. His cheeks are vivid, crimson. It spreads over the tips of his ears. Down his throat, as he crowds Suguru against the kitchen island and then stops, head almost falling onto his shoulder.
Eyes like shards of summer sky peer at Suguru through a curtain of white. Suguru smiles, indulgent and fond; cards his hand through the ends of Satoru’s hair.
“No? What do you want then?”
“You’re really gonna act all innocent now?”
“But I didn’t do anything you didn’t want. Did I?”
Satoru goes redder.
“At least take responsibility, you perv!”
The humour of it shakes him, reverberating against Satoru’s heartbeat.
“Oh yeah? How?”
Satoru hooks his arms around Suguru’s middle immediately, chin pressed to one shoulder. When Suguru’s hands come up to hold his back, they come away flaky, like Satoru’s bleeding colours like a butterfly.
“Just one colour. Asshole.”
Satoru says, making Suguru realize he said his last thought out loud. His heart works fretfully, trapped between their chests.
Satoru’s mouth moves against his ear, tracing the shell of it with breath, side of his face pressed to Suguru’s shower damp hair. Fingers digging into his hips.
“Finish what you started. Fucking coward.”
Suguru laughs. Loud.
Love shaking his bones like a freight train hurtling across the tracks.
He latches off from the rosy nipple in his mouth, frowning. The walls of Satoru’s bedroom have been threatening to shake apart from the sounds. Suguru doesn’t want to go deaf before he’s thirty.
“Don’t you have neighbours?” He says, reaching up to tweak one fair ear. “Keep it down, won’t you.”
Satoru stares at him then, blue-eyed and feline, defiance in each line of colour that makes his irises; pliant in how his hands trace patterns over Suguru’s shoulders.
“Make me.”
Five months into Suguru’s stay, the boy comes over.
His sister is still at the school, under Shoko’s watch. Recovering, from what Satoru says.
Megumi Fushiguro, mirror image of his father before him, stands silent and brooding in their living room, hands carefully holding the conjoined pair of crystal birds that Suguru broke and Satoru chose to keep anyway.
He keeps turning it over and over in his hands.
All he has to show from Shibuya is a faint scar high on his right cheekbone, as opposed to the massive pink and red scar on Satoru’s back; an injury that would’ve easily killed anyone else but him.
He’s grumpy and solemn, flinching away from any sign of physical affection that Satoru tries to smother him with, but as Suguru watches from the kitchen, only half of his attention on not overcooking the octopus, the boy might as well be Satoru’s shadow.
He moves like his side is sewn to Satoru’s back, barely saying a word. His eyes, lined with the same exhaustion that Suguru feels on some days still, light up with small sparks whenever Satoru’s hand ruffles his hair. As he regards Suguru with barely-masked disdain, peering at him from behind Satoru’s forearms, he almost looks ten years younger than he is now.
“You’re really staying with him, huh.”
“Megumi.” Satoru says, a quiet warning. But gentle. As gentle as Suguru was in his reprimanding whenever Nanako used to slam the door behind herself or Mimiko tried to leave the table without cleaning her plate.
“Yeah, yeah. Whatever.” Megumi looks away. At the carpet. The succulents on the balcony. “I guess I don’t get to blame him after what I–”
“Hey.” Suguru’s never heard Satoru sound so angry. Genuine ire lacing his words. But not directed at the boy next to him. “We’ve been over this. What did I tell you? It’s not your fault.”
“It’s not yours either.”
Oh. Suguru flips the octopus onto its other side with his chopsticks, breathes in the sizzling steam and tries to adjust to the fact that he’s not the only one in the world who can read Satoru’s silences now.
Satoru, the fool, only sighs. Sidestepping as usual.
“Would you have said this about Yuuji if he was still Sukuna’s vessel when I got out of the realm?”
“Itadori knew how to fight back. I didn’t. I gave up. I let him take over.”
“No. If you’d given up, I would have had to kill you. But we’re still here, aren’t we? From where I see it, you did good, Megumi.”
“But–”
Before Megumi can say anything more, Satoru reaches out and crushes the boy to himself in a hug. Megumi fidgets restlessly, not immediately holding him back. But inch by reluctant inch, the guilt bleeds out of him. He relaxes, face turned away from Suguru, pressed against Satoru’s shoulders. Hands twisted into the fabric of Satoru’s shirt.
Satoru runs a hand through the top of his head.
“Megumi. It’s okay. What’s done, is done. And I’m proud of how good all of you did. I was right to count on you. Always.”
He steps away then, and Megumi lets him, turning to glare at Suguru’s side profile again.
“Don’t avoid the question. He’s really just…gonna stay here?”
“Yep! You should go make friends with him! You guys are gonna keep meeting now anyway!”
Both Megumi and Suguru shudder collectively.
“No way. I’ll just– What’s that on your throat?! God, you have no shame at all, do you?!”
“What?” Satoru blinks, confused. Then, his hand flies to his neck where there are three large purple bruises, only half a day old, and instead of any shred of self-consciousness, he just throws back his head and laughs.
Megumi, face scarlet, glares at the floor.
“God, I can’t stand you…”
Satoru throws an arm around his shoulder and the boy doesn’t flinch away but throughout the lunch they have together, he refuses to look either of them in the eyes because of the little game of footsie that Suguru initiates halfway through the meal, almost making Satoru choke on his food.
He counts that as a win.
Even if Satoru, draped across his back as he scrubs at the oil stains on the bottom of the frying pan, snickers into the nape of his neck after the boy’s left.
“You’re so petty.”
Suguru shrugs.
“An art your brat needs to learn if he wants to get anywhere in life.”
“He’s…doesn’t he remind you of that man? I’m not mad. I just…I don’t understand how you did it.”
Satoru runs the brush carefully through his hair.
“Sometimes he used to. But he’s nothing like his father, Suguru. And he was a kid. He didn’t have anything to do with what his dad did.”
