Chapter Text
Dusk comes down like a held breath.
Suguru walks the single road that stitches this village together—rusted corrugated roofs, lanterns smoky with old incense, the sweet-sour smell of offerings rotting faster than the fruit they’re meant to bless. Wind drags a chime across itself until it sounds like teeth. The air has the taste of rain and iron and superstition; every gaze he meets is a prayer that has already decided its answer.
The curse is easy. That’s the worst part.
It has nested under a stilted house where the ground is permanently damp, a knotted thing born from fear and malice, slick as a frog’s back. It was born here; the adults’ whispering fed it. He lets it lunge. He lets it show him a maw of nails and hair and old pennies, and then he calls something bigger, older, kinder in the way storms can be kind—impersonal, thorough. The curse he releases is iridescent like oil in a puddle, a ribboned dragon that uncoils from the shadow of the joists and pins the knot in its jaws. He pulls the rotten sentiments and vile terror, winding and winding and winding until it forms into a sphere in the palm of his hand.
The house sighs. The air clears.
He swallows the curse and gags a few times. The buzzing behind his molars—the hum he’s lived with since he learned to take curses into himself—settles to a bearable pitch.
He could go. He could leave a report stamped with exorcised and board the last bus out. But jujutsu sorcerers are answers and answers must be delivered face to face, so he loops the ribbon of dragon back into himself and walks to the home where the adults wait.
They’re standing outside like judges. The man has a jacket’s sleeves tied around his neck like a noose; the woman’s mouth has collapsed into the shape of no.
“It’s done,” Suguru says. “The curse under the house is gone.”
They do not thank him. Of course they don’t.
“We told you to get rid of the source,” the man says, chin toward the shed.
They usher him into a shed lined with lit candles. Between them, on the far wall, a metal cage holds two little girls. Knees up, faces dirt-smudged. One stares at him like a trapped animal; the other stares like a saint in a painting: wide, emptied out to survive.
“What’s this?” Suguru asks.
“What, you ask?” the man blinks, gesturing to the cage. “These two are responsible for the latest incidents, no?”
“No, they are not.”
“These two are crazy,” the woman shrills.
The man’s words are filled with spittle when they come next. “They used their mysterious powers to attack the villagers! Their parent’s were just as bad. I knew we should have killed them when they were babies.”
The faint wisps of a curse coagulating begins to form as they hiss.
Something that began in him on a rooftop by the ocean—when a bullet parted the air, when a blade pierced through Satoru’s body, when Riko’s body hit the ground and all the prayers turned to screams—shifts, clicks, slides a fraction deeper. He thinks: Why do they always ask for the same thing? Why do they always look at us like tools? This is all their fault. Even now, this is all their fault.
Suguru steps farther into the room. He feels how close he is to one particular fate, as if the floorboards tilt toward it. The hum in his teeth swells; the dragon under his skin wants out; everything in him wants out. He could end this village like snuffing a candle: breath, darkness, quiet. He could say step outside and make sure no one steps back in.
He closes his eyes. He sees a small boy in a summer yard, a mother turning fish in a pan, a father laughing at something on the radio. Home. He has one. He thinks of Shoko and their smoke breaks. Satoru—
Suguru opens his eyes and chooses a different edge.
He smiles very gently. “How about we step outside for a moment?” he says.
They hesitate, suspicious and pleased in the same breath, then push open the shed door. Rain needles the yard; candle smoke folds back from the draft. He follows them onto packed earth gone slick, the tin roof’s overhang drumming like distant feet.
“Let’s be clear,” he says.
He doesn’t raise his voice. He lets a little of the dragon rise instead—just enough to color the air the way heat shimmers above a kiln. The rain between them hisses on nothing; the woman’s breath stutters; the man’s makeshift scarf—jacket sleeves knotted at his neck—slackens as his throat works.
“You will not touch those girls again. You will not look at them like that. You will not speak of them as if they are… things.”
He steps forward until the gutter’s steady spill patters off his shoulder, until presence alone makes the gravel creak. Softness is the most frightening music when the world expects you to shout; he keeps his tone gentle.
“If I come back because they’ve been harmed,” he says, “I will not be gentle.”
The threat sits in the rain like a sheathed knife laid on a shrine: visible, unarguable. The man swallows, jaw jumping. The woman’s composure buckles enough to show the raw pulse underneath.
“So, I’m taking them,” Suguru adds, like noting the weather.
“You can’t— They belong to—” the man starts, voice breaking on the last word.
“They belong to themselves,” Suguru says. He doesn’t explain that he belongs to himself today too—that this is the difference between the path he almost walked and the one under his feet now. “And to no one who would put them in a cage.”
He turns his back on their sputtering and steps into the shed. Candlelight licks the corrugated walls; the faint wisps of a new curse, born of their hissing fear, thin and dissolve as the pressure of him crosses the threshold. The metal crate squats against the far wall, wired shut with a twist of coat-hanger. Two small faces—one feral-still, one emptied to survive—watch him without blinking.
He crouches. He lowers his head so he isn’t towering and lets his hands go idle and empty on his knees.
“It smells like smoke in here,” he says softly, as if discussing the weather with skittish cats. The roof ticks. A leak finds the corner and begins to bead. “You’ll get rained on if you stay. I don’t want you to catch cold. Will you come out?”
The smaller one—Mimiko, he will learn—tightens white-knuckled around a bar. The older—Nanako—studies his open palms, then his face. He waits. He unwinds the wire holding the cage shut with slow fingers, sets it aside with a faint scrape, and eases the latch.
When he pulls the door open, he doesn’t reach in. He tips his shoulders, making himself smaller, making the world past his body look wider, safer.
Nanako leans first, a small, decisive tilt; Mimiko follows because Nanako moves and because the air around him, for all its weight, has that first thin taste of safety they’ve known in weeks. He lifts them one at a time, careful with the jut of wrist bone and with a tenderness he wasn’t sure he is still capable of.
They are so light he wants to be sick.
“Shoes,” he says to the room in general, to the adults who have gone paper-faced and useless. “Coats.” When no one moves, he looks, and they scurry like staff in a temple where the god has arrived. He slips little rain boots onto small feet, pulls sleeves gently over thin wrists, adjusts a hood so it doesn’t catch the bruised cheek.
Mimiko’s breath is small and fast against his neck. Nanako’s hands hook in the collar of his uniform. He feels their hearts; they feel his. Three off-rhythms, finding one line.
Outside, the rain arrives in earnest—soft pellets that turn to a curtain. He turns his shoulder against it, making a wall for the girls, and walks until the house is behind him and the temple gong is behind that and the road turns from packed dirt to a greased strip of mud that wants ankles. He stops beneath a half-dead ginkgo that still tries to yellow at the edges. The village hums to itself like an appliance left on.
He has done something both enormous and small. He has not killed a village. He has stolen two children. He has to choose, again, in the next minute, and the one after that.
Suguru sets the girls on the veranda of a closed teahouse. “Two minutes,” he tells them. He kneels so they can see his hands once more, empty. “I’m going to make a phone call. I’ll be right here.”
He doesn’t take out his cell phone. It’s muscle memory now to avoid the number he could dial in the dark, to avoid the voice that would change the shape of this moment just by existing in it. There’s a payphone down the road outside the shuttered post office, still stubbornly live. He digs coins from his sleeve and feeds them into the slot. The line rings, stutters to life, then clicks.
“Shoko,” he says.
Her voice is the sound of a scalpel laid on a tray. “Where are you?”
“A village,” he says. He hears how steady he makes it sound and hates the performance while needing it. “Two minutes away from leaving.”
“Are you hurt?”
He looks at his hands. They are not bleeding. The hum in his teeth is higher now, close to a whine. “No.”
She leaves a small breath in the line. She knows to wait for the part he didn’t say.
“I took two girls,” he says. The words feel like a confession and a vow. “They’re sorcerers. They put them in a cage. There was a curse. It’s gone. The people—” He fails to find a word that covers people like that while also being a person himself. “I’m not okay.”
There it is; the words sit between his teeth like a coin he’s finally spent.
“I know,” Shoko says. She says it like yes, water is wet. “Thank you for calling. Can you get back to campus?”
“Yes.” His throat tries to close on the next words. He forces them through. “Don’t tell Satoru.”
A pause, this one sharper. He can imagine her tilting her head to better hear the shape of the truth behind the request.
“All right,” she says finally. There is no censure. Shoko does triage first. “Do you need a car?”
“I’ll take the high road.” He swallows. Rain thrums against the phone box. He watches Nanako and Mimiko on the veranda, their heads turned toward him like small birds watching the sky. “If I hear him, I’ll break,” he says, too soft for anyone but her and the rain and the wire between them. “If he sounds fine, I’ll still—”
“Break,” Shoko finishes, as if marking a chart. “Call me when you’re closer. I’ll meet you at the gate with a blanket and my worst mood for the faculty. You did the right thing.”
The coin timer bites down and the line clicks dead. His phone rings, and Shoko’s face is grinning up at him. He picks up and there is silence for a beat.
“Keep talking to me while you walk back.”
He does. He describes the road, the smell of wet straw, the way the girls have not let go of each other since his hands let go of them. He tells her he can taste metal. He tells her that every prayer he’s heard lately sounds like a dare and he is so tired of being dared. She makes small sounds where a friend would make them: mm, and uh-huh, and there you are. It doesn’t matter. The words were said; the bridge held. He promises to see her soon.
“Ready?” he asks the girls. He lifts them again. The ginkgo shakes rain into his hair. He whistles low through his teeth, and the air answers: his iridescent dragon uncoils from within him, longer now, scales like slick glass in a soap bubble, eyes opal-bright. It’s ridiculous and beautiful and exactly the sort of thing that makes small children forget for a minute that the world is cruel.
Mimiko’s fingers flex. Nanako leans forward with sharp attention. Suguru steps onto the curve of the dragon’s back; it dips in greeting like a bowing boat. He settles the girls against him, one on each side beneath his arms, their faces tucked into the dark line where his jacket meets his skin. He can feel the damp of their hair through the fabric. The dragon lifts, a slow sure rise to clear the eaves, and then they’re above the roofs, above the laundry lines, above the village that could have been a crater if the wind had blown a degree closer to despair.
The road out of the mountains slicks away under them. The rain turns to mist; the mist turns to cloud. Suguru breathes. The hum in his teeth is less scream now, more low-wire.
He does not look back.
He does not call Satoru.
In his head, he knows the names: Gojo, The Strongest, the person you call when you need the impossible done and you don’t care if doing it carves him thinner. In his chest, there is Satoru—who once fell asleep with his cheek in Suguru’s palm on a train, all that power curled like a cat. Today, those halves of truth don’t meet; the gap is a danger zone, and he is careful around fault lines.
“Campus,” he tells the dragon, and it understands the way old things understand. The girls huddle tighter. He lowers his head so his mouth is near their ears and speaks in the cadence you use to talk a frightened animal out from under a car.
“You did nothing wrong,” he says. “You were brave. I’m taking you somewhere safe.”
Nanako nods once, ferociously, like biting down on a choice. Mimiko’s hand finds his hair and holds, a small anchor.
The city grows from the edge of the rain like a paper lantern lit from within. Jujutsu Tech sits beyond it, the old cedars taller than bad memories. He can almost see the gate. He can almost see Shoko with a blanket and a terrible expression that will cow whatever bureaucrat tries to say the word protocol in front of him tonight.
He is shaking, a little. He is sick, a little. He is alive, more than a little.
Suguru exhales, and for the first time since a girl’s body fell and a boy he loved bled, he doesn’t feel like he’s swallowing knives. The dragon curves toward home, and the three of them—one man, two children, none of them tools—ride the long arc down.
Shoko is exactly where she said she’d be: at the gate, under an umbrella that drips like a metronome, blanket over one arm, expression so unfriendly it could peel paint. The kind of face you wear to make bureaucrats scatter.
She takes one look at the girls and the scowl softens, not by much, just enough to show the human under the scalpel.
“Give,” she says, and he does—one small, trembling body at a time.
Mimiko clings for a heartbeat, then Shoko murmurs something so low it’s more rhythm than word and the girl unhooks her hands. Nanako tolerates the transfer like a cat being pried off a high shelf, eyes dry and furious. Shoko tucks the blanket around both, one practiced sweep, and the heat trapped there makes the shiver in Mimiko’s shoulders stutter and settle.
“Inside,” Shoko adds, already turning. “Clinic.”
They move through the dark corridors like contraband. The old cedar floors don’t creak for Shoko; they know better. In the infirmary she thumps the lights to half and gestures Suguru into the corner, palms flat.
“Stand there. Don’t fall down,” she says, deadpan. “If you pass out I’ll step over you.”
He can’t tell if she’s joking. He nods anyway.
On the cot, Mimiko flinches from the brightness and tries to disappear into the blanket. Nanako sits upright, chin lifted as if height is courage. Shoko pulls on gloves with a snap that is mostly theater, then peels them off again and sets her hands to the slow business of Repair.
Reverse Cursed Technique in Shoko’s hands isn’t flashy. It’s the steady warmth of a kettle coming to boil, the precise click when a jar seals. She cups Mimiko’s cheek and hums under her breath. Blue-white light breathes from her palms and stitches down the swelling around the eye; the angry puffiness relents, the bruise mutes from raw plum to old sky. Mimiko’s mouth loosens. The trembling eases. Shoko’s face does not change, but her thumb is soft at the hinge of the girl’s jaw.
“Good,” she says quietly, to the body, not the child. “Keep that up.”
Nanako doesn’t blink while Shoko cleans the scrapes along her shins. “This will sting,” Shoko warns, and Nanako doesn’t twitch when it does. When Shoko lays her hand over the worst of it, the light pools, knits, drains. Nanako watches Shoko’s wrist, then her face, and only when the pain exhale leaves her shoulders does she glance at Suguru, quick, like checking the weather.
“You smell like rain and wire,” Shoko says without looking back. “Shower. Now. Hot as you can stand for five minutes. Then warm. Don’t argue.”
“I’m fine,” he says, automatically.
She cuts him a look that could be billed as a medical instrument. “You’re damp, shaking, and running on adrenaline and ethics. Shower. You’ll be more use if you’re not hypothermic.”
He wants—god, he wants—to keep touching the children with his eyes, to prove to some untrustworthy part of himself that they’re still here, still breathing where he put them. He leaves his jacket folded over the back of a chair like a surrendered flag and goes.