Suguru hugs his knees, cheek pressed to one. The clock reads 2:30 am but sleep has eluded them tonight.
“You would have been a better parent than I was.” Satoru says, taking another section of Suguru’s shoulder length hair between his fingers. The last time his hair was this short, Suguru was only sixteen. “I never knew what to do with them on most days.”
“Neither did I.” Suguru smiles. “I had to learn how to bake because they wouldn’t stop asking me to take them out to cafés.”
Satoru sets down the brush. His arms come around Suguru’s shoulders, fingers laced together at his collarbones, face pressed to the side of Suguru’s head.
“Tell me about them?”
Talking about the girls is like trying to yank at a metal splinter lodged inside his heart, constantly leaking blood. But it has to be done, if he ever wants them to go back to being one of the most precious things life gave him and not the series of terrible and inaccurate nightmares they’ve been reduced to after Shibuya.
He takes Satoru’s joined hands and presses a kiss over the back of bony, pale knuckles.
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything you want to tell me.”
Sunlight streams in through the open balcony, crisscrossing across the floor. The air is fragrant with the scent of the gardenias Suguru’s been growing. Cicadas trill in the heat, sleepy and sluggish.
In the brilliant light, the scar on his forehead is almost invisible. Suguru barely even remembers it’s there, most days. He balances his book before himself, wrist resting on his chest, glasses perched on the bridge of his nose.
He reads aloud, for Satoru, like he’s been doing ever since he started on this one. Satoru seems to really like this one, for all that he didn’t even seem to know it existed in his bookshelf.
' Loving him was all interpretation, creative in its way. We barely used language at all to communicate: he sulked and thought I was putting him down if I made complicated remarks, and sometimes I felt numb at the compromise and self-suppression I submitted to.'
Kneeling on the floor, Satoru swallows his cock with a dreamy, faraway expression in his summer-sky eyes, snowy eyelashes fluttering against his flushed pink cheeks.
Suguru lets him be, one hand gentle and steady in that soft, downy hair.
'Yet beyond that it was all guesswork; we were thinking for two. The darkened air of the flat was full of the hints we made. The stupidity and the resentment were dreadful at times. But then in sex he lost his awkwardness. He showed his capacity to change as I rambled over him now with my fingertips and watched him glow and gulp with desire; his clothes seemed to shrivel off him and he lay there making his naked claim for the only certainty in his life...'
He feels the pleasure like a living thing, heavy, curled up like a cat on his middle, when Satoru flattens his tongue over the thick vein on the underside of his cock, when he tongues at the slit and sucks on the head, but other than that, Suguru keeps his eyes, and most of his mind, on the words on the pages.
' It was a kind of gift for giving, and while he did whatever I wanted it emerged as the most important thing there was for him.'
He reads, toying with the ends of Satoru’s hair. The nape of his neck, grown warm and damp from the heat. Satoru only hums, mouth full, eyes lidded, and nuzzles his face between Suguru’s legs, the back of his throat a delicious warmth to press against.
The heat builds, pleasant and slow and languid, like the rising sun outside but each time it starts to touch the overwhelming afternoon blaze, Suguru tugs sharply on that snowy hair, keeping that sinful mouth at bay.
'Desires, brutal or tender, silent but evolved, were in the shiftless air, and hung about each jaded traveller, whose life was not as good as it might have been.'
He keeps reading to Satoru like this, snippets and sections of the book they both loved enough to remember, flipping through the dog-eared pages.
By the time, he’s set the book down, his toes are curling with the effort of holding himself back, his breath a tight fist around his heart, all sight narrowed down to Satoru’s lovely, fair head between his legs.
It grows and grows like a sun inside of him, hot and burning, as he draws Satoru off with a hand tight on the back of his neck. Satoru goes, obediently tilts up his lovely, flushed face, eyes closed; tongue out and resting on the pillow of his lower lip like an altar-offering.
With his other hand, Suguru reaches for his spit-slicked cock, warm from Satoru’s mouth and he tugs sharply on himself, once, twice, thrice, before he’s spilling all over that beautiful, upturned face; over the apples of his cheeks, his rosy mouth, his closed eyelids.
Satoru’s tongue, pink and feline, darts out craftily to lick his lips clean but he keeps his mouth open, waiting for Suguru’s fingers to feed him the rest like ripe fruit.
The shirt is stiff with age. Starchy. The red bleached a shade paler than it had been when Satoru had first presented it to him, bought from one of the several little shops lining the quiet road next to the shoreline.
It had been smelling like sweat and salt and seashells the last time he took it off. Now, when he presses it to his face, it only smells like mothballs and time.
“You really don’t let go of anything, do you?”
He's not talking about the shirt.
White eyelashes flutter, like butterflies in a cabbage patch.
“’m sorry, Suguru.”
Neither is Satoru.
Suguru shakes his head, palm coming up to hold the side of Satoru’s face.
“Don’t be. I’m not.”
“Grow me more flowers.”
Satoru says, hugging him tighter. They’re on the bed, wrapped up in the warmest, thickest duvet from the closet. Satoru is a toasty, heavy weight on his chest, face smushed against the wool of Suguru’s sweater, warming his toes against the thick socks over Suguru’s feet. Like this, Suguru can see only the top of his head, like a shock of white fuzz, peeking out from the edge of the duvet.
He rests his head on it, the best place in this world to lay down for rest, and holds Satoru to himself, rubbing his hands up and down his back.
Satoru purrs like a happy cat, nuzzling against Suguru’s neck. His skin is cold despite how he’s stayed burrowed inside the duvet since early morning and Suguru winces but doesn’t let go, burying his face in that soft, sweet-smelling hair.
“Mmm. More flowers, huh?”
“Yeah.” Satoru sighs, splaying his fingers over Suguru’s heart. “Grow me flowers, Suguru.”