The infirmary shower is for scrubbing blood and disaster off people; it’s brutal and honest. He stands there while the water needles the back of his neck and tries to remember how to make his breath longer than a count of two. When his hands start to shake hard enough to rattle the fixtures, he braces them flat on the tile and stares at the grout. The tile is the color of old bone. The grout is a line. On one side: a village-shaped crater. On the other: two small sleeping chests, rising and falling. He made one line and not the other. He says it in his head until it takes.
Satoru would have made a joke by now. Satoru would have flicked water at him and called him dramatic, or not said anything and just stood too close until Suguru could remember air was for sharing.
He turns the water cooler on purpose, the shock a clean slap that keeps the images from sliding. Someone—Shoko—left a change of clothes outside th door.
When he comes back hair dripping in his eyes, Shoko has already done the quiet miracles: both girls in clothes much too big—Shoko’s spare t-shirts and soft shorts cinched with string, sleeves rolled to their elbows. The blanket is now a cape and a cave. Mimi has a cup between both hands like she’s holding a sacred object; Nanako is pretending not to like the steam hovering over hers.
“Tea,” Shoko says. “Sugar. Salt.” At his look, she adds, “For shock. Sip.”
He sips. It tastes like every shitty vending machine and every nurse who’s saved his life.
“Kitchen,” Shoko orders, and herded as efficiently as any curse, he goes.
They make soup with what Shoko keeps on hand because she is the kind of person who expects to be needed: kombu, miso, tofu, scallions, a thumb of ginger she smacks with the flat of a knife. She hands him a cutting board like a reprimand; he slices green into neat coins and watches his hands for tremor. They don’t shake when they have a job.
Shoko moves around him, small and decisive, catching spill before it becomes mess. “Two bowls for you,” she says. “One now, one when you think you don’t want it.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Shocking,” she says dryly. “Eat anyway.”
He does. The first spoonful hurts because it insists he has a throat, a mouth, a body that needs things. The second is easier. By the third his stomach remembers how to want.
The girls eat with that wary efficiency kids learn in houses where food is conditional. Shoko sits at the table with them and pretends to be very interested in her charts while actually counting bites. She never says “good job” or “one more”; she lets the silence credit them with having chosen. When Nanako pushes her bowl away with one last stubborn scrape, Shoko tips half of her own into it without comment. Nanako glares, then eats. Mimiko reaches for the tofu with the solemnity of a ritual and nearly smiles when it breaks cleanly against her spoon.
“You’re safe,” Suguru hears himself say, quiet, as if he’s afraid of spooking the words. “You don’t have to finish anything.”
Shoko gives him a look over the chart that says don’t confuse appetite with compliance. He shuts up and eats the second bowl.
When everything that can be warm is warm, they take the girls to his room because it’s closest and because anything else would be cruel. He stripped the bed sometime in the hot-water fog and Shoko remade it with the unflappable competence of someone who has never once believed in fitted sheets. She tucks the girls under his blanket and then tucks the blanket under them like origami. The blanket smells like his laundry—citrus and cedar; the room smells like wet hair and miso and something electric settling.
He stands because he thinks maybe standing will train his body not to reach.
“Go,” he says to Shoko, meaning let me talk to you somewhere they can’t hear.
He barely finishes the word before Mimiko’s hand darts out and hooks his fingers. Nanako doesn’t bother with hands; she simply stares until the point lands. He sits on the edge of the bed, careful not to jostle the line of their bodies.
Shoko switches off the overhead and turns on the small lamp. Light pools like honey. She takes the chair by the desk and pretends to scroll through something on her phone while being loudly present. They stay until the girls’ breathing evens into sleep and the clutch of Mimiko’s fingers loosens one notch.
Shoko lifts her eyebrows. Can you?
He shifts very gently, an inch at a time, substituting blanket for thigh, pillow for hand, until he can stand without triggering the alarm of waking. The girls sigh toward the warm; a small sound like a ship docking. He stands there a second longer because his chest tightens in a way that isn’t panic and he doesn’t trust it.
Outside, under the eaves, Shoko lights a cigarette like someone clocking in.
“No lectures,” Suguru says.
“Who has time to lecture,” she says. She blows smoke into the rain. “I have questions.”
He waits.
“How are you,” she asks, and then, before he can deliver the lie, “mentally. Not ‘did you get stabbed.’”
He is a little surprised by the ease with which the answer comes. The phone earlier loosened something. “Bad,” he says. Then, more precise: “Nothing in the work feels real. Everything at home feels like a ghost. People pray at us like we are drains for their guilt. I—” He stops because the ground just under this sentence is a sinkhole. “I almost,” he says, and that is enough.
She nods, like checking a box she knew would be checked. “Moral injury,” she says. “Compounded by bereavement, trauma, and chronic institutional misuse. In my professional opinion, you need a break.”
He laughs; it sounds like a bark. “A week?”
“A season,” she says. “Minimum. Preferably longer. Away from missions. Away from the elders. Away from people who think ‘tool’ when they look at you.”
“You know they’ll call it quitting.”
She flicks ash into the rain. “They can call it karaoke. You need a break.” She eyes him, then adds, softer, “And it’s not just the work.”
He stares past her shoulder at the glossy drip off the eaves. The distance between two rooms on the same campus can feel like continents. “It’s like shouting across a canyon,” he admits. “I can’t tell if the echo means he’s calling back or just that I’m loud.”
“If I had put him on the phone tonight, he would have come in a straight line, through walls,” Shoko says, matter-of-fact. “You asked me not to.”
“He doesn’t need me,” Suguru says, because the worst thought is the only one that fits his mouth. “He’ll be fine. He’s—” the strongest—“he’s already figured out how to survive without me.”
Shoko tips her head, considering him like a tricky lab value. “Needing is a poor metric,” she says. “He needs to breathe and eat and sleep, and he needed those things last week and he’ll need them next week. People are not IV bags. Choosing is the metric. He has always chosen you.”
“It doesn’t feel like that anymore. Not since,” he says and stops, and it’s petty to bring up the blood, the scream that never made it out of his throat. It’s also true.
“That mission was a stupid experiment the universe ran on both of you,” Shoko says. “Results: inconclusive, side effects: catastrophic. He lived. So did you. Now the question is what you do with that.”
Rain patters. She takes another drag, then holds the cigarette out; he waves it off.
“The girls,” he says. “What do we do?”
“Tonight? They sleep in your bed because you’re the thing keeping the floor under them.” She ticks items off with the hand that isn’t smoking. “Tomorrow: I log them as sorcerer wards, temporary placement pending evaluation. The higher ups can sneer about ‘protocol’ and I will practice my worst mood. We swing clothes from the donations closet. We see a social worker who owes me a favor. If Yaga tries to make this difficult, I will go for the jugular in three letters or less. You—” Her eyes narrow. “You do not take a mission. You do not take a call. You take a break.”
He should argue. He’s good at arguing; he and Satoru once argued with entire rooms by smiling. The words don’t form. Instead: “And if I still feel like this after the break?”
“Then you don’t go back,” she says, so simply it makes his knees weak. “You resign. You go home. You make soup. You don’t harm people. You don’t let people harm you.”
“Is it that easy,” he says, which is the same as asking is it allowed.
“Nothing about this is easy,” Shoko says. “But I’m your doctor, and I am prescribing not ruining yourself to please a committee.”
He laughs again, quietly this time. A small, real sound.
Shoko’s phone buzzes. She glances, snorts. “Wow, they already want you in the morning.” She slides the phone back into her pocket like she’s shelving a pest. “They can wait.”
He lets his head tip against the post. The wood is damp, cool against the bruise blooming under his skin where the urge to end the world pressed hard. “Thank you,” he says. “For not calling him.”
“You asked.” She flicks ash. “Also he’s a disaster right now even if he doesn’t see it and you two in the same room without a plan is an accelerant. We’ll stagger the detonations, if it’s all the same to you.”
Something in his chest eases at we. He doesn’t deserve it; he’ll take it.
“You’re going to need to tell him,” she says, after a beat. “Not tonight. Not tomorrow. But not never.”
“I know.” He watches rain bead along the umbrella bone. In his head, Satoru is two things that won’t meet: Gojo, The Strongest, and a boy sleeping with his cheek tucked into Suguru’s palm on a train. The canyon between is not smaller just because he can name it.
“It feels like he’s already gone,” he admits, and hates himself for the smallness of it when two small girls are sleeping in his bed because he chose them.
“Then your job is to live in such a way that if he looks for you, he finds you upright,” Shoko says. “Preferably fed.”
He huffs out a laugh. “Soup,” he says, to the rain.
“Soup,” she echoes, dry. She stubs her cigarette and tucks the butt into a little tin because of course she does. “Go lie down. I’ll take the chair. You can cry about it without waking them; I won’t annotate.”
“I’m not going to—” he starts, and then stops, because tears have their own agenda and Shoko has never been impressed by his dignity.
They go back in. The girls haven’t moved from the warm dent where he left them. He lies down on top of the blanket, a long curve next to a small, uneven one. Mimiko rolls toward his heat on instinct. Nanako’s hand finds the fabric at his sleeve and holds, not tight, just enough to make sure the world still has edges.
Across the room, Shoko settles into the chair, crosses her ankles, and pulls a textbook onto her lap like she didn’t just rescue three people with a blanket and a bowl of soup.
The room hums. It’s not the curse in his teeth; it’s the building, the rain, the blood in their wrists. Blue, off-tempo, not quite in time and still, somehow, a song. He stares at the ceiling until the plaster blurs and thinks: I didn’t call him. The thought tastes like loss and like a kind of mercy. It sits next to another: I will have to tell him I left.
The space between is a chasm. Tonight, he doesn’t try to cross it. He keeps the girls warm. He breathes. He lets Shoko keep watch.
When the shaking comes, it does what it does; he turns his face into the pillow and lets it pass. No one says anything about it. No one needs to. In the morning there will be paperwork and Yaga and Shoko’s worst mood. There will be tea and miso and small shoes lined up by a door that is, for now, his. There will be a break.
And somewhere, in another room, there will be an empty bed, a phone that didn’t ring, a canyon that will still be there tomorrow. He can’t do anything about that tonight.
He closes his eyes. The dial tone in his head, at last, is quiet. The only sound is breathing.
A couple days later, Satoru gets back late enough that the dorm has turned to echo and mortared heat. The hall lights buzz the way gnats do over standing water. His feet take the same path they always take after missions—down two steps, left at the vending machine that eats coins, right at the noticeboard where someone’s flyer has been half-peeled for weeks—and stop in front of Suguru’s door. He knocks with two knuckles, the dry joke already rising to his mouth like a bad habit.
The joke dies. The door is unlocked. The room is wrong in the smallest ways, the ways the Six Eyes hates. Fewer shirts tug at the closet rail than muscle memory expects. The desk is tidier by a single stack, a subtraction that shows like a missing tooth. A pen he once borrowed and returned is not where it should be; the dust shadow on the shelf around its absence looks like the outline of a fall. The air smells like citrus detergent and the sharp ghost of smoke that only clings to Suguru after a Shoko-shift—clean, medicinal, a little scorched.
“Damn missions,” Satoru tells the room, because saying that is less pathetic than what he really thinks. The Six Eyes flickers through the inventory again on reflex, overlaying what is with what should be: three shirts light, one book gone, the good mug missing. He magnifies, then forces the focus down, like pulling a lens cap on himself.
He sits on the bed. The blanket is Suguru’s, the pillow is Suguru’s, and there’s a single dark strand threaded into the weave where a jaw usually rests, caught like a line on a map. The buzz under his skin—that constant electric rasp he keeps Infinity stoked with—drops a register the second he burrows in. It’s embarrassing how immediate the relief is. Fever meeting cool tile. Pressure valve cracked open. He turns his face into the pillow because there’s no one here to see him do it, and because the room smells like him in the particular way that means alive.
He tells himself he’s only closing his eyes to reset the grid. The room shifts from bare to bearable. Sleep takes him like a door slamming against a storm—sudden, graceless, shoes still on, mouth open. The hum finally goes dim.
Morning drags him up by the collar. He sits up too fast, heart doing the old drumline, Infinity hiccuping on without permission. The Six Eyes catches on all the wrong edges again: the pen is still not where it should be. The closet still looks thinned. The air still smells like Shoko’s clinic clean threaded through Suguru’s shampoo. The wrongness hasn’t corrected itself in the night like he half-believed it would just to be kind.
He goes to find Shoko because if he doesn’t move he will go back to the bed and crawl under the blanket and convince himself that counts as a plan.
The infirmary corridor is artificially cool, the way rooms with sharp tools like to be. Shoko is charting with the conviction of a person daring an administrator to interrupt her. She looks up and runs her eyes over him in one long, unromantic x-ray that gets all the way to his marrow.
“Where is Suguru?” Satoru says, no hello. His voice comes out bright and flat, the particular shine of polished glass.
“On leave,” Shoko says, like reading a thermometer. “Mine. Seventy-two hours.”
“Since when is that a thing you don’t tell me.”
“Since I’m his doctor and not your secretary.” Her eyebrows tilt by a measurable degree. “You slept?”
“Why?”
“Because you look slightly less like a haunted tuning fork.”
He refuses to tip into the banter because if he tips anywhere he’s not sure he stops. “Is he hurt?”
“No.”
“Then where is he?”
“Home,” she says. “With instructions to eat real food and not turn feral.”
Something in him uncoils and hisses at the same time. Relief and anger share a ribcage; he pushes the latter forward because it has sharper teeth. “You could’ve called me.”
“I could have,” she agrees. “I didn’t. You are also not doing well.”
“I’m great,” he says, and smiles the way people smile when they’re showing you a weapon and calling it a flower.
“Your Infinity is on right now in a medical ward and you don’t seem to know it.”
He shuts it off without blinking. The room doesn’t change; his face pretends that’s because nothing was wrong. “I told you before, it’s automatic now. But there. Happy?”
“Delighted.” She flips a page with surgical malice. “You’ll see him in a day or two. Try not making this about you until then.”
“It is about me,” he says before his better sense can grab his tongue. The sentence lands between them like something that should have been defused. He hears himself; shame flares and he reroutes in a smaller, pettier voice. “I’m calling him.”
“Try three times,” Shoko says, deadpan. “Then stop.”
He leaves in a huff, because he’s good at leaving before someone can look too closely.