Suguru folds himself smaller, their embrace becoming something he can scent for hours, after. Like flowers.
“Okay.”
They pick the flowers together, Satoru leaning on his shoulder and chatting sunnily with the young girl behind the counter.
“Something we can grow in our balcony.”
Our. Our.
Satoru is pressed to his side and so Suguru feels the way his breath hitches; the gentle way he relaxes further against Suguru at the word.
Each of the flowers they end up choosing are either winter blooms or spring blossoms or perennial. There are plum blossoms. Orange and blood-red chrysanthemums. Tulips, pink and white. Gardenias. Daffodils, the mere mention of which makes Suguru’s heart beat faster and Satoru’s cheeks red. Blue azaleas.
Periwinkle and sacred lily, both of which are poisonous.
“You know you can’t murder anyone now, right? They just removed the execution order on you.”
Suguru smacks him on the back of his head, while putting in a few samples of red and cream roses inside the basket.
“Not funny. They’re to keep birds and pests away. Idiot.”
As Satoru sulks, whining and rubbing the back of his head, Suguru takes a moment to survey his other choices. After a few seconds, he decides on forget-me-nots.
If they’re to regrow the spring of their youth, they might as well go all the way.
There’s nothing unlearned in his passion, nothing unpracticed in how he bites down on Satoru’s lower lip, makes him gasp, ravages his mouth with a warm, wet tongue, and places hungry, biting kisses along Satoru’s jaw, the line of his neck. Suguru’s had twelve long years to practice moments like this to perfection.
Each, better than the last.
The arm around Satoru’s slim waist presses him flush against Suguru’s chest. Satoru makes him feel warm, so warm even with the street outside drenched in the rain; his fingers scratching through Satoru’s scalp, fisting in his hair, just this side of being painful, just enough to make Satoru tremble.
Infinity is like pocket of dry, portable sunshine made just for them. Raindrops hammer down on its surface; run down the shimmering veil like shards of broken glass.
When they break apart for breath, Satoru stares at him, hands over Suguru’s cheeks, eyes dreamy and soft, spine bent where it’s pressed against the balcony railing.
“Suguru…”
Is all he says.
Suguru moves to the pale column of his throat, latches onto it with his teeth, biting and nipping at the sensitive skin hard enough to bruise, laves over the purplish-pink marks with his tongue and Satoru’s voice shatters on a keening groan, hoarse but sweet.
So sensitive. He wants this. He wants it so much….
Suguru’s hands run up and down his back, his head reeling from how badly Satoru still, still, inspite of all the bloody carnage spilled out at their feet, seems to need him.
Satoru struggles in his arms, as if unable to decide if he would rather kiss or be kissed, desperate to be held or hold but delighted when he finds that the strong embrace he’s locked in won’t give an inch even against the strength of his arms trying to pry it apart.
His heart, thrashing like a bird over Suguru’s when Suguru slips a hand around the base of his throat like a necklace, long, elegant fingers resting where the pulse flutters.
“Suguru…I…”
“Yeah?”
Suguru coaxes, lazily rutting himself against Satoru’s middle, already brought to full hardness just from the fevered, hungry whispering of his name on Satoru’s lips.
In all this world, Satoru is the only one who takes Suguru’s name and turns it, from a structure made of syllables, to a taste that can be savoured through a kiss.
“C’mon, sweetheart. It’s okay. I’m right here...”
A pitiful yowl resounds through the kitchen.
“No, no, don’t be scared. I’m here, darling. You can jump. I’ll catch you, I promise.”
Sura, the one year old white ragdoll, flicks her tail, crouched and trembling on the topmost cabinet where she’s stuck and can’t get down from.
“You should leave her there for a day. What she gets for being so disobedient.”
Satoru says, leaning against the doorway, shoulders shaking with laughter whenever Sura turns her glittering baby blues towards him and yowls angrily.
She faces Suguru immediately, crying fretfully.
“Satoru, don’t be mean.”
“Can’t.”
“Be nice, now.”
“Won’t.”
“I was talking to the cat but...”
“You–! You’re lucky I’m in a good mood now. I’ll let you go this once.”
He doesn’t tell the real reason he won’t move from where he is, which is Taro, their one and a half year old bobtail, perched on Satoru’s feet like a fuzzy black cloud.
She’s purring so loud Suguru can almost hear it from here. Taro adores Satoru, resembling more an oversized duckling in how she follows her human around the entire day.
Suguru holds out his arms for Sura, who mewls, trying to sniff at his fingers. She’s attached to Suguru, swiping bloody murder at Satoru whenever he tries to pick her up. They do not get along, even if Sura always approaches Satoru for extra treats that Suguru won’t allow. Her and Taro get along like a house on fire.
“C’mon now, honey. You can do it.”
Sura yowls again, making the saddest face known to man, and not for the first time, Suguru wonders how it is that her and Satoru are each other’s sworn enemies. Twins would be a more appropriate description.
It takes a good deal of work to coax her and after half an hour, Suguru’s arms are beginning to ache when Sura, in a burst of reckless courage and clumsiness, half-leaps, half-tumbles into them, paws smacking against Suguru’s face.
Suguru laughs, arms coming up to hold her against himself as she tries to find her grip, tail swishing. She lets out the tiniest mrowrr, snapping at the air.
“There, you are.” He croons, nuzzling her soft fur. “Good girl, Sura. Good girl.”
Taro, rubbing herself luxuriously against Satoru’s long legs, offers a meow in greeting when Suguru lets Sura go, setting her down.
Satoru folds his arms over his chest, watching as the cats begin to play fight, swiping at each other, nipping at each other’s tails. They disappear into the hallway, Taro running outside. Stopping and looking back. Waiting for Sura to give chase.
“How come you’re always so sweet to them and so mean to me?”
Suguru goes over to him; presses a kiss to his cheek.
“You like mean.”
“S-Suguru...Suguru...Suguru...”
They’re in the kitchen, half-made lunch completely forgotten; stifled by the midday heat. Satoru, with his face pressed into his elbows on the countertop, cheek against the cold stone as he pants, open-mouthed, body flush with heat.
Suguru’s knees are starting to go numb from the ache. They’re not sixteen anymore and his body feels it, even if his hunger is mindless and uncaring.
Satoru’s legs, spread apart as far as they’ll go, are also shaking slightly from the strain but they’ll hold, strengthened by years of sparring and training.
Suguru thinks of what their teachers would say if they heard his mind now, of the use he’s putting their years of effort and training into. He laughs, stops, momentarily to tell Satoru as much and Satoru laughs too, breaking off into a moan when Suguru’s tongue presses back in.
“Desperate for it, aren’t you?”
Satoru is too far gone to do anything but whimper, but it’s not far from the truth. The first time they’d done this, as teenagers, Suguru had refused to even entertain the thought of doing this outside the sanctity and privacy of their rooms.
Now it’s the middle of the day, with broad daylight streaming in through the window and they didn’t even have the patience to get their clothes all the way off. They’re just pushed out of the way, Satoru’s sweatpants pulled down to just below his knees, both hands braced on the stone as Suguru kneels behind him fully clothed, eating him out, wet and sloppily and loud.
Satoru’s hard and leaking messily, his cock trapped between his own stomach and the kitchen cabinets. Suguru licks along the furled ring of muscle, sucking bruising kisses over it hard enough to hurt and then, scissors two lubed fingers inside to hold Satoru open as he begins to fuck his tongue into his hole at a punishing rhythm.
His own erection is one long, tender ache, left alone and untouched. Chafing inside his pants, tenting the denim.
“Ah, ah, ohhhh...that’s...”
Satoru trembles, legs spread, arms shaking, thrusting his hips back for more.
It’s almost unbearably hot inside the kitchen.
Sweat is running down the nape of Suguru’s neck and making his hair cling uncomfortably to his skin.
Satoru is worse and better, all at once. On his pale skin, his flush almost scarlet; he’s incoherent beyond the little ‘ah, ah, ahs’ that keep spilling from his mouth, the sounds of Suguru’s tongue fucking him open, wet and obscene in otherwise quiet afternoon haze.
“Wanna come like this?”
He pulls away to ask and Satoru only nods once, weakly. Suguru's hands knead the soft muscles of his ass, large and calloused fingers digging into pale skin, teeth biting playfully at the meat of it.
“Okay.”
He says, and goes back to what he was doing as Satoru goes back to falling apart beautifully from it.
“What’d you wanna do for your birthday, S’guru?”
Satoru asks him suddenly, one day in December. Weeks after the seventh. Maybe the twenty-fourth. He’s a wall of heat draped over Suguru’s back, peppering kisses along the freckles on the tanned skin.
Suguru holds the question in his mind like he holds Satoru inside his body, hugging the pillow to his chest, face pressed into the blue and white floral patterns on the pillowcase.
Suguru picked it out when he and Satoru went shopping for new bed covers and curtains a week ago to find suitable replacements for all of Satoru’s Hello Kitty themed linens.
Already, it smells like Satoru’s hair and sleep and sex on hot summer nights. It’s a smell Suguru wants to get used to, especially in the chill of winter. He reaches behind himself to let Satoru lace their hands together, to let him press open-mouthed kisses to his shoulder blades.
As much as he adores that Satoru is the only one in this world who can hold him hard enough to break him and wonder at how Suguru doesn’t break anyway, he also adores this. As much as he adores their rough housing and the way sex leaves him feeling spent and bruised and exhausted the next morning, like they’ve been fighting a war through the night, he also cherishes this.
He loves it as much as Satoru loves being treated like he’s the gentlest, softest thing in the world, and not the closest thing to a god this planet has. He loves it when Satoru bears down on him and kisses the back of Suguru’s neck over and over again. When he presses love bites on each inch of body and skin that he can reach. When he holds Suguru down – writhing and thrashing beneath him – and asks him stupid, beautiful things like “What do you want to do for your birthday?” in that shy voice, as if he doesn’t feel the bed trembling and shaking under the force of his thrusts.
I love you, Suguru thinks, kissing Satoru’s forehead when they’re done, pushing back the damp, sweaty hair sticking to clammy skin, reclining back on pillows that smell heady and suffocating, with Satoru in his arms.
He feels emptied. Taken apart in the nicest, sweetest breaching his body has ever felt. Like the opening of a rind from a tangerine, the ripe core bared.
Full of nectar.
I? I want to love you forever.
The winter passes over like a fever dream.
As the seasons ripen, the garden they’ve planted grows and flourishes, thriving far beyond Suguru’s expectations for it. The once barren sterility of the balcony, full of spotless railings and minimal other features, nourished by his hands and the rains, turns abundant and flowering.
The garden occupies the entire front balcony, covering it in a swathe of flowers, herbs and succulents that grow almost perennially, attracting hoards of butterflies in spring and summer.
It is a thing of beauty and he spends each blooming season with Satoru, sitting on moonlit nights in the mellow breeze, guiding his fingertips over the shut buds, the opened blossoms, the leaves.
It’s nothing like the greenhouse Suguru once built and nurtured. It’s everything like home.
There’s red and yellow chrysanthemums. Periwinkle. Vivid pink azaleas to join the blue. Peonies and sacred lilies and galsang. Pear blossoms. Crocuses in cream and orange and yellow. Tea-olive flowers. Wild oleander, poisonous and deadly, grow outside the periphery of the other blooms, feral and flowering.
Ivy, clinging with both thin arms to the railings like a child peering down to the streets below.
The pear and peach blossoms make wonderful flower crowns and Suguru spends one lazy evening stitching two identical ones to place atop Sura and Taro’s heads. More privately, he’ll accept them being pressed into his own braid whenever Satoru comes along hiding another flower behind his back.