Outside, the courtyard is sheet-white with late heat. He calls. Straight to voicemail. Calls again. Voicemail. Again. Voicemail. The beeps sound like tiny doors closing in sequence. His thumb hovers; the need to hear a voice that will rearrange his bones is a physical ache, a bruise under the sternum.
He starts leaving messages because the alternative is swallowing them whole and letting them scrape his throat raw on the way down.
“Pick up. Where are you?” He hears the way the second sentence collapses toward are you okay and hates how obvious he is.
“Shoko says you’re on leave. You hate leave. Are you hurt? Tell me you’re not hurt.” The words stack; he tries to make them sound like a joke. They do not consent.
“If this is some kind of stupid penance I’m—just—call me back.” He nearly says I’m coming anyway and swallows it, because it would not be a promise; it would be a threat, and he is trying not to be a threat to the person he loves.
“It smells like you in your room,” he says before he can stop himself. “That’s not a threat. Just a fact. I’m guarding the bed, apparently.” He cringes at his own need and still doesn’t delete it.
“I’ll come get you if you say where you are.” The offer sits there, impossible and true.
“Okay. Don’t say where you are. Just say something, Suguru.” His voice catches on the name. He clears his throat and hangs up because if he stays on the line he will start saying anything like please, and he can’t afford that particular plea on a record.
He paces the length of the path until he can feel the grid of the paving through his shoes, until the calling turns into listening: his own voice coming back at him in cheap speaker rasp, pathetic and honest, stacked into the world like a hasty altar. The Six Eyes flickers once, trying to do what eyes do—measure distance, predict return. There is nothing to measure. There is only the smell of rain somewhere far off, the metallic taste of a storm he can’t see, and the fact that when he closes his eyes he can feel the absence of a pen on a shelf like a pulled tooth his tongue keeps finding.
He stops moving. Infinity hums at the edge of his skin, a reflex he won’t admit has become a comfort. He turns it off again on purpose and stands in the heat until sweat tickles the back of his neck and a cicada clicks like a bad fuse. Somewhere in the city, a payphone is catching coins; somewhere beyond that, a door opened for Suguru without needing to be knocked on. He pictures a kitchen that does not ask him to be the strongest thing in it. He pictures a bed that shortened while he grew. He does not let himself picture a hand on Suguru’s hair that isn’t his.
His phone buzzes—nothing from the number he wants. A mission ping, a pointless admin memo, Yaga asking if he’ll be in class. He silences it and slides the phone into his pocket like he’s sheathing a knife, then goes back to the room that still smells like someone who isn’t there and lies down again because he has no other plan that doesn’t involve breaking something he can’t fix.
He tucks his face into the pillow and pretends the blanket is only a blanket and not the only thing on campus that knows how to quiet the hum in his bones. He tells himself he can wait a day, maybe two. He tells himself he is not a child. He tells himself he is not a tool that’s been left on a bench. He tells himself a lot of things, and none of them are as convincing as the simple, stupid fact that the room is wrong and he is here but Suguru isn't, and the world is asking him to be patient, and patience is the one thing he is not built to weaponize.
He sleeps again anyway, because the body does not care about pride, and the pillow still smells like a person he has always mistaken for air.
“Seventy-two hours,” Shoko had said, holding out a folded paper like a prescription. “You go home. You eat. You sleep. I keep the girls in the infirmary. I will bite anyone who tries to file anything with the words ‘placement’ or ‘protocol’ before you are a human again.”
“I can stay,” he’d argued, because staying was a shape he knew even when it was killing him.
“You can’t,” she’d said. “I’m the doctor. I win.”
Nanako had stood very small and very square at the edge of the room, Mimiko half behind her like parentheses. Suguru had knelt so he wouldn’t loom. “I have to go see my parents,” he’d told them. “Just for a little bit. Shoko is the best doctor on earth. She’ll guard you with her terrible personality.”
“Confirmed,” Shoko had said. “I’m a menace.”
Nanako had narrowed her eyes at Shoko, decided she approved. Mimiko’s fingers had found Suguru’s sleeve and curled. He’d set their hands around the stuffed rabbit they had gotten from an arcade what felt like years ago. “Watch him,” he’d said solemnly. “He’s vicious.”
They’d nodded like he’d entrusted them with a state secret. Shoko had mouthed go over their heads.
The train rocks him toward a life that hasn’t seen him in too long. He watches the city unspool, feels shame lap up to the gunnels and back off: not strong enough, not holy enough, not enough. His phone buzzes on the plastic seat; the screen fills with Satoru’s name stacked into a column like vertebrae. He flips it face down and stares at his palm until the buzz stops. When he swallows, the back of his tongue tastes like old coins and incense ash. The hum in his molars—the residue of every curse he’s taken—sits high and mean, a bad frequency that makes water taste like wires.
His parents’ door is a familiar weight in his hand. It opens before he knocks twice.
His mother doesn’t say you look thin, but the air is full of it. She puts her hands to his face like she’s warming them and says his name like a diagnosis and a blessing. His father makes the quiet noise men make when something in their chest is coming apart and they don’t want the room to notice.
He sits at the table and food arrives in the memory order: rice, soup, pickles, fish. Steam lifts, clean and kind. He manages half a mouthful—and his body betrays him. The taste of curses shoves up through the flavor—rotten pennies, pond-metal, a frog-belly slick—and his stomach seizes. He sets his chopsticks down carefully, the way you set a blade you don’t trust, and says, “Excuse me,” to no one in particular on the way to the sink.
He retches nothing first—spit and bile and that rancid, coin-copper ghost—then enough to make the back of his throat burn. It isn’t violent, just thorough, the sort of clean-out a body does when it’s had too much unholy in it for too long. He rinses the sink twice, three times, because he can’t stand the smell, and then he stands there with his hands braced and lets the splash of the tap pretend to be rain.
His mother does not follow him into the kitchen. She meets him at the doorway with a folded cloth she’s run under cold water, sets it on the back of his neck without comment, and slides the soup bowl away with the discretion of a card trick. She swaps the pickles—sour for sweet—and sets a little dish of salt beside his chopsticks like a talisman. “Try this,” she says, meaning the ume later, meaning the ginger under the lid, meaning I see you.
“School?” his father asks, after he coaxes a second spoonful of soup down and keeps it. The question is a rope thrown from a safe shore.
“Busy,” Suguru says. The truth would flip the table. He eats in careful sips, letting the rice loosen in the broth until it’s nearly porridge, adding a pinch of salt when the curse-taste rises. He stops before he’s sick again. He wipes the table because his hands need a job. He helps wash dishes because he is still their son and there are rules in this house: you rinse, you stack, you don’t talk about blood at dinner.
When the heat climbs his face and his stomach lurches again, he excuses himself and throws up quietly in the bathroom, the tile cold against his knees, breath counting the grout. His mother leaves a cup of water outside the door with a slice of ginger floating like a small boat; he sips, and the sting chases the rust from his tongue long enough to stand.
His old room smells like dust and summer and the chalky after-scent of books. The posters are still crooked where his teenage self left them. The sliding closet door still sticks on the same splinter. A stack of old school notebooks leans in the corner like shy relatives; the top one has his name written twice, once in careful block letters and once in a slanted amusement that became the man he is. On the bookshelf, a photo in a cheap frame: him in a uniform too big for his shoulders, his parents flanking him, the world before curses learned his name.
He showers first, steam ghosting the mirror, the curse-taste sweating out of him until the water runs cooler and his stomach stops arguing. His mother’s spare towel is warm from the radiator; a worn cotton shirt of his father’s waits on the lid of the laundry basket without comment.
He lies down on top of the blanket like a boy who came home from camp.
He is tired in a way that leaks. The thought that cracks him open is small and ridiculous: If I had done it, who would have eaten this fish my mother burned her fingers on for me. It undoes him completely. He turns his face into the pillow and shakes the way bodies shake when words are too heavy to carry out loud.
The ceiling fan doesn’t move; the room moves around his breath. Somewhere between one breath and the next, bile climbs again and he has to sit up fast, hand over his mouth, make it to the small wastebasket and then the sink. The second time is thinner, more memory than substance, that same foul, coin-bright rot stamped all over it. He rinses and rinses until the water runs clear and the mirror stops doubling.
He climbs back into bed and, unbidden, tears stream down his face like he’s a child again—not beautifully, but the old way: uneven, hiccup-caught, salt and heat and small, humiliating sounds pulled out of him by gravity and relief.
The door opens without the light. His mother comes in on slippered feet and sits on the edge of the bed the way she did at seven, at twelve, at fourteen. She doesn’t ask what happened because she already heard it in the water running too long and the way his bowl went back half full. She gathers him the way you gather a feverish kid—one arm behind his shoulders, one palm at the back of his head—and he goes, all six feet of almost-eighteen into a curve that still fits in that old shape. He feels stupid for a heartbeat, then not at all, because her hand finds the small whorl at his temple and starts those slow circles she’s drawn there his entire life. Her shirt smells like laundry dried in sun; her pulse is steady under his cheek, a blue, off-tempo he knows as well as he knows the house.
“You’re here. You’re okay. You’re with me,” she says, not a question, not a test, the simplest sentence in the language.
He hiccups a laugh that hurts and nods into her shoulder. She hums something shapeless and familiar—maybe a lullaby, maybe just breath with edges—and the awful pressure in his chest lets go another notch. His father’s shadow fills the door crack and retreats, leaving a folded towel on the dresser and the hall light two fingers open: the family’s unit of measure for I am here if you need me.
Embarrassment creeps up—the grown man crying on his mother like a toddler—but it washes out under the larger fact of being held anyway. Her hand keeps time.
“Small sips,” she reminds him, reaching for the water glass, and he obeys again, the ice tapping the rim like a metronome.
“Good,” she says, the way people praise a fever for finally breaking.
When it passes, the quiet is clean. She kisses his hair like she can smooth it back to the right decade and stands.
“I’ll make ginger for morning,” she says, which means I will keep doing the ordinary things that keep you alive. She closes the door to that same two-finger width and leaves him with the hum of the house: the TV ticking down in the living room, the neighbor’s wind chime counting time, his father running the old faucet in the garden until it relents.
On the nightstand, his phone is a small, bright square of accusation. He stares at the column of missed calls and the dozen voicemails like a sheer wall. Shame finds a new, stupid edge—he left you a map and you won’t even look—and the back of his tongue goes sour-metal again.
He types: I’m safe. We’ll talk later. He adds: I’m sorry for not picking up. He deletes the second line. Sends only the first. Face down.
He watches the ceiling fan that doesn’t turn and feels the truth arrive not like lightning but like tide: he can’t go back. Not to the missions. Not to the campus that smells like blood. Not to being the instrument the elders lift when they don’t want to touch the blade.
It doesn’t feel rebellious—it feels anatomical. This is your heart. It beats. You cannot keep asking it to be a hammer. This is your stomach. It will not keep what can’t be made clean. He is almost eighteen—old enough to be sent to die, young enough to still belong to someone—so he chooses the belonging.
He sleeps then, the kind of sleep bodies take when the person who loves them has given permission. And near dawn he wakes to the clean clatter of a wooden spoon and the smell of ginger porridge rising. His mother sets the bowl in his hands and tucks the blanket around his knees, precisely the way she did when he was five.
“Small sips,” she says again. He obeys. The porridge goes down without revolt; the candied ginger she leaves by the cup chases the last of the coin-taste from his mouth. On the doorframe, the pencil marks wait for their next notch. On the dresser, the basin and towel say just in case. In the front pocket of his bag, his phone, face down, holds that one message like a fragile truce.
By the time the sun warms the glass, he knows the word for what comes next. Withdrawal. He will tell Shoko. He will hold the girls’ hands. He will tell Satoru the part that can be told and carry the part that can’t until it dulls.
When he steps into the hall, his mother is there with his scarf folded in half and his father behind her with the umbrella that always sticks on the third rib. No speeches. His mother measures the hollow at his wrist with her thumb and forefinger, a habit from childhood, and frowns at the space. She says, lightly, like telling the weather, “We’ll make your favorites tonight. If you’re home.”
“I’ll be back. I’ll call you,” he says, and means it in the way people mean I will try to be the person this house believes I am.
He leaves the umbrella by the door because the sky is clear. He leaves the door two fingers’ width from closing because some doors stay that way in certain houses, forever measuring here if you need me. He walks toward the station, the street the same and not the same, and the knowledge of what he has to do walks with him like a shadow that finally fits.
Notes:
i've always known that food and cooking for others is one of my love languages, but wow it just shows up in every work huh?
if you made it this far: tiny heart? stray thought? future reread? i’ll take any and all! i love hearing everyone's thoughts almost as much as i love sharing these works.
Chapter 2: how much of you is yours
Summary:
The year goes star-small: bright, then swallowed. Two bodies out of orbit. Hope buzzes once, then dies; the strongest learns there are forces you can’t hold out.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Dispatch finds him before the sweat on his neck can cool.
Ping. Coordinates. A voice that always sounds like paperwork says, “If you’re free,” which everybody knows means you are.
Satoru doesn’t bother with the joke about his calendar. He lifts a hand without looking and the air obliges him; the city folds along a crease only he can see. Late heat stands over the rooftops like a held note. He moves through it the way lightning does—seen after it’s already happened.
First stop: warehouse by the river where the concrete sweats and the bay door whistles around a broken seal. The curse here has been fed on boredom and stolen paychecks, a thin rat thing with a spine like wire. He lets it scuttle. He lets it think it’s clever. Then he opens a line through space so fine it sings and the rat unwrites itself, clean.
“Thank you, sir,” the foreman says, grateful the way people are to a machine that finally works when you hit it right.
“Mm,” Satoru says, friendly as an elevator. He’s already walking. He doesn’t take the water they offer. He forgets the vending coffee in his hand until it goes warm and mean.
On the way back across the yard he looks at his phone without thinking about looking at his phone. The message sits where it has sat since the last train out, since the night the campus had been boiled down to glare.
[Suuguuuruu 12:49 A.M.] I’m safe. We’ll talk later.
He has thought of a thousand better words than later and none of them are his to send. He opens the keyboard anyway.
when?
delete.
on campus?
delete.
alive? (idiot.)
delete.
Ping. The voice again: “If you’re free.” The map jumps; he goes.
He keeps Infinity idling out of habit, like a car in summer traffic: a hum under the skin, a layer of stillness between him and everything else. Every time he flicks it off, the day presses too close. Every time he leaves it up, people step wrong around him like they can feel the blued edge and don’t know what it’s for.
He passes the half-peeled flyer on the admin hall as he cuts back through campus—some club that will never get quorum. A corner unsticks and wavers in the draft of his passing. For no good reason, it makes something in him itch.
Second dispatch drops him in neon: alley behind a karaoke box where the night smells like fryer oil, sugar, and old microphone foam. This one is slick and showy, a centipede of lights that wants to be seen. A twist of his fingers and the world misaligns just enough to make the thing forget that it exists.
Somewhere above him a metal door slams. The sound lands right under his ribs. Infinity leaps to max without permission, a flare so bright the alley re-focuses around it; he laughs too loud at nothing at all and yanks it back down like pulling a hood over his own head.
“Oops,” he says to the air. No one is there to hear it. That’s almost worse.
He checks the message again because he is an idiot with perfect recall. Later sits there and refuses to be now. He writes a line that says later is a terrible metric and erases it before the bubble can even think about bobbing up.
“Sir?” A girl in a sequined dress peeks around the back door, eyes wide. “Is it…” She makes the shape of gone with her hand.
“It’s handled.” He throws the coffee away untouched. It hits the bottom of the can with a hollow, tinny clack he feels in the back of his teeth, a small iron taste that RCT will not clear no matter how many times he taps the circuit to smooth the day’s bruises, the impending ache behind his eyes.
Between pings, the city tries to be a place again. It sets out its laundry. It sends a dog nosing into a hedge and back out victorious with a defeated sock. It lifts heat in shivers off the asphalt. Satoru moves through it. He is good at moving. The higher-ups have noticed this and made it his job.
Third dispatch takes him out to the tram’s end, where the neighborhoods thin and the river loses its manners. A shrine crouches under a cypress so old it remembers the last time the water came this high. The caretaker waits with his hat in his hands like the hat did something wrong.
The curse is an old grief bolted to a new accident—half-shadowed, half-truthful. It shows him everything anybody has ever said to the river and asks if he would like to drown too.
“Not tonight,” he says, and reaches in and turns it off. He can do that now—reach through the ribs of a thing and find the switch it didn’t know it had. The world closes around his hand with a sound only he can hear. When he pulls back, the air feels like a room after somebody remembered to open a window.
The caretaker bows. There’s a cup of barley tea on a tray. There is a rice cracker in plastic that will taste like air and necessity.
“Thank you,” the man says, not looking at Satoru’s face. “We were—” He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to. The rest is what people always mean when they say we: scared, tired, grateful to anything that will let the day go back to ignoring them.
Satoru takes the cracker because his hands need a job. He doesn’t eat it. He puts it in his pocket like evidence.
I’m safe. We’ll talk later.
He imagines saying, define later. He imagines saying, be specific. He imagines saying, I’ll come now and make it later by force of will.
He does not send any of those. He pulls space along its seam and goes where the map tells him to go.
Ping. A pin on a map that might as well be a finger in the middle of his back.
Four flights up in a concrete walk-up that smells like boiled cabbage and laundry steam, the lights buzz in a way that makes the air feel granular. Someone’s TV leaks a laugh track through a too-thin door. On the landing between 3 and 4, a puddle of something not water shivers without a breeze.
The curse is a knot of neighbor noise—screamed phone calls, dropped wrenches, a door that never latches—braided until it learned to gnaw. It has teeth like keys. It keeps throwing itself at the stairwell window and bouncing, rage with nowhere to go.
Satoru doesn’t pull a technique that requires naming. He sets his palm against the wall and nudges space a thumb’s width to the left. The stairwell becomes a place the knot can’t quite remember how to inhabit. It unravels the way a sweater does when you find the right thread. The buzzing dims by a measurable degree.
Someone in 3B says, “Huh,” as if a headache just stepped out of a room.
A door cracks; an auntie peers with a cigarette she’s not allowed to have indoors. “Finished?” she asks, already deciding whether to scold the landlord or burn incense.
“Mm.” He doesn’t add, Open the window sometimes. He doesn’t add, Stop shouting through the wall like it’s a messenger. Advice isn’t what they hired.
The window on the landing has been painted shut for a decade. He taps RCT through his wrist because his fingers are cramping in a way that feels like someone else’s hands. It helps with the cramp. It doesn’t touch the weather humming in his teeth.
On the top step a toddler sits pajama-kneed with a cup of juice, watching him like a cartoon that wandered off the screen. “Are you a robot,” the kid asks, grave.
“Only part-time,” Satoru says, and the kid nods, satisfied, and takes a solemn sip.
He buys another vending coffee from the lobby machine and leaves it balanced on the mailboxes when he remembers he isn’t going to drink it. The can kisses metal and makes a small iron chime that reaches under his ribs and taps the place where evening keeps its hand.
Outside, the heat has eased enough to pretend there’s weather besides heat. Laundry lines lift and settle. A scooter coughs awake and flees the alley like it owes someone money. He checks his phone because of course he does.
I’m safe. We’ll talk later.
Later is a hallway with a light that never stops buzzing, he thinks. He slides the phone back into his pocket like sheathing a blade he isn’t supposed to bring to dinner.
When it’s over, when the voice says, “stand by,” in a tone that means don’t sleep too deep, he realizes it’s been thirty-six hours sense the first ping.
The map goes dark. For the first time all day there’s nowhere to point him.
He turns toward campus. He could fold the city and be there in a breath; he takes the long way instead, letting the streets be streets and not just distances. Laundry lifts and settles. A scooter coughs and escapes an alley.
By the time the endless climb to Jujutsu Tech come into view, Infinity has idled down to a thread and the taste of iron is just a memory he can almost ignore.
He tells himself it’ll be fine.
Thirty-six hours of being pointed at things has left him hollowed to the useful shape; the campus lights look mercifully ordinary from the road, and ordinary is all he needs. He takes the steps two at a time on purpose, like a person coming home and not a weapon being shelved. He even thinks, stupidly, I should make him eat something, as if a bowl of instant miso could fix the part of the world that won’t sit still.
Suguru’s door opens too easily.
Hope doesn’t die; it stumbles. He smiles anyway, the reflexive, bright one that has gotten him through a thousand bad corridors.
“You back?” he calls, light, because if he keeps his tone on a certain tightrope he can cross anything.
The room looks back at him with a hotel’s face.
Not tidy—emptied. The kind of clean that happens after drawers are pulled all the way out and checked for stragglers. The blanket is folded wrong; not Suguru’s neat, Shoko’s efficient, not-my-room neat. The closet hangers hang in a row, all their identical shoulders pointing in the same direction. The shelf leans evenly now because the missing book is not an absence anymore; it’s been accounted for. The air is citrus detergent without the threaded ghost of smoke or hair oil. Clinic-clean has gone, too; whatever hurt and helped here has already left.
For a heartbeat he thinks he’s in the wrong room. He is not in the wrong room. The Six Eyes hate subtraction; the room keeps handing him missing signs.
He doesn’t step in. He stands in the doorway and lets the vision do its cruel work: sun-fade rectangles where posters used to hang (the top left corner still has a half-mooned tape scab clinging on, the exact one Satoru teased him about never peeling off clean); a scuff near the desk from the time Satoru swung a punch too wide in a “stop being dramatic” spar and Suguru caught his wrist and they both crashed into the chair; a tiny gouge low on the door where the rabbit arcade prize once snagged a staple and tore, and Suguru laughed so hard he hiccuped.
On the underside of the desk, a constellation of pen dots where exam week chewed through three nights in a row. On the floor by the bed, the faint burnish of heel-turns from half a year of pacing while Suguru pretended he didn’t. The bedframe’s third slat has a hairline crack; that was Satoru, freshman spring, when he cannonballed into a nap he wasn’t invited to and the slat said no thank you! and Suguru said you’re insufferable and moved over.
He finds every ghost his eyes can be bribed to see. The room has been smoothed down to the version you could put in a brochure. The little errors—the ones that proved the world had contained them—are all that’s left.
He steps inside then because not stepping in is worse. The smell isn’t right, but the air still remembers the height of a body. He puts his hand on the desk as if weight could force an answer out of wood. Dust doesn’t even stir. The good mug isn’t here to be missing; it’s gone in a way that suggests decision.
He has a spare brain he uses for logistics—he borrows it now. Shoko first? She’ll know exactly where, exactly why, and say it in a sentence that leaves no splinters. Yaga? He’ll have a form with a checkbox. A clerk in the admin office who collects signatures like pressed flowers. He could open a door in the air and be at any of those in a breath.
He doesn’t move.
Residuals lift like heat off asphalt—thin, imprecise, truer than rumor. He tries not to read them and immediately reads them. Two small pulses came through here: quick, wary, nested close together. Shoko’s signature scissored in tidy across the threshold earlier, all neat edges and competent contempt. And Suguru—Suguru is not a ghost. Suguru is fresh, braided through the room in long lines: hand on the doorframe (a pause), shoulder at the closet (decision), knuckles along the desk edge (goodbye), footprint in the weave of the rug still pressed a hair deeper than the rest. The air leans.
He follows.
It isn’t graceful. He forgets that he can fold space because feet were built for running and thinking was built for later. He takes the hall fast, shoulder bumping the place on the wall where someone once taped a “no smoking” sign and Suguru drew a smiley face on the cigarette; the tape ghosts are still there, an empty rectangle like a failed magic trick.
The vending machine that coughs as he flies past it and the metal taste licks the back of his tongue. A bulletin board he has never once read offers nothing. The flyer he’s been ignoring for days is gone now, a pale square with four stubborn tape corners, one still furred with paper. He hates it for no reason and also for the reason.
He could take one step and be there. He takes twenty, thirty, a hundred, lungs burning pleasantly the way they do when you decide to be a human body for a minute. Infinity flickers on, off, on, like a bad light; he keeps it down out of spite. The residuals thread away from the dorms, under the old cedars that remember better rules, toward the side gate that tastes like rust even when it’s dry.
Left out of habit at the stair landing where a heel once slipped and Suguru laughed until he cried; right where the sunlight burns out into deep corridor shade; through the breezeway where air moves like a river and where a boy once learned his body isn’t a promise. The stone underfoot remembers a knife; his bones do too. The metal sign the maintenance crew never fixed knocks like the last line of a bad joke.
He rounds the last pillar and sees him.
Small bag on his shoulder. Face set the way people set it when they’ve decided to keep not sleeping until the decision finishes. Standing exactly where Satoru doesn’t like anybody to stand, in the strip of shadow he still dreams in.
The hopeful narrative in his head collapses without a sound. He hears it anyway. For half a second he almost says welcome back.
He forgets every better opening he rehearsed in doorways and alleys and long minutes between dispatch pings. The sound that leaves his mouth is bright and flat, as sharp as glass ground down to dust.
“This—Suguru—where are you going?” Satoru asks, and the hum in his body spikes so hard he has to breathe like a person to keep from armoring himself out of the moment.
Suguru turns and his eyes find the question and go around it. He stands too straight for someone who slept. Small bag on his shoulder, strap bitten flat where a nervous hand has worried it. He’s not dressed to run, but he’s dressed not to be stopped.
“Home,” Suguru says. “For a while.”
“For a while,” Satoru repeats, like testing a coin for bite. “Great. I’ll—” He hears himself, bright and stupid. “—I’ll come by after class. Or before. Now is also good.”
“Not now.”
He laughs like that’s funny. It isn’t. The air around him is thin the way it gets at altitude; Infinity wants up, up, up. He keeps it down through force and habit. “You left me a… thesis,” he says. “I’m safe. We’ll talk later. This is later.”
“Not with you.”
The words are small and ordinary and loaded like a trap. The metal sign at the breezeway knocks once, a punctuation he hates.
“Okay,” Satoru says, and then doesn’t say okay at all. “Why didn’t you call me?”
Suguru’s gaze flicks past Satoru’s shoulder to the strip of stone that tastes like blood even when it’s clean. The ground remembers a knife. Satoru’s ribs do too.
“Because I would have changed my mind,” Suguru says. “Because I would have said yes to anything you said, and I’m trying to say yes to not dying.”
“I’m very pro not dying,” Satoru says. He grins because his options are grin or show his throat. “Huge fan. Unsubscribe from dying. Block and report.”
“Satoru.” Soft, please stop. It rubs him the wrong way; he’s a cat pet backwards.
“What is this?” He gestures at the bag, at the set of Suguru’s jaw, at the way the campus behind them insists on being a place where someone could vanish and it still counts as ordinary. “You take seventy-two hours and come back, and we fix—”
“I’m not coming back,” Suguru says, very gently, like loosening a splinter. “I withdrew.”
It lands late, like thunder after lightning. Satoru’s tongue goes dry; his body does the wrong thing and takes a step into the shadow he still dreams in. Infinity jumps to max without asking him for consent. The world gets quiet the way it does when a storm closes its mouth.
“You—what,” he says, like he misheard the language. Then, more precise: “Since when do you… do things like that without me?”
“Yaga signed the paperwork,” Suguru says, not apologizing for the order of operations. “He said the door’s open. He meant, if I stop being difficult I can come back and die properly.”
“Yaga said—” Satoru starts, then discards it because he doesn’t care what Yaga said; Yaga is a chair with arms. “You don’t quit,” he says, dumb with the old catechism. “We don’t quit.”
“You don’t,” Suguru says. “You’re the strongest. You can keep eating what they feed you and it doesn’t touch you. I am… not built like that.”
“Touch me?” Satoru says, too fast, too bright. “That’s the complaint? Touch me.”
He steps closer on reflex. Suguru’s hand lifts halfway, palm bare, something ancient in the gesture—proof of no weapon, request for contact. Infinity, traitor, flares—not a wall so much as a mistake his body makes to stay intact. The air between them hardens, that blue glass of no.
Suguru’s hand stops a breath from his cheek and meets nothing; the nothing holds. He leaves it there a second anyway, fingers trembling minutely in the not-air. “There,” he says, not cruel. “Even now.”
Satoru hates himself with a clarity he usually reserves for geometry. He shuts it off so hard the air stutters; the metal sign gives one more sorry knock, as if embarrassed to be here.
“I didn’t—I don’t mean—It’s automatic,” he says, stupid. “You know that.”
“I know,” Suguru says. “That’s the problem.” He lowers his hand. “We were boys once. You could turn it off because you wanted to. Now you can’t because you don’t know how to be safe otherwise. I am not safer than your habit.”
“Say what you mean,” Satoru says, because riddles are for people with time.