Summer days are spent under the shade of the awning, reading, as Satoru lounges with his head in his lap, talking about everything and nothing all at once.
When it rains, washing away the dust from the hot earth, filling the house with the smell of damp soil, they sit together at the dinner table, rolling out gyoza wrappers, the cats lured in by the fragrance of the rich, meaty filling. Each night that is colder than the last as the seasons run their course, he spends with Satoru hanging off his arm, bickering about what should go into the bubbling pots of curry.
Suguru bakes, sometimes. Satoru’s always hovering around whenever he does, stealing cake batter by the spoonfuls, the cats trailing after him, lured by the sugary scent.
As snow begins to fill up the stark branches of the trees outside, white and fluffy as cotton flowers, they bring all the plants indoors. The roses thrive, blooming dark and blood red, with shards of soft snow melting inside their hearts.
He comes into the bedroom one night, having stayed up reading beyond midnight, and finds Sura and Taro curled up at the foot of the bed like a breathing yin-yang symbol; Satoru, sleeping with nearly half his body off the bed, blankets kicked off.
It makes something, white-hot and painful like a knife, twist in his heart. He’s felt the twist of it before, packing a second lunch alongside his own in high-school; doing his girls’ hair each morning before the bathroom mirror; watching Satoru’s hands separate the delicate bones from a fish with the edge of a knife, scales clinging to his fingertips.
“Idiot. Can’t even sleep right.”
He murmurs, stroking a hand through that soft hair, tucking those splayed limbs back under the blanket before he lifts up one edge of it and crawls inside himself, folding his front to fit against the jigsaw shaped curve of Satoru’s back.
The garden is always blooming, held in an endless spring, and despite the cold outside, their home always smells like flowers.
“Satoru’s not home.”
“I know.”
Megumi Fushiguro stands outside the door, looking out of place for someone who’s been familiar with this place way longer than Suguru has been.
Suguru just shrugs, leaving the front door open behind himself when he goes back inside.
He watches, eyebrows raised as the boy heaps another spoonful of sugar into his coffee, but says nothing. The silence between them is thick; but not uncomfortable. Not yet.
You need to actually know each other that well to be made uncomfortable and they...well. They know as much about each other as two banks of a river would. The river is all that they share in common.
“How do you look at him in the eyes even now?”
Before Suguru can reply, the boy looks up. There’s something desperate in his eyes, despite the general nonchalance on his expression.
“I can’t. I keep seeing what I almost did to him. I keep seeing that I almost killed him.”
Ah, Suguru thinks. In his focus on the river, he’d forgotten that the banks do meet. Right on the bed of earth that bears the river’s weight.
Megumi sets down his cup.
“I don’t know how to unsee that. How can you?”
Suguru takes another sip of his coffee.
“Do you love him?”
“What?” The boy blinks, incredulous.
“He raised you,” Suguru goes on, without waiting for a response, “so I’ll assume you do. You care about him. Do you ever want to see him hurt again?”
“What? Of course not! You...you don’t hurt the people you...the people important to you!” He says. Eyes blazing, he adds, “I am not you.”
Suguru raises an eyebrow.
“Wrong. We can only hurt someone when we love them. Just like they’ll only be hurt if they love us. A stranger wouldn’t care, would he?”
“But I didn’t mean to hurt him. I never would have! I didn’t even –”
“Exactly.” Suguru says, shrugging. “You didn’t. Someone else did. They used you to do it but it was them. Not you.”
He traces the rim of his cup with his forefinger.
“If you care about him, it doesn’t mean you’re never going to hurt him. Or that he won’t ever hurt you. If Satoru thought like you do, you’d be dead by now.” He pauses. “The kindest pair of hands I held in my last life were also the ones that killed me. He did it because he loved me. It’s different from letting anyone else hurt me. You're right. I did hurt him. I hurt him very much. That doesn't mean I'll let anyone else hurt him too.”
Megumi stares at him, hands clenched around the cup.
“I’m not you.” He adds, quieter, “Or, him.”
Suguru leans back, shrugging.
“You have it easier, then. He doesn’t need to be coddled but. Maybe focus on what you’d never want to have happen to him again, instead of crying over something you didn’t even do.”
He downs the rest of his coffee, watching the dregs at the bottom of the cup, and gets up, pushing back his chair.
“It’s not so simple.” Megumi says, eyes like flint, but contemplation at the crease between his eyebrows. God, he really looks just like–
Suguru turns away.
“Love never is. And people have still done worse things for it.”
On the third year, Suguru finally mourns his girls.
Satoru is with him as he lights incense in their name; makes an offering of all their favourite desserts. He’s there when Suguru picks out the freshest, largest lilies and roses from the garden for a bouquet.
He comes with Suguru all the way to the cemetery, but won’t go beyond the oak that marks the few steps to the twins’ resting place. When Suguru turns to look at him, Satoru only shakes his head, eyes blue like unshed rain. Endless horizons full of something soft.
“You were theirs, too. Longer than you were mine.”
Mimiko and Nanako’s graves are something he’s avoided visiting all this time, just like a man who avoids looking at that one water spot on his walls, willing that his wilful blindness will make it go away, even as it increases day after day.
Even so, it’s spotless when he gets there, with not even a single leaf littering the stones. Instead, wildflowers bud all over the stone; a bright orange butterfly startles and drifts away on the wind like an autumn leaf when he sets down the bouquet.
A spot of bleeding colour against the stark white marble.
They always loved colours, his girls. Flowers, too. Watching over his shoulders each time he planted something new. The greenhouse was their favourite place to be in.
“Mimiko. Nanako. It’s me.”
There’s silence, just like there was the first time he met them. But no more fear. Almost as if they still believe, just like they believed that first time, that it’ll be okay; they’ll be okay, because it’s him.