“You are everything that is using us,” Suguru says, quiet, and the sentence cuts them both. “Not because you want to be. Because they made you into an answer and you decided that was a virtue. You call it helping. They call it infrastructure. When I look at you now, I see a door and a blade. I can’t live in that.”
“You’re leaving jujutsu or you’re leaving me?” Satoru asks, and he hates the sound—flat, boyish, the wrong metric naked in the hall. “Tell me which one I’m supposed to be mad at.”
Suguru’s mouth goes a hard line. “You are jujutsu,” he says. “That’s the whole tragedy.”
“Then be mad at me,” Satoru says. The laugh slips; his voice shows its bones. “At least stay mad where I can reach you.”
“This isn’t about you,” Suguru says, which people say when it is a little. “I can’t stomach their cries for help anymore. I can’t keep swallowing curses and pretending they taste like duty. Every mouthful is vomit and rot. I keep thinking of that cage, and then I think of a different kind of cage.”
“You say that like I put you in it,” Satoru says. “You think I like it.”
“I think you don’t know there’s an inside,” Suguru says, and bitterness lifts its head at last; it isn’t loud, it’s careful. “You believe you’re a tool, and you confuse compliance with comprehension—being used with being understood. ”
He says it like a diagnosis. Satoru doesn’t bleed; he burns.
“And you confuse leaving me with saving yourself,” he snaps. “Congratulations on your mercy. ‘I’m safe,’ you text, and then vanish like a coin trick. Safe where? With who? Or is the point that it’s not me?”
Suguru flinches at with who like it’s an accusation from a smaller mouth.
“It’s not you,” he says, evenly, and Satoru’s hands close uselessly on air. “Because if it’s you, I do not leave. I need to leave.”
“Coward’s way out,” Satoru hears himself say, earlier self trying to claw its way into this version. He wants to take it back the second it’s aired; his pride refuses to move. “You could stay and fight. With me.”
“Against who?” Suguru asks, and his voice doesn’t rise; it goes buried and mean. “The higher ups? The missions? The grief? Your reflex? I’ve been fighting since I was a child. I am tired. If I stay, I break in the direction that makes me useful. We both know what that looks like.”
Satoru’s throat clicks. He chooses anger because it holds its own weight.
“You don’t get to make me the villain in your exit monologue, Suguru,” he says, bright as razors. “You want to be done. Fine. Say you’re done. Don’t dress it up as conscience.”
“You died,” Suguru says, and the world tilts. “And then you got back up and called it proof of concept. That is what I am leaving. Not you. The math you did afterward.”
“I didn’t die,” Satoru says, and the worst part is he says it like a flex. He hears it, too late to catch it. “I… lived.”
“Congratulations,” Suguru says, and his mouth cracks on it. “In the future maybe don’t do it right where I can hear the sound.”
They stand in the strip of shadow that made Satoru; the stone remembers a body cooling. He can’t keep his hands still; he runs a palm over his jaw and wants to feel skin, wants to feel anything that isn’t this steel-blue hum.
“Stay,” he says. He never begs; the word arrives ruined. “We’ll make it different. We’ll… We’ll take less missions. We’ll burn the paperwork. I’ll tell the elders to rot. I’ll—”
“You can rip space in half,” Suguru says. “You can’t unmake a machine by glaring.”
“We,” Satoru says, smaller, ridiculous. “We are—”
“We were,” Suguru says. “We were the strongest. Now you are. And I don’t know how to stand next to that without being a knife handle.”
The mean part of Satoru bares its teeth because if he doesn’t bite he will collapse.
“Maybe you just hate not being the strongest,” he says, and he feels the pettiness like a fever breaking wrong. “Maybe all of this is a tantrum because the room looks at me first.”
Suguru’s face goes very still, not blank—hurt the way stone is hurt by weather.
“You know what I hate,” he says. “I hate that you think strength is the only language you can speak to me in. I told you I am sick. I told you I am full of the worst parts of the world. I asked for… absence. For quiet. For soup. And you brought me a sword and a promise.”
“I’m all I have,” Satoru says, and there it is—bone. “I don’t know how to offer anything else and still keep breathing.”
“Then learn,” Suguru says, and for a second the gentle teacher he could have been shows through like sun under water. “Learn without me.”
The phone in Satoru’s pocket buzzes. The voice that sounds like paperwork: If you’re free. It might as well say, do you belong to us or to yourself. He doesn’t look at it. He doesn’t have to; the hum of the ask is specific as a scent. Suguru’s eyes cut to his pocket anyway. Of course he hears the world when it calls for Satoru; everyone does.
“See,” Suguru says, quiet. “You are always free for them.”
“I am free for everyone,” Satoru says, and it comes out wrong—proud, like he meant it as applause. “That’s the point.”
“No,” Suguru says. “That’s the problem.”
He should say I’m choosing you right now. It even would be true for this exact breath. It would be a good line and a bad proof. He doesn’t say it because Suguru would hear the lie shaped like later underneath.
“What do you want from me?” Satoru asks, and he means the sentence with an honesty that makes him stupid. “What can I do that counts?”
“Let me go,” Suguru says, and Satoru’s body registers it as violence. “I don’t have a better speech. I can’t be the one who teaches you how to be a person. If there’s anything here that survives, it’ll survive me stepping away. If not—then that’s the answer. Figure it out without me.”
“Don’t ask me to make this smaller,” Satoru says, furious and seventeen and a thousand. “Don’t ask me to be reasonable about you.”
“Satoru,” Suguru says. “If I matter to you, don’t make me fit your hand.”
Silence hits like a wave. The metal sign knocks once, tired. The breeze moves just enough to carry the hospital-clean ghost of Shoko’s cigarettes and the cedar-resin the elders think smells like honor.
Satoru feels the panic rise—the old drumline, the edge of a cliff, the part of his brain that only knows how to solve things by punching through them. Infinity tries to set, reset, set; he lets it ride at his skin like a bad light. “Tell me where you’ll be,” he says, last card, already folding. “I’ll— I won’t come. I’ll just… know.”
Suguru looks like a person choosing a smaller kind of pain. “No,” he says. “Not yet.”
The phone in Satoru’s pocket buzzes again. If you’re free. If you’re free. If you’re—
“I’m not,” he says, to someone who can’t hear him, and then he’s a liar because his thumb has already moved to silence the request and he has already counted how many breaths it will take to cross the city if he has to go. The map of duty lives under his skin like a second circulatory system; he hates it and he owes it and he knows how to be alive inside it. He looks back at Suguru because if he doesn’t, he will trip.
“Fine,” he says, and the word is a blade laid flat. “Run, Geto.”
The surname lands cruel and childish; it is meant to. Suguru doesn’t flinch. He nods like a verdict and shifts the strap on his shoulder and takes one step, then another, out of the strip of shadow where Satoru became a miracle and a mess.
Satoru doesn’t move. He doesn’t call him back. He doesn’t make a door in the air and drag him through it. He stands exactly where a man once tried to teach him about being mortal and watches the person who taught him the other thing walk away.
The hum in his teeth is a scream. The world presses close. Infinity goes up to spare him from the air.
He breathes once, twice, the way Shoko would tell him to if she were here and willing to be ignored. He takes the path that hurts less immediately: forward. The map in his pocket says go. He goes.
By the time the old cedars swallow him, the passageway looks empty. The metal sign knocks once for the person who left and once for the person who didn’t, and then the campus swallows both sounds and pretends the stone was always clean.
Dispatch hears the argument even if no one else does.
He keeps Infinity idling like a fan in a sealed room: a hum to pretend the air is kind. The campus falls behind in tidy rectangles. The old cedars give one dry shiver as he passes under; the metal sign does its tired knock as if to say, still here, still wrong.
Ping. If you’re free.
He goes.
The city keeps building a body around him—knees (stairs), ribs (bridges), skin (awnings that clatter), breath (subway wind). He has always been good at moving through bodies. He has started to suspect that’s the problem.
Under the tracks, someone burned offerings that were not meant for gods: receipts, a postcard, a photograph that didn’t curl right. The curse is a thin wire strung between two bad thoughts; it sings itself into being when a train passes. He pinches space and the wire goes slack. The next train goes by and the air is just air.
He should feel better after that one. He doesn’t. The hum in his teeth is not a curse.
On his way back to the street, a man laughs in a high stairwell and the sound caroms off concrete in that too-bright way that makes cheap radios painful. The laugh lives for one second exactly where Toji left a knife in him, and his body—unbidden, unconsulted—goes to ground. Infinity spikes so fast he gets the afterimage: light gone aquarium-blue, sound cut into squares. His hands don’t know what to do with themselves and choose fists.
It passes. It doesn’t pass. He moves.
Ping. If you’re free.
The last dispatch of the night is a joke the city thinks is funny: a bathhouse gone to tile and mildew, all steam ghosts and dripping taps, a place where sound arrives late and leaves early. The curse crawls up out of a drain like a wad of hair that learned to hate. He doesn’t even look at it. He opens a line through space and fires at it, and it unwrites cleanly, the way a word disappears if you hold the backspace down long enough.
He should go home. He stands in the empty bathhouse while the taps tick cooling and looks at the rectangle where a mirror used to be. He sees himself anyway: a blur with too much circumference, edges he can’t hold, eyes doing the insane, conscientious thing of trying to inventory damage they can’t name.
He taps RCT through his wrist, the small pulse that smooths bruises and rounds off the corners of the day. It does what it’s supposed to do—clears the lactic acid, dampens the ache behind his eyes, uncurls a cramp in his hand. It does nothing for the part of him that is convinced the ceiling wants to touch him.
“Fix it,” he tells nobody, and tries it again, harder, the way you shake a vending machine you already know ate your coin. The warm wash runs up his forearm and evaporates. The hum does not move.
He forgets how to take a full breath for three breaths in a row. Shallow-shallow-shallow, like skimming stones. He knows that’s not the way. He also knows that if he forces the big breath, he might find out where the bottom isn’t.
He goes outside. The night hits him the way nights do right before dawn: all at once, like it was waiting around the corner with its hands full of nothing.
He walks.
He takes the long route on purpose because he doesn’t trust doors right now, even the ones he makes out of air. Asphalt heat lifts and falls like a tide; laundry lines trade secrets overhead. At a corner, a payphone that should be dead coughs a dial tone into his hand when he lift the receiver. He hangs it up like it burned him.
He tries names on the inside of his teeth like pills. Suguru, which his mouth knows too well. Shoko, which his mouth knows just enough to be dangerous. He tries not saying either and manages that for four blocks. A scooter barks awake and flees a side street; a cat glances at him like he’s weather.
The city changes clothes several times without asking his opinion. Neon takes itself off; the sky fits itself into early. A woman washes her stoop with a ridiculous little hose like she’s apologizing. A truck delivers bread to a bakery that looks too nice to have ever sinned.
Satoru’s body does the thing again without asking him—no warning, just the cliff. The world slides half an inch to the left, and his vision becomes a list. The bones in his hands are either not there or too present to tolerate; he opens and closes his fingers and they become a metronome for a song he doesn’t know.
Infinity goes up and up as if he were underwater and somebody opened a drain. He pulls it down and it shoots up again and for a stupid second he imagines it will set permanently and he will be a statue in the road while the delivery truck politely goes around.
He steps into a doorway because it’s there. The shop is still closed; the metal grate makes a mesh shadow on his shirt. The space between his skin and the world is wrong; he can’t decide whether to remove it or double it. He puts his palm flat to the metal and feels the shape of a net. He tries the ridiculous thing: counting the squares. Three across, seven down, three across, seven down. The numbers are a bridge that holds just long enough to get both feet to the other side.
His phone buzzes. Not dispatch. Yaga, of all people, doing his impersonation of a person who owns a phone: Will you be in class? He laughs without any humor in it and types back: No. He almost adds: Taking a personal day, like he ever did that; deletes it.
He should call Shoko. He imagines her saying the boring, correct words about breathing and eating something with salt and not walking into traffic because the ground feels like it has opinions. He wants to hear the bored part of her voice. He wants to not be someone who wants things.
Instead he walks. He walks the way people pray—multiple routes to the same door. He goes by the river because it is exactly itself and doesn’t ask him to pretend that it isn’t moving. The metal taste backs off to a memory if he keeps the water at the edge of his eye. He chews the corner of a rice cracker from his pocket and it tastes like air and ash but it stays down.
By the time the uphill starts toward campus, the sun is high enough to tint the windows mean. He takes the steps two at a time because he remembers how. He doesn’t go to his room because there isn’t a reason to. He doesn’t go to the admin office because if he hears the word protocol he might make a new hallway. He goes to the quietest place on campus instead—the storage room behind the second dojo, the one with the warped floorboard that squeaks like a mouse when you step wrong.
He does not turn on the light. The smell is familiar in a way that doesn’t ask questions: oil, old wood, dust that minds its business. He sits on a stack of tatami and breathes like he’s not being graded on it. The hum is still there, but it’s a distant wire now, not a siren.
He thinks, I will sleep here for an hour and then I will be a person. He thinks, I will not dream in the strip of shadow if I sleep here. He thinks, I will close my eyes and wake up and Suguru will be here. He thinks, I am not a child. He thinks, later. He thinks a lot of things.
He sleeps for twenty minutes with his mouth open and his hands in fists because his hands do not trust his mouth to keep the air. He wakes to the sound of someone walking past the door and armors himself out of the moment.
Outside, the day has become fully itself. He checks his phone because of course he does. No new message from the number that matters. A new one from the number that doesn’t but pretends it does: Stand by.
He pockets the phone and tells the quiet room, “I’m standing.”
The room believes him enough to let him leave.
Shoko clocks in by making a problem out of Yaga.
“Bring the ledger,” she says, already tying her hair up with a rubber band she stole off a chart. “And the stamp. And your respectable-older-man aura. We’re doing placement before some committee decides to discover the word protocol.”
Yaga looks up from the doll he’s stitching like she’s asked him to grow a second head. “I have classes.”
“You have legs,” Shoko says. “Walk with them. The girls are coming with us. We’ll need a guardian signature, and yours scans as ‘grown-up’ better than mine. If anyone asks, this is a medical follow-up. If anyone keeps asking, cough ominously.”
He squints. “Since when am I your clerk, Ieiri?”
“Since I’m everyone’s doctor.” She flicks a pen into her coat pocket, cigarettes into the other, phone between teeth while she gathers the blanket the girls slept under like it’s evidence. “Let’s go.”
He goes, grumbling because that’s how his consent sounds.
The girls stand by the infirmary door in borrowed clothes and small shoes lined up like a spell. Nanako has arranged the rabbit on top of a clipboard as if it’s supervising. Mimiko’s hand is hooped in the hem of Nanako’s shirt. Both pairs of eyes track movement like cats in a place with too many exits.
“Field trip,” Shoko says in her best deadpan nurse voice. “Hats on.”
They don’t have hats. She puts the blanket around their shoulders like a cape and a raincoat and a permission slip all at once. “You ride with me,” she tells them. “Sensei will meet us there and scowl at the paperwork.”
Yaga scowls on principle. “Where is ‘there’?”
“Mrs. Hara,” Shoko says. “Retired grade two. Allergic to elders. Wife’s a schoolteacher. Two bedrooms, no shrine that burns incense unsupervised, no locks that turn from the outside. Cat named Konbu who judges ethically.”
“Background check?” Yaga asks, already fishing the ledger from a pocket the size of a philosophy.
“I’ve known them for five years,” Shoko says. “They feed interns who forget dinner and drag second-years in from the rain. They pass the only check that matters today: I would take a nap on their couch.”
He grunts the bureaucratic version of fine.
On the way down the corridor, Shoko’s phone buzzes.
A message from Suguru: check on him
No punctuation. The kind of ask that fits in a throat that hasn’t decided what else to say.
She types back: on it
Puts the phone away like she’s slotting a scalpel.
The Hara house is set back from the road with a hedge that is very serious about being a hedge. A windsock shaped like a carp slumps off the eaves like it partied too hard in May and never went home. Mrs. Hara meets them on the step in slippers and a cardigan that has outlived several trends. She takes one look at the blanket-capes, one look at their wrists, and makes the small sound competent women make when they’ve decided to be dangerous on your behalf.
“Inside,” she says. “Shoes there. Tea immediately.”
Mr. Hara—who is short, square, and radiates the exact energy of a school bell—slides a tray onto the low table with a practiced hip. The cat arrives like a judgment wearing whiskers, then decides Mimiko passes muster and leans against her shin with shocking generosity. Mimiko’s hand opens on instinct; the cat pretends not to notice she’s petting it like something that might disappear.
Shoko ignores the tea at first and does her circuit: windows, latches, the bathroom lock (thumb turn, inside only), the kitchen knives (in a drawer, child-high but not child-easy), the space under the beds (dust bunnies, not cages). She notes a low nightlight in the hall and a bowl of mandarins on the counter like the house thinks vitamin C counts as hospitality.
“Conditions,” she says, turning back to the grown-ups, remembers what Suguru asked of her. “Sisters stay together. Doors stay two fingers open at night unless they ask otherwise. No incense. No ‘discipline exercises.’ If either of you sees anything that feels like a curse, you call me first, and then you call me again.”
Mrs. Hara nods, no offense taken. “I’ll tape your number to the fridge.”
“To the cat,” Mr. Hara says. The cat flicks an ear like it heard its name taken in vain.
Yaga clears his throat in the key of paperwork. “Temporary placement,” he says, opening the ledger. “Ward evaluation pending. I’ll—mm—file the W-form when we return.”
“W stands for ‘we are doing this now,’” Shoko says. “Sign.”
They sign. Shoko watches their hands for tremor and finds none. She sets two little bowls in front of the girls—rice gruel, steam rising like proof—because sometimes medicine has a spoon.
Nanako eyes the bowl like it’s a test and then devours it when it passes. Mimiko eats like someone showed her a map and then let her keep it. Mr. Hara pretends to fight the cat for a dried anchovy; the cat wins magnanimously and leaves one near Mimiko’s sock like tribute.
“You call me if anyone comes to your door with a clipboard you didn’t invite,” Shoko says to the Haras. “If they say ‘from the school,’ ask them for my name and the name of my cigarette brand. If they don’t answer, shut the door and call again.”
Mrs. Hara’s mouth tucks. “You think they’ll try to… move them.”
“I think bureaucracy is a river that likes the path of least resistance,” Shoko says, which is kinder than the sentence she wants. “We’ll dam it at your gate.”
Nanako sets her spoon down with the ceremony of a person deciding not to run anymore.
“Are you coming back?” she asks, small voice that pretends it’s bigger.
“All the time,” Shoko says. “You’ll be sick of me. I’m insufferable.” She touches the rabbit’s ear like a stethoscope and nods solemnly at nothing. “Vitals: fierce.”
Mimiko leans into the cat until the cat gives up and sits on her foot. Shoko files that under blood pressure, improved.
Outside, Yaga exhales like he’s been holding a building on his back and finally remembered to set it down.
“You terrify me,” he says, almost fond, which for him is a sonnet.
“That’s my bedside manner,” Shoko says. She lights a cigarette and doesn’t smoke it, just lets it be a small burning clock in her fingers. “Next errand.”
“Elders,” Yaga says, face turning into a piece of furniture. “They’ll want explanations.”
“They can have my worst mood,” Shoko says. “First, I’m going to look for him.”
“Him,” Yaga repeats, and his eyebrows do math. “Gojo?”
She doesn’t bother pretending otherwise. “Suguru asked,” she says, like it’s a clinical trial requirement then shrugs. “And even if he hadn’t.”
Yaga studies the smoke like it might be a memo. “He’s been… busy,” he says, which covers dispatch and rumors and the new way students flinch when a door slams. “If he’s working, he won’t answer.”
“Then I’ll catch him not working,” Shoko says, and flicks ash into her tin. She doesn’t say: he won’t sleep anywhere soft if no one tells him where to put his head. She doesn’t say: he’s seventeen in the places that matter and nobody taught him where to put his hands.
Campus pretends to be quiet when she gets back. The quiet is the kind that comes after someone stopped shouting, not the kind that means safe.
Shoko does her grid.
Clinic (no), dorm (Suguru’s room emptied to brochure; Satoru’s door shut, the kind of shut that means no one is inside), roof (the wind says nothing helpful), dojo (mats in neat stacks, a ghost of chalk where someone worked the same form too many times). Storage room behind the second dojo: the warped board squeaks when she steps on it; the air tastes like old wood and a nap that ended abruptly. He was here; he isn’t now.
She texts: where are you
She doesn’t add a question mark. She calls, gets the polite machine that wears his voice like a joke. She hangs up before the beep so she doesn’t have to hear herself too closely.
On the breezeway, the metal sign knocks once, like it’s trying to get her attention with bad manners. She stands in the strip of shadow where the stone remembers a knife and lets herself be angry for exactly three breaths. Then she puts the anger away with the rest of her instruments.
Yaga meets her halfway to the admin hall with his ledger like a shield. “Well?” he asks.
“He’s not where I want him,” she says. “He’s somewhere obvious to him.”
Yaga grunts. “I’ll stall the higher ups.”
“You’ll do more than stall,” Shoko says. “You’ll make them think ‘later’ was their idea.” She taps ash into the tin, closes it neatly, slides it back into her pocket. “I’ll try again tonight.”
“Shoko.”
She stops, eyebrows up.
“You can’t be doctor to all three,” he says, meaning the boys and the girls and the rest of this year that won’t end.
“Watch me,” she says, without heat. “Or better—be doctor to one of them for five minutes and I’ll get a cigarette break.”
He huffs what might be a laugh. “Gojo will come up for air,” he says, half reassurance, half wish.
“He’ll come up when there’s a hand to pull on,” she says. “He doesn’t know how to do it by himself yet.”
“Whose hand?” Yaga asks, not unkind.
“Any that aren’t a job,” she says, and that rules out most of the hands on campus.
Back in the clinic, she updates the chart the higher ups will never read: Mimiko: ate half, then the rest. Nanako: glares intact. Placement: Hara household, favorable. Patient (Suguru): discharged self with insight. Patient (Satoru): AWOL. Plan: locate, scold gently, feed.
She sets her phone face-up on the desk like a welcome mat and gets back to work. There are stitches to remove, a first-year with a sprained pride, a bottle of iodine that refuses to open unless you ask it in the right tone. Every twenty minutes she looks at the screen and sees nothing relevant and decides that counts as information: still moving.
When dusk drops its held breath again, she steps under the eaves with her little tin and the first smoke of the evening. The wind brings the city in pieces—fryer oil, rain not yet here, metal warming itself for night. Somewhere under all of it a hum she’s heard all summer, blue and off-tempo.
“Fine,” she tells the air. “Be feral.”
She flicks the ash, tucks the butt into the tin, and goes back inside to write orders no one wants and keep watch the way she knows how: blanket, tea, the lamp turned low and her phone face-up on the desk.
He reaches the dorm by habit, the kind that lives in ankles. The hallway lights pulse like tired veins. His knuckles find Suguru’s door without consulting him and rap twice, the old knock that used to pull laughter through a wall.
Nothing answers but architecture.
He stays there long enough to feel foolish, then slips into his own room because the alternative is standing like a coat rack.
His own room takes him sideways. The smell is detergent and the faint copper of old pipes. The next-room shape is still there in his head—Suguru three steps away, a body you could aim your sleep at—and his eyes, dutiful traitors, keep feeding him the update: vacant. No breath under the thresholds. Square footage. Air flow like a schematic. Micro-scratches on the desk edge. A dead zone beyond the wall—no heat signature, no soft static of bodies. Empty recorded as data. No heat pocket bleeding through paint. Nothing.
“Quit it,” he tells his eyes. They don’t.
They continue their efficient, awful job: the strip of lighter paint where a poster used to hang; the way sound travels further when it has one fewer thing to hit; no stray heartbeat; no hair oil in the air; no pen in the exact spot his hand wants one to be. A negative image of a life.
The fight keeps replaying in dumb, high definition, not the parts that make sense—withdrawal, break, season—but the cuts: You are jujutsu. We were. Let me go. The place his own voice broke around a name he didn’t say. The moment he said “Run, Geto,” like he’d been saving it for a day he hated himself. He keeps finding better words two hours too late. He stacks them in his mouth and can’t get his jaw to work.
His phone is a small square of mercy he keeps trying to bribe. He opens the thread and stares at the one line he has:
[Suuguuuruu 12:49 A.M.] I’m safe. We’ll talk later.
He types when? and takes it back. Where? and takes it back. I didn’t mean the surname. He doesn’t send that either. A phantom buzz runs down his thigh like memory. He checks anyway. Nothing.
The misfire doesn’t crash in; it prises the seams. First, sound gets too close, like the room leaned in to hear him think. Then the floor tilts, not a lot—just enough that his ribs throw their hands up. His fingers lose their settings. Infinity slams on like museum glass dropping between him and the rest of the exhibit. He hauls it down and it snaps up; for one stupid heartbeat he sees himself stuck, a display that can’t be dusted.
“Not now,” he says, and his voice arrives from a little further away than he left it.
RCT takes the edge off a sore knuckle, smooths the migraine crouching in the right side of his face. It slides off the bright wrongness lighting under his sternum. He runs the circuit again because repetition is religion. Same result: bruises soothed, alarm untouched.
He tries breathing the way you’re supposed to. Counts like rungs of a ladder. His lungs answer with the paper-bag version—shallow in, shorter out, the kind that only makes you hungrier.
The wall between rooms has that new, neutral quiet the air gets after someone unplugs a refrigerator. He hates it for having the nerve. He rests his forehead against the paint anyway, because cool is better than spinning, and because he needs the proof that something in the world will push back when he leans.
The fight won’t stop happening. Every time his chest loosens, a line hits with fresh elbows. You confuse being used with being understood. He had a hundred clever counters when the hall was empty; they evaporate now, leaving the one bald truth he didn’t want to admit: if Suguru had asked, he would have handed over any part of himself that made this easier. He doesn’t know if that’s mercy or laziness.
Another false buzz. He checks, ridiculous, quick as a burn. Nothing. A trick of the blood. He hates how hope keeps getting up off the floor.
He sits because legs aren’t suggestions anymore. The floorboards under the thin rug are warm in stripes where the day sank in. He thinks about lying down and can’t make himself horizontal; sleep used to be a door he could open by putting weight on Suguru’s shoulder, a switch he flipped with a cheekbone against a sleeve. Now the bed looks like work. The pillow looks like a riddle.
He drags himself onto the mattress anyway and it repels him, wrong softness in the wrong place. He rolls off like he meant to be on the floor all along and lets his back find the wall. The paint cools the spine through his shirt. He waits for his hands to remember they aren’t sirens.
Eyes keep doing the job he designed them for—measuring, tallying, proofing. He gives them something harmless to hold: the screw heads in the vent (four), the hairline in the ceiling plaster (two branches), the number of slats on the blinds (eleven). A cheap trick, but cheap tricks count.
The second wave comes vertical: stomach drops the length of the room, breath hitching on an invisible step. Infinity climbs in a smooth, indifferent column. He tells it no like you tell a well-meaning dog to sit. It listens on the third try. He thinks about the shadow where Toji put metal through him and the way Suguru stood inside that same shadow today and did not argue himself back into the light. The thought hits like palms on a closed door.
He presses his thumb into the meat of his own palm until the pain lands clean. He thinks: call Shoko. He thinks: don’t make her be the adult again. He thinks: she already is. He thinks: later.
He texts nothing. He reads I’m safe. We’ll talk later again until the letters become shapes. Later keeps shrinking until it’s a pin he could swallow, sharp end first.
He tries the thing he hates—saying facts out loud. “I’m in my room.” The voice works. “The wall is a wall. The next room is—empty.” His mouth balks on the last one. He changes it. “The next room is… not mine.” The substitution slides down easier and still scrapes on the way.
The phone finally admits to a message and his heart vaults straight into his throat before his thumb even moves.
[Shoko 07:12 P.M.] are u back?
He laughs without amusement and types: no. Almost adds did you know? deletes it, almost adds did he talk to you? deletes that too. Sends the single syllable because he can manage one.
A minute passes the way a pulled muscle passes—slowly, with notes. He fumbles the other half of the cracker from his pocket and chews until salt has a place to be. It stays down. Victory, mean and small.
He realizes the room has crept a half-step back. The buzzing fixture outside goes from inside-his-teeth to outside-the-door. His fingers are his again, cheap machines with a thousand tricks; he flexes them like he’s running a quiet roll call.
His face finds the pillow because faces do that. The fabric smells like clean cotton and nothing else. He tries closing his eyes. The dark is busy. Every time he listens, he hears the wall say no one, which is not what walls usually say. He opens his eyes again, angry at the ceiling for having angles.