Keeping out the rest of the world.
When they get back home, Satoru disappears into the guest bedroom and returns with a small box in his hands. He holds it out for Suguru to take. For all that he’s the strongest creature to walk the earth, there’s a careful tenderness in his gestures that only Suguru sees.
Even now.
“I wanted to wait till you were ready.”
Suguru takes the box. Opens it.
The world keeps spinning even as life crawls to a stop, reduced to the size of the box in his hands. Inside, wrapped carefully in transparent film bag, are two things. A tattered doll with a noose around its singed, bloody neck. A broken phone.
“This is...how...”
Satoru’s right in his space, forehead against Suguru’s shoulder. The only thing keeping him upright. The only reason to even keep breathing as he holds onto this, the last memories of his girls.
“Shoko.”
“You...why didn’t you tell me before?”
He whispers and Satoru’s fingers press into his forearms.
“You weren’t ready to listen, then.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
He accepts the mug that Satoru gently pushes towards him. The coffee is perfect; black. No sugars. Satoru says he hates the taste but it’s never stopped him from seeking out coffee-flavoured kisses after.
“You good?”
He asks, like he didn’t let Suguru press his face to his heart and cry silently through two of his sleep shirts, before getting rid of it altogether so Suguru just could wipe his tears on bare, moon-warmed skin.
“No.” Suguru replies, honest. Wrung out. Reaching for Satoru’s hand across the table. “But I think I will be.”
Suguru’s thirty-sixth birthday passes quietly.
Like every year, Satoru asks him, “What do you want to do?” and like every year, Suguru doesn’t tell him anything then, knowing that Satoru will have something already planned.
They celebrate it like they used to celebrate birthdays back in high-school. By themselves. Satoru makes him zaru soba. Better than Suguru ever remembers having it.
In the evening, Shoko comes over, carrying a bottle of aged, expensive wine.
It’s for Satoru, who can’t stand to drink anything else and probably won’t drink this either.
Satoru brings out a white box tied off with a lilac ribbon, full of an assortment of cupcakes. There’s a whole range of flavours, known and unfamiliar, to make their way through.
Suguru peers in, trying to see which ones he recognizes. Chocolate, and tea, and jasmine; pink vanilla; strawberry, and lemon; mint chocolate and raspberry and sea salt with caramel.
Beside him, Satoru’s lighting up little candles, multi-coloured ones like little kids get for their birthdays, one for each of the thirty-six cupcakes, the tip of his tongue poking out, brows furrowed in concentration.
Most of these would’ve been too sweet and full of frosting for Suguru’s tastes back when he was a teenager or even in the early years of his adulthood.
Now, he snatches up the orange flavoured one, tipped with sugar pearls and whipped cream before Satoru can.
“Hey!”
Suguru shoves half the cupcake into his mouth at once.
"Suguru! I swear you do that on purpose every time!"
It’s full of vanilla frosting inside. The sugared pearls crunch beneath his teeth.
“Shoko! Say something! Suguru stole my favourite cupcake!”
Shoko, rifling through Satoru’s untouched and absurdly expensive collection of alcohol, raises an eyebrow.
“It’s his birthday?”
Satoru scowls, unwrapping the chestnut flavoured one. It has a little, perfect-looking chestnut, made of fondant, on top of it, too.
“You guys are the worst.”
Later, they sit on the floor of Satoru’s living room, Suguru holding a light to the end of Shoko’s cigarette. It’s the same brand, he sees, that Satoru had once got her a lifetime back when she was upset, and that she always demanded each time afterwards when either of them did something to annoy her.
The box of cupcakes sits on the low glass table, half-opened and more than halfway empty, among empty wine glasses. Satoru toys with the ends of the ribbon. He has a smidge of ganache at the corner of his mouth. When Taro comes out of the bedroom, tail raised curiously in the air, he lets her come over to him, sniff at the scent of icing sugar on his fingertips.
Shoko sets down her half-eaten cupcake, taking the cigarette with hands tipped green from the mint chocolate.
“I was alone longer, you know.” She blows out smoke, staring at the space between them. “Not complaining but. It’s good to know sometimes that you guys didn’t forget that. Not fully, at least.”
“Sorry, Shoko.”
“Sorry, Shoko.”
Cigarette clenched between her teeth, Shoko waves them off. She has as little patience or need for apologies now as she did at fifteen. Shoko’s always been a believer in material atonement. She gestures at the glass cabinet behind herself.
“A bottle of your most expensive scotch and we’ll consider it even.” She pushes half the cupcake towards them, leaning back on her hands. “And maybe just try not to fucking die again. Can’t be that harder than literally coming back to life, hmm?”
Suguru laughs first at this, sudden in the stillness of midnight; Taro, nestled on Satoru’s lap, jerks up at the sound and this sets off Satoru into a set of giggles, cheeks pink from the two glasses of wine he’s made his way through.
Soon, all three of them are laughing, shaking from it; the sound of it is a lot like clearing the dust-laden covers from the furniture in an abandoned classroom. The veil of rising dust burns their throats and makes them cough, but when it settles, they get to look around at the old chairs and tables, initials scribbled onto the wood like dates marked out on an old calendar.
When it settles, it’s still the three of them back in one place, with everything different and not much changed about them all at once.
“Happy birthday, S’guru.” Satoru says from beside him and Shoko raises her cigarette. “Happy birthday, asshole.”
Suguru reaches blindly into the box; unwraps another cupcake.
Jasmine tea.
Ah.
They saved him his favourite.
“Good?”
Suguru murmurs, stroking his knuckles along Satoru’s cheek adoringly. Satoru snatches his hand between his own, holds it to his face, nodding. He’s a vision above Suguru, pale skin pink and bitten and scratched. Hair, spread out like a halo.
They’re both spent, Satoru flushed red and sweating despite the fact that it’s snowing outside. His head has fallen back, baring his neck and Suguru can almost hear how his heart pounds at the hollow at the base of his throat as he straddles him, knees on either side of Suguru’s thighs.
He keeps one hand over Suguru’s, the other planted on his chest as he rides, mouth open in a silent ‘o’ of pleasure. Tears, like diamonds, glisten on his snowy eyelashes.
“G-good...ah, ah, Suguru, I...I...”
He laughs once, a high, sharp sound that breaks on a rough groan when Suguru runs his free hand across his chest, finding and then, pulling on one of his nipples.
They’re already sore and sensitive from all of Suguru’s mouthing at them; his adamant insistence that “Yes, Satoru, you can come just from this even now ” as Satoru had first complained that he “couldn’t”, then fisted his hands in Suguru’s hair to keep his mouth where it was, and finally, come just like that, from nothing more than having his nipples played with.
Suguru is sweet enough that his only reaction had been a pleased little “hm”.
Satoru grinds his hips in a swivel, the powerful muscles in his arms and chest rippling from the movement. His pectorals flex like birds’ wings, a thin film of sweat gathering on the skin.
The bedsprings creak threateningly under the ferocious, fierce way Satoru’s bouncing on his cock but Suguru doesn’t think it’s the right time to remind him that they’ve already had to change mattresses twice this month.
“Unh, more...need more...”
Satoru says, more to himself and he lets go of Suguru’s hand to plant both palms on his chest. His fingernails press in over the skin hard; like he’s trying to force Suguru’s ribs open and crawl in.
Stupid, Suguru thinks, head falling back. As if he’s ever had room for anything, anyone, else inside him. He hums, sweet and loving. His hand tucks a lock of hair behind Satoru’s ear.
“More?”
“Y-ye...s...”
The word breaks in half over Satoru’s lips when Suguru meets him with a slow thrust upwards; both hands braced on Satoru’s waist.
“Ask nicely now, ‘Toru. More of what?”
Satoru’s tongue wets his lips. He loves it when Suguru makes him work for it, when he’s a little mean, when he makes Satoru, who has the world kneeling at his feet, beg. He loves it and it shows in how the words leave him, shaky and desperate.
“Want you to fuck me harder!”
Satoru grits out, eyes full of fire and ice.
Suguru just smiles, splaying his palm over Satoru’s ass. A slender fingertip traces where his cock keeps Satoru stretched open.
“If you really want more, I’m sure you can ask nicer than that, Satoru.”
Satoru glares at him, half-heartedly. The effect is ruined by how his eyes are glassy orbs of pure crystal; how he worries his bottom lip between his teeth. He speaks, more exhale than word.
“Please.”
Suguru strokes his cheek, using the pad of his thumb to gently free Satoru’s lip.
“There we go. That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
Then, he plants his feet on the mattress and gripping Satoru’s hips between both hands, he begins plowing into him, hard and fast enough to hurt. It’s...it’s perfect.
Satoru gasps, cries out. His fingernails are digging in blunt crescents into Suguru’s chest as he bounces along in time with Suguru’s thrusts till the bed is shaking beneath almost violently beneath them.
“Suguru...more, more, more...ohhh, just like that...fuck...”
Suguru’s hand wraps around his cock in response, giving Satoru a hot tunnel to fuck up into as he rides.
Yes, he thinks, as he watches those vivid blue eyes rolling shut; feels the tremors of Satoru’s climax as the shaking inside his own bones. This. I would leave the arms of death a thousand times more just to have another moment of this. Just to have another moment with him.
“Suguru. Suguru. Suguruuu...”
“What is it, Satoru?”
“Won’t you come inside?”
“Satoru, it’s ten in the morning...”
“And I don’t even have to go the school today! We have all morning to ourselves. I even fed the cats already! Suguru...please?”
“...”
“Please? Please, please, please?”
“...Let me at least finish pruning these leaves. They’re going to be all overgrown otherwise.”
“Then sex.”
“We’ll see.”
Satoru whoops, hand over his heart.
“If only you were this sweet when we were teenagers!”
“I didn’t say yes?”
“Didn’t say no either!”
Suguru ducks his head behind the fat pink peonies swaying gently in the morning breeze, letting their scent wash his cheeks pink.
As if I ever would, he thinks but wisely doesn’t say.
The silver-white winter is slowly but steadily melting to make way for the birth of spring. From the tops of the bare, blackish branches, snowflakes fall to the ground, turning the soil to slushy, muddy piles of brown and white.
The air is still chilled, frosty and sharp, tipped like the points of the stars that come out in the midnight blue sky each night. Today, a full moon hangs low in the sky, like a ripe, silver fruit, ready for the taking. Its light, pure silver, washes over the snow-covered land like a river of luminosity.
The large roses, red and pink, tipped with snowy beards, stand tall and proud in their garden, spots of bright, vivid colour against a city painted white.
Each breath he takes is heavy with their mellow, sweet fragrance. In the branches of the birch maple, an owl hoots. He rests his hands on his knees and sits, back to the glass door, letting the moonlight touch his face.
Footsteps, quiet and stealthy, walk up behind him but he doesn’t turn. Then, hands, warm, sneak over his face, fingertips pressing ever so gently against his eyelids. Like a dragonfly’s wings kissing the tops of his cheeks.
Lips, soft and cold, press over the tip of his ear; breath, hot and full of laughter, ghosts along the side of his neck.
“Guess who?”
Suguru hums, considering this intently, even if he shares space and life with only one person; even if he would recognize these hands, this touch, in life as well as in death and beyond it.
“Hmm. Let’s see now...”
Laughter, chirpy and bright. A warm chest to his back. Suguru tilts his head to the side, fond.
“Is it, by some stroke of good fortune, you, Satoru? Gojō Satoru? The strongest sorcerer alive?”