Sleep feels like crossing a river without a bridge. He could build one—technique, stubbornness, lying to himself—but the far bank keeps moving. He stays awake on purpose, a petty triumph, because choosing is the only thing he has left of the day.
Another phantom buzz; he doesn’t even reach this time. If Suguru texts, he’ll hear it straight through the floor. He knows that’s not how phones work. It’s how his body does.
After a while the panic finishes being a siren and becomes an old refrigerator again—there, constant, ignorable if you’re tired enough. He is very tired. He is also made of small, disobedient wakefulnesses: a shoulder that remembers carrying; a mouth that keeps forming apologies it won’t send; a hand that wants to knock at a door that won’t open because the person he’s asking for isn’t behind it anymore.
He leaves his own door unlocked when he goes to brush his teeth, not because anyone is coming back tonight, but because some part of him only unclenches if there’s an exit that isn’t a technique. On the way back he touches the wall between rooms once, fingertips light, as if it could give him a pulse he forgot.
The phone lies face up on the desk, blank square, patient. He turns it face down. Two breaths later, he turns it back.
“Later,” he says to the quiet. It sounds like a dare and a promise and a lie he’s willing to hold in his mouth until it softens.
He doesn’t sleep. He does the long, unglamorous thing instead: stays put while the night gets rid of itself, heart gradually remembering the tempo his body insists is sustainable, eyes finally learning how to look at a wall without counting what’s missing behind it. When dawn starts rubbing the edges of the blinds, he’s still awake, still here, still stupidly listening for a sound that does not arrive.
He gets up anyway.
Notes:
okay, this was too fun to write which doesn't bode well for my babies. i wanted it to feel like standing in a room while the air pressure changes: nothing obvious, just the ache in your chest that tells you something’s gone wrong. satoru’s panic here is as much about suguru leaving as it is about the way his own body betrays him; suguru’s departure doesn’t just take him out of jujutsu tech, it takes the one point of gravity satoru ever let himself orbit.
thanks for making it this far! leave a thought or two, because i always love reading those, and love the speculation of what y'all think will happen next. 💜
Chapter 3: how much weight does absence have
Summary:
Satoru clings to strength like it’s the only thing keeping him upright, pretending power is a cure for everything he’s lost.
Suguru keeps finding himself softened in ways he doesn’t want — laughter, gratitude, small moments that slip past his guard — and mistakes it for failure.
Neither of them knows they’re moving further from each other, even as they orbit the same absence anyway.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
December 6th, 1999
Kyoto’s winter is a quiet that bites.
Frost skins the pond so thin you could write a name on it with a breath. The camellias keep their mouths shut. Smoke rises from the kitchen vent in a narrow line as if even heat has been told where to go. The house smells like momiji and polish and a kind of old obedience. Somewhere, a bell counts the cold in clean, spare numbers.
They wake him before the light understands itself. Ten years old; hair shorn and brushed back; a white that thinks it is older than he is. A maid warms his socks between her palms, remembers, sets them on the floor instead. They’re wool from sheep no one else could afford; placed at a distance, immaculate, waiting for the boy to step into them like a shrine god dressing himself. He slides his feet in. She bows too low, a small apology to the rule that made her move.
No one says a lesson is beginning. In this house, lessons are what your body is doing when nobody names it.
First: run until the morning has to keep up.
The courtyard stones are the kind that don’t learn softness even under centuries of feet. He stands on them with socked feet and feels winter measure him up the arcs of his toes, up the ladder of his shins. A retainer ties a sandbag at his waist with a practiced tug that makes a knot of his belly; another paints a tally on a slate: 0.
“Once around,” says the hunter-eyed old man, voice like a reed flute dried past tenderness. “Stop when you’re told, not when you’re tired.”
He runs the outer path where gravel gives underfoot like rice. Past the bare persimmon, the stone lantern with the hairline crack he can find in his sleep, the pond that pretends to be a mirror. His breath leaves his mouth in small ghosts; he chews them back in because that is what a body does in the cold. The sandbag rides his hips with a meanness he recognizes as education.
A woman counting with prayer beads clicks at the turn. “Eyes up,” she says, not scolding, not kind. “You are not your feet.”
The Six Eyes is above. Bow to no one. Need no one.
It’s not spoken like a line to memorize; it lives in the way their eyes skim over him the way you check a roof for leaks: useful, structural, not intimate. A pillar does not get to be tired.
The strongest does not go be out of breath, and the thought makes his chin lift, sharp in the winter air. When his chest starts to ache, he decides the ache belongs to lesser boys. He is not lesser. He will never be lesser. He keeps his shadow long and his mouth quiet and completes the first loop.
“Again,” the old man says, and the slate reads 1.
By the fifth the cold is inside him like a new organ. By the seventh his shoulders have opinions; by the ninth the opinions turn into thesis statements. The slate prints 9 with the impatient flick of someone who has written this number about other boys who did not finish it. He does not look at the slate. Looking would be an admission that the number owns him. He owns numbers; he has been told so since he could count. He looks at the lung-colored sky over the outer wall and thinks about nothing on purpose.
The tenth loop asks something uglier. His arches threaten a vote; his lungs are too small for the argument he’s having with them. He keeps his head up because a woman with a bell is standing where boys look when they want to be allowed to stop, and she will ring it if he asks, and asking is the test.
He passes without asking. For one beat, pride sharpens through the exhaustion: he is still running when other boys would be carried. He is not other boys. He is Gojo Satoru. He tells himself that means something. The slate becomes 10.
They take the sandbag off like mercy and hand him two wooden buckets with the handles sanded smooth by boys who learned this lesson too. He lowers into horse stance between the frost-shocked boxwoods; the cold grabs the backs of his thighs and refuses to be negotiated with.
“Hold,” the old man says, and a junior taps his outer knee with bamboo when he tries to save himself by cheating the line. “Lower.” The buckets fill with water because someone made sure to leave them under the eaves and the drips respect gravity more than children. He watches the meniscus climb. His shoulders light, then burn, then become the kind of steady hurt that turns into information if you refuse to let it be pain.
The woman with the beads clicks: one, two, three, until he understands the number will never be theirs.
His quads tremble, small betrayals he refuses to let grow. The buckets ask his wrists what they’re worth. The old man’s face stays as it always is: not angry, not proud, but measuring — the way you test a blade for balance. A maid in the side corridor stops under the lintel and forgets to move for two seconds. He wants to pretend she is his mother and then is angry with himself for wanting that.
“Up,” the old man says when the water finds the rim and his arms cease to be lines and remember they were made of meat.
He stands with the carefulness of a person stepping out of a glass they’ve been poured into. Breath catches, says a soft curse in the back of his throat he will never say out loud in this house. He sets the buckets down where someone will move them and is relieved to have hands that can shake where no one is looking.
They feed him tea that tastes like a prayer someone forgot to make interesting. The leaves are imported, the water boiled in silver. He drinks it like obedience.
“Stretch,” the junior says kindly, as if kindness were a muscle you can lengthen. He does; it helps in ways that are not rewarded.
Archery next. Not on the range with its tidy sand pit and its mat wall and its house for bows: in the wind corridor where the estate funnels icy air like a discipline. They hand him a bow his height and a glove thumbed smooth by other boys already measured for coffins. Fingers numb do not feel like fingers; he learns this as the string suggests a kiss to the pad of his index and then takes a bite instead.
He anchors, draws, pretends a target where only sky exists. The first arrow wobble-sings; the second corrects; by the fourth he can do it with his eyes half-shut against the wind, which is the point. The Six Eyes is above. You look beyond what small people would call the mark. You do not let weather pick your horizon.
“Again,” the old man says, not for the shot, but for the part where your spine says yes to a line and holds it while the world hurries.
They do not correct his posture with hands. They correct it with silence. Silence is the loudest worship they give him: no touch, no praise, only the expectation that he will align with perfection because that is what he was born for.
A part of him thrills — no one else his age could stand so still, so true. But the pride has no place to go; no one claps, no one laughs, no one calls his name. It curdles into a sharper kind of stillness.
He holds until holding is a separate person inside his body doing the job for him.
He is allowed to eat at midmorning. “Allowed” looks like an efficient bowl of rice that skinned over while he was being made useful. The grains are perfect, immaculate, too fine to taste like anything. He breaks the film with a wooden spoon the weight of a decision and finds heat underneath.
Someone—there is always a someone—sets a wedge of persimmon on the edge of the tray and looks away too quickly for it to be anything but kindness.
He tells himself he doesn’t need it. But he puts the wedge in his mouth whole and presses it to the roof until the sweetness melts into his blood. It lingers longer than the rice, and for one treacherous second he wishes someone had stayed to see him eat it.
Later an uncle showed him the shrine ledger—ink lines marching like soldiers—and put a fingertip to the page where his name sat. “A house stands when it has a pillar,” the uncle said as if explaining rain. “A pillar does not ask the roof for comfort.”
He tried the idea on like new shoes and found he could walk in it. Above, alone, untouchable. You could see very far from up there. You couldn’t touch anything without breaking it. That part they didn’t say out loud. He learned it anyway.
Afternoon is the part where you stop pretending the morning was the hard thing.
Makiwara: a wrapped post bolted to ground that keeps only true secrets. He is told to strike cleanly, three hundred, then one hundred more, because numbers are a god the clan believes in. Every impact is tallied. His fists swell pink, then red, then raw; no one winces on his behalf. Pride is not in leathering the knuckles, but in learning the exact angle of a wrist that will let him keep doing this forever.
The junior watches for wasted motion and makes a sound like a sparrow when he finds some. The straw warms his skin to the point of split. The old men don’t look away. They watch him the way you watch a house beam in a storm. Someone produces a jar of salve with a smell like forest and medicine and sets it aside where he can see it but not touch it yet, a promise for later if he proves worth preserving.
Between sets they make him go through a series of kamae—one foot forward, weight a secret; arms forming a frame he could hang a world in—while the old man and a retainer have an argument about roof tiles that is also about him. “Pitch,” the old man says, and the retainer says, “Cost,” and neither says “child,” because the word has been misplaced for years. He holds the stance while their words rub together and makes himself a place none of them can live.
Balance: a beam slick with frost under the corridor eaves. He goes over and back and over again with a weight tied at the small of his back so that the word “center” becomes a physical place he can point to. He falls once. The sound his body makes is a confession, sharp and humiliating, and he knows at once it will be recorded in someone’s mind as data.
The junior looks at his ankles and says, “Again,” like someone folding the same letter for a different envelope.
A sparring partner arrives— three years older and two heads taller. The boy is positioned at the edge of the yard like an instrument waiting to be tuned.
“Try him,” the old man says, cane punctuating the air. The other boy bows like boys are supposed to bow: a practiced tilt that saves space between bodies.
Satoru’s fists are swollen and humming from the morning’s work. The other boy steps forward with a cautious respect, eyes measuring. His body knows the sequence: feint, step, strike. The part of Satoru that has learned to hold still imagines the clean answer—pull the blow, let the lesson be mercy. For a fraction of a breath he lets the thought live. He pulls the hit at the last second; the other boy stumbles but rights himself. The yard holds its breath.
The old man moves faster than thought. A cane snaps a line across the back of Satoru’s thigh hard enough to make bone ring.
“Above all,” he says, reed-dry, “Gojo Satoru bows to no one. Needs no one. Mercy is beneath you.” The welt blossoms under his training whites; heat and red bloom together as if someone has painted on him. Satoru lifts his chin and refuses to limp. The other boy looks away, shoulders folding with an apology he didn’t intend to make.
He wins the next exchange cleanly. Infinity hums like approval under his skin when he lets it; the motion is fluid, practiced, inevitable. He tells himself the cane didn’t hurt. He tells himself he is unmoved. But the wound is not the strike itself so much as the meaning—that a hand will correct him for wanting to spare—carved into him like a ledger entry. He does not tell anyone that what stings more is learning there is no room here for a hand that doesn’t strike.
When he finally finishes, someone slides the salve into his palm without comment. The permission is the only thing that makes him want to cry all day. He looks at the person who gave it to him and cannot tell if she is a cousin or a retainer or a very brave version of both. He will remember the shape of the jar forever and not her name. That is what the house asks.
Another boy from a branch line arrives for a different appointment with the old men and is parked at the edge of the yard the way you park a cart. He is Satoru’s age, cheeks raw, knuckles bragging a stupid purple from striking practice. His mother crouches to tie a scarf around his neck tighter, as if warmth were armor. When she pats his sleeve after, she leaves her hand there too long, like she has forgotten they are in public.
The boy leans into it without shame. His shoulders fold gratefully around the scarf.
No one slaps him for it.
Satoru looks once, because it is impossible not to. His knuckles burn where he's rubbing the salve in; cold making a hymn out of his knees. Something in him aches toward the sight, stupid and small. Immediately he tells himself it is beneath him. Scarves are for children. He is Gojo Satoru. The Six Eyes is above.
No scarf waits for him when they let him stand. No hand lingers on his shoulder unless it is correcting his posture.
The old man catches his glance and clicks his tongue—not at the boy with the scarf, but at Satoru, as if looking sideways were the greater mistake.
Evening brings the house back around him like a coat. Dinner is a room arranged to insist that appetite is vulgar. He eats the soup before it skins. He does not look at the fish’s eye.
A maid leaves a halved mandarin on his plate like a sunset with an instruction: choose your own sugar; no one will sweeten anything for you after this. He peels it very clean. The oil sprays his fingers and pretends that the day hasn’t been asking him to give those sweet parts up.
They walk him through one more corridor that has decided not to creak for him.
“Listen,” an aunt says, pointing not at anything but at everything. He does. The wheel on the far road needs oil. The pipe in the wall knocks when it is cold enough for aristocrats to say ah. The old momiji tells itself an old joke in the key of wind. The hum is the loudest thing. He realizes, with the kind of comprehension that doesn’t let you ask for prizes, that he is being taught to hear past people. He is being tuned to the world.
He goes to the room they call his not because it contains him but because the floor remembers his weight now. He does not tell anyone he is tired because tired suggests someone used him wrong and here the only wrong is admitting wrong.
He lies on his side the way animals put bellies to stone. The wood is warm, just a little, from bearing everyone all day. The smell is smoke and rice and winter’s iron. He does not tell anyone that when he lay on the floor with his cheek to the boards, he could hear the house humming back at him like a throat trying not to cry.