Satoru laughs again, and then, his hands are falling away from Suguru’s face to wrap around his shoulders instead. One hand holds him around the shoulder and the other cradles the side of his head so Satoru can press up against him, their cheeks nuzzled together.
“No. Not yet.” He says, holding Suguru tight. Suguru’s palms come to rest over his forearm. He turns his head so he can kiss Satoru’s cheek.
“There.” Satoru whispers then, compressing them into something smaller, conjoined. “You and me. The strongest.”
Suguru breathes in.
Roses, roses, roses...
At forty, Satoru has more laugh lines than he did at fifteen. That’s about it, as far as change goes.
Otherwise, he’s still the same Satoru who leans against the kitchen island and eats marshmallows straight out of the family-sized bags they’re always stocked up on, whenever they make hot chocolate together.
He still loves indulging his students, old and new, with impromptu shopping trips and visits to fine dining restaurants, even if none of the old ones are students or even teenagers any longer.
“They’re always gonna be kids to me.”
He still buys Shoko the same expensive cigarettes, regardless of if she’s mad at him or not.
He’s still a notorious blanket thief and he still loves building pillow forts with Suguru in winter. He still likes persimmons and watermelon-flavoured shaved ice when summer comes. He still feeds extra treats to Sura and Taro when he thinks Suguru isn’t looking and he makes Suguru hand-rolled soba noodles on each birthday even now, all while complaining loudly about the effort it takes.
Suguru still caught him in the kitchen at midnight yesterday, licking frosting off a cupcake wrapper.
He’s still as willing as he was yesterday to hold Suguru inside himself or hold himself inside Suguru. And the day before. And a year before. Twenty years before.
He’s still just Satoru.
Not much has changed about him than that his youthful face now has the finest lines of joy etched onto it.
His thighs tighten around Suguru’s waist but they're not teenagers anymore. There’s barely a stretch when Suguru enters him. It’s a deeply comforting thing, in a way that it is to briefly press chilled palms against the pots of soup bubbling on the fire. To feel Satoru’s body give so sweetly. To know that Satoru can wake up mornings, turn over and take him inside himself without waking him up.
To know that he’s, irreplaceably, made room for himself within Satoru. An emptiness only he can fill. A space shaped over and over and over to house only him.
“Never feels the same without you.” Satoru murmurs, face hidden to the world with how Suguru’s hair falls around him. His eyes are closed; ankles lightly tapping at the backs of Suguru’s thighs.
And that’s unbearable.
Suguru kisses his neck.
“Look at me, Satoru.”
There’s a hundred skies still waiting to be travelled within those eyes. Satoru reaches for his face, and Suguru sees the pale violet colour of his own eyes reflected in those orbs like storm clouds. At home, only in a sky.
I’ll never leave you, he thinks.
“I’ll never let you.” Satoru promises.
Oh. Oh, he’s really got to stop speaking his thoughts aloud.
But Satoru just laughs, soft, so maybe it’s not such a bad habit, after all.
This desire, his love, it turns out, is a stubborn thing. As it always has been. It had consumed him when he first felt its arms trying to grasp his heart. Haunted him when he left. Day and night. Halfway through summer. Under the mid-afternoon sun. In the chill of midnight.
Kept its hands wrapped tight around his heart, refusing to give him up for dead.
Like the object of it, his love also seems to have grown a mind of its own in all these years, limbs of its own. It throws its arms around his neck when he’s trying to work on a new recipe. Nudges his toes with its own when he’s eating dinner. Kisses the top of his head as he tends to his flowers.
He wrote it a song made of three little words at fifteen, and now, it refuses to let him go to bed unless he’s sung it out loud each night, and heard it sung back.
He sleeps with it holding him around the middle, wakes up with his arms full at the crack of dawn.
He once thought of it, this desire, love, like a lit candle. Eating into itself, breaking apart into fat drops of melting wax, until both light and fire were gone, leaving nothing behind.
He had tried, foolish and deluded and in pain, to put it out before it burnt up either itself or everything else around it.
Had tried, to snuff out the flame.
Even so, it had remained. Like the stench of a burnt wick, long after he’d blown out each candle in the room, it had followed him. It had come to sit with him, beside him, in the dark.
Person-shaped.
Real.
His.
His desire is not bottled up in a glass jar, suffocating and wasting away. Neither is love like the self-destructive candle eating into itself, hot wax and futility.
It burns just as hot as it did in his youth, with the force of the blazing sun, the pure light of the moon, the heat of the stars, and given just as freely. Coloured in ten shades of blue.
As free as the wind that plucks cherry blossoms from the swaying trees and leaves it out on their balcony.
His desire kneels there, tending to the large, yellow chrysanthemums, fair hair flying in the breeze, pushed back with a pink headband that’s one of the most ridiculous things he’s ever seen. Adorable, too. The slant of his fair, lovely face is half hidden behind blinding sunlight, his hands grimy, soil beneath his fingernails.
When Suguru goes up to him, his movement sends dozens of sleeping, surprised butterflies flying from their nests on the flower petals, under the little leaves; white, lime green and pale yellow wings like startled kisses on his cheeks.
His right hand reaches out, wipes the beads of sweat away from Satoru’s left cheekbone. Satoru looks up, lighting up to see him, holds Suguru’s hand to his face between both of his own palms, sunshine bright, leaving damp earth on the spaces between Suguru’s fingers.
A place that is his, in this world.
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
Easier to say each time it’s said out loud. Easier to say it at forty than it was to even think of at eighteen.
The wind blows through the tops of the roofs, houses and windows and curtains, sighing quietly.
Everything else stays the same.
Home, Suguru thinks…no. He knows, looking at Satoru singing to himself, loud and off-key, as he peers, for the third time in half an hour, into the glowing oven to check if the cookies are done yet.
I am home.
Panaah mil jaye rooh ko jiska haath chhoo kar
Usi hatheli par ghar bana lo.
- Gulzar.