He breathes with it until the sound evens. He holds the ice of the day behind his teeth —The Six Eyes is above. Bow to no on. Need no one — and doesn’t swallow it when it melt. Across the paper door, a shadow pauses—maid or mother or retainer—and goes on.
He does not tell anyone that tomorrow he will be eleven, and some soft, treacherous part of him still thinks that means something — a sweet on a plate, a hand on his hair, proof that a boy lives under it all. He does not tell anyone, because the house would only remind him otherwise.
He sleeps the way a blade is stored: oiled, sheathed, no fingerprints, ready to keep the ground from learning about Gojo blood.
Present Day
The desk between them keeps its silence like a third student.
Morning hangs wrong in the classroom. Light comes in the tall windows at an angle that wants to be ordinary, but the absence beside him drags everything out of shape. Chalk waits at the board. Yaga has left his ledger open like a wound. Dust turns in lazy spirals, unconcerned with anything that matters.
Satoru drops into his seat the way he always does, long legs sprawled, chair kicked half a step back as if he’s a guest in the building rather than the reason it exists. His bag thumps to the floor. He props his chin on his hand like he’s already bored. This is ritual; the room expects him to perform it.
Only this morning, ritual has a gap in it.
Suguru’s desk — two to the left, perfectly aligned, always annoyingly neat — stares at him like an empty mouth. There is no half-read book spine bent open. No pen cap worried between teeth. No lazy, sideways glance that says are you done being a clown? There’s only the wooden grain polished flat by years of elbows, a surface too clean to belong to anyone alive.
The clan drilled into him: The Six Eyes is above. Bow to no one. Need no one. He repeats it under his breath like a psalm whenever his chest threatens to misbehave. But the desk makes a liar of him.
Shoko throws her coat over the back of her chair and sits without comment. Her hair is tied up in a loose knot that looks like it was stolen from sleep. She’s balancing a thermos in one hand, phone in the other, cigarette pack half-visible in her pocket even though she’s supposed to keep them hidden. Her whole body says, don’t start with me.
He starts anyway. “Mornin’, Sho. Dream of me again?”
She doesn’t even look up. “Nightmare, more like.”
Normally Suguru would smirk at that, a silent you walked into that one, dumbass. Satoru waits for it and gets nothing. He covers the silence with a grin that’s brighter than it needs to be.
The desk keeps being empty.
Yaga clears his throat, the sound like furniture shifting. He scrawls something across the board about curse dispersion ratios, something Satoru doesn’t need because numbers have always come to him like second language. He lets the words skate past his ears and pretends distraction is a choice.
Shoko is actually taking notes. Her handwriting is lazy but legible, strokes trailing like smoke. Every now and then she blows air out of the corner of her mouth to move a loose strand of hair. The movement is so ordinary it almost hurts.
Satoru slouches deeper in his chair. His sunglasses slide down his nose; he leaves them there. If anyone asks, it’s because he’s too cool to care. If anyone looked close, they’d see he’s half-hiding the way his eyes keep snagging on the empty space two desks over.
Suguru should be here. Arms folded. Foot tapping in that way that means he’s working through an idea he won’t say out loud until it’s perfect. Shoulder loose against the chair back, head turned just enough that his hair would catch light. Suguru should be here to intercept the stupid things Satoru says before they get too sharp. Should be here to give him that look, half-patient, half-daring him to try harder.
Instead there’s a rectangle of absence where all of that should live.
Yaga keeps talking. Something about classification protocols, about reports, about the need to document. His voice makes Satoru think of forms stacked on desks, ink drying in neat lines, the kind of busywork that used to drive Suguru insane.
The thought almost makes him laugh. He bites it back before it can turn into sound. The silence it leaves behind feels like glass in his throat.
When the bell finally releases them, Shoko caps her pen, tucks it behind her ear, and stands. She looks at him for the first time all morning. Not long. Just enough that her eyes say what her mouth won’t: you look like shit.
He stretches, exaggerated, arms thrown wide like he’s trying to convince the air he owns it. “Don’t tell me you’re worried about me, Shoko. You’ll ruin your reputation.”
She adjusts her coat. “Don’t flatter yourself. You look insufferable as always.”
Normally Suguru would roll his eyes, tell them both to shut up. Normally there’d be balance. Instead, Satoru slings his bag over his shoulder first. Too fast, too casual, sunglasses tilted just enough to pass for arrogance instead of retreat.
By the time she finds him in the courtyard, he’s on the steps arguing with legs that don’t want to move.
The sun has dragged itself higher, sharp and pale.
Shoko doesn’t look at him when she drops down beside him.
“You could at least wait until you light it,” he says, nodding at the cigarette dangling between her fingers.
“Maybe I like the idea more than the taste,” she says. Her voice is flat as paper.
He tilts his head back, lets the sky press against his face. Infinity hums low under his skin, an engine he can’t switch off. Every breath tastes metallic.
He wants to ask the question that’s been living behind his teeth since the night Suguru walked away. Where is he? Did he say anything to you? Does he miss me like I—
He doesn’t.
Instead he says, “You think Yaga knows half the shit he writes on the board?”
Shoko exhales smoke that doesn’t exist. “Better question: you think you’re fooling anyone?”
His grin falters, then recovers. “Fooling? Shoko, I’m dazzling. I’m un-fool-able.”
She flicks ash that isn’t there. “Sure. Keep telling yourself that.”
They sit in silence long enough for the courtyard to empty. Long enough for the weight in his chest to become unbearable.
He almost says it then — I can’t stand the empty desk. I don’t know who I am if he’s not sitting there. I can hear that he’s not in his room. Did you know he forgot a sock under the mattress? The words build behind his teeth like pressure. He swallows them with a laugh instead.
“Let’s ditch,” he says. “I’ll buy you ramen. Consider it payment for suffering through class alone with me.”
Shoko doesn’t argue. She never does when the alternative is silence.
The ramen stand smells like broth and oil, like the kind of comfort that doesn’t ask questions. Satoru orders too much, as always, piling the table high with bowls and plates he knows he won’t finish. Shoko just raises an eyebrow and steals the egg out of his bowl.
“Thief,” he says, mock-wounded.
“You weren’t gonna eat it.”
“Still. Principle of the thing.”
Normally Suguru would be here too, elbow on the counter, teasing both of them until Shoko threatened to throw chopsticks. Normally Satoru would shove half a dumpling in Suguru’s mouth just to hear him complain about manners. Normally the table would feel too small for all their noise.
Instead it’s just him and Shoko, the silence between them filled with the sound of clattering bowls and the vendor’s radio.
He tries to fill it anyway. Jokes louder than he needs to. Stories exaggerated past truth. He laughs at his own punchlines because someone has to.
Shoko lets him. She doesn’t encourage, doesn’t discourage. Just listens, her chopsticks moving slow, her expression giving nothing away.
Halfway through the meal, she says quietly, “You know you don’t have to perform, right?”
He almost drops his chopsticks. “Perform? This is me, baby. Pure, unfiltered charisma.”
Her eyes flick toward him, sharp and tired. “You’re allowed to miss him.”
He laughs like she told the world’s funniest joke. “Tch, Sho. I’m Gojo Satoru, baby. Untouchable. Unshakable. Thriving.”
She looks at him for a long moment, then says nothing. Somehow, the silence is louder than his laugh.
“I miss him, too,” she adds later, her chopsticks stopping halfway to her mouth. “But this is good for him, Satoru.”
The words hit like a curse. He looks away, grinning too wide, eyes hidden behind glass. He pretends they don’t sting.
The thing about missions is they don’t wait for you to get your shit together.
Dispatch pings his phone before breakfast. Again during lunch. Again while he’s halfway back from the last job, sneakers still wet with curse guts. Someone else would’ve passed a few of them off, let the younger years cut their teeth. Someone else would’ve slept.
Satoru doesn’t pass anything off.
The missions stack up like ribs in a cage, and he walks into every single one grinning like it’s a punchline only he gets. He takes the exorcisms no one else wants — the ones with bodies left for days, the ones with families sobbing on thresholds, the ones where you’re lucky if the blood’s already dry. It’s not that he needs to, exactly. It’s that the quiet between jobs has started to feel like drowning.
It’s easier to move.
The Six Eyes is above. Bow to no one. Need no one.
He repeats it every time his lungs start clawing for something softer. The clan drilled it into his bones so deep he doesn’t even have to think the words anymore — they’re a hum under the skin, a reflex like breath.
Except every fight keeps pulling him sideways anyway.
The first mission of the week is an old apartment complex with a stairwell that smells like mold and bleach fighting for custody. A curse’s spine coils through the stair rails like bad ivy, swallowing the air thick. Satoru hums tunelessly under his breath, just loud enough to hear himself over the whisper-crawl of cursed energy.
“Peek-a-boo,” he says, stepping onto the landing. His voice echoes. The curse lunges, all black teeth and heat.
Infinity hums awake on instinct, a soft drag of air where the world stops just shy of touching him. He doesn’t even need to think about it — his body’s already a fortress. He laughs, sharp and clean, lets it ring against the cracked tiles until the thing shrieks. He slices through it with a lazy flick of blue and barely watches it scatter.
“You’re welcome,” he mutters to nobody on the way down, tossing a casual salute at the landlord’s bowed head.
By Wednesday, his knuckles ache from clenching his fists too long, but the grin hasn’t slipped once.
The next curse isn’t even worth the paperwork — a half-formed thing hunched under a bridge, skin like melted wax, keening as if it knows it shouldn’t exist. It takes less than five seconds to erase it. He lingers anyway, crouching at the edge of the canal, letting his eyes track the scum-slick water until it blurs.
It was Riko’s laugh that day, right before she died — high, bright, ringing like wet glass. He blinks, hard. The sound doesn’t leave.
The Six Eyes is above. Bow to no one. Need no one.
He thinks it again, sharper this time, until it drowns her out.
Thursday’s curse nearly gets him.
It shouldn’t. He’s the strongest. He knows this like he knows his own name, like he knows the shape of his shadow in any light. But halfway through the fight — a special grade lurking in an abandoned tram yard, all ribs and whispers and too many eyes — something splits open in his head without warning.
For a second it’s not this curse in front of him.
It’s Toji.
Knife flashing.
Suguru shouting his name.
Blood sliding slick between his fingers like it was never going to stop.
He freezes.
The curse catches him across the ribs before Infinity shoves the world back where it belongs. He exhales, ragged, doubles over laughing too hard and too loud until his throat burns.
“You almost had me,” he pants, wiping spit from his mouth with the heel of his palm. “Man, wouldn’t that have been embarrassing?”
He erases it in a single strike, no witnesses but his own echo.
Later, he presses a hand to his side and feels blood drying under his uniform where RCT hasn’t quite caught up yet. The ache is deep enough to make him want to sit down, so he doesn’t. He walks home instead. Fast.
By Friday, the jokes come easier than breathing.
“Not my type,” he says to a curse made of centipede legs and teeth, dodging blows without moving an inch.
“Sorry, pal, but you’re ugly enough to haunt yourself,” he tells another before flattening it with red.
He doesn’t have to mean the jokes. That’s the point.
Shoko texts him twice, a clipped “slow down, idiot” and then “don’t make me patch you together.” He leaves them on read.
He starts laughing mid-fight just to hear the sound. If he keeps it loud enough, he doesn’t notice how close Infinity hums to his skin now, restless as a migraine. He can’t remember the last time he turned it off completely.
Somewhere between one breath and the next, he realizes he hasn’t thought about sleeping in two days. It would mean stopping. It would mean quiet.
He doesn’t stop.
The Six Eyes is above. Bow to no one. Need no one.
He says it so often it stops sounding like words. It’s a beat under his skin, a percussion that drowns out everything else, even the memory of Suguru’s voice calling his name.
But every fight reminds him anyway.
Suguru used to tease him mid-mission, leaning on his staff like the whole world was moving too slow.
“Show-off,” he’d say when Satoru used blue for something a flick would’ve handled. And Satoru would laugh because it was true.
Now he overkills because no one’s there to tell him not to.
By Saturday night, the missions have bled into each other — one endless hallway lined with teeth, every door opening into something that needs to die. He lies on his bed fully dressed, glasses tossed somewhere on the floor, the phone buzzing again with another ping he won’t ignore.
The ceiling hums faintly with Infinity, as if the air itself is refusing him. His body aches but won’t let him rest.
He stares at the cracks in the plaster until they blur and splits Suguru’s name into the silence like a secret.
It doesn’t sound like his voice anymore.
The dorm door shuts behind him with a click too final for a place that isn’t home. His uniform is still damp where blood steamed through and got washed out by rain, or maybe it was just curse runoff, or maybe it was his—he doesn’t check. He toes his shoes off, doesn’t bother lining them up, lets his jacket collapse on the floor.
The bathroom tiles are cold enough to sting when he steps in bare.
Infinity hums at once, reflexive, a sheath between him and the world before his brain can even catch the thought. He strips off the rest of his clothes anyway, piles them into the corner like something he doesn’t owe. The mirror fogs too early from the heat of the room. He doesn’t look at it.
He turns the shower on. Water threads down in silver ropes, steady, unbothered. He puts one hand out to test it. It beads and skates off the invisible skin of Infinity. Doesn’t even make it close.
He exhales sharp through his nose. “Not funny.”
He steps under the shower and tries again. Same result. A glimmer of water held away from his body like he’s a saint in a cheap painting.
He sighs — too sharp to be tired, too soft to be angry.
It isn’t control. His cursed energy obeys him like breath. It’s his body that won’t listen — wired too deep, refusing to let him be soft, bare, touchable. He thinks of Toji’s knife splitting him open like wet paper, of lungs forgetting air, of Suguru’s voice breaking as he screamed his name. The memory is muscle-deep.
He drags a hand down his face, presses his fingertips hard into the corners of his eyes until colors bloom. He blinks them open and presses his head against the wall. The tiles are cold, clinical. Water spatters against the shield and slides away. His jaw aches from the clench he didn’t notice.
“Off,” he mutters, and the field collapses around him like a held breath.
Infinity recedes with a shiver. He counts down from three.
Three. Two. One.
The water hits him.
And he flinches like he’s been cut open all over again. Cold-hot, sharp as teeth, so wrongly loud in his ears. His lungs seize, his breath claws shallow. He shoves his eyes shut and forces them open again, blinking against the blur. His ribs clamp around nothing; he can’t get a full inhale past the reflex screaming at him to put the barrier back up.
You’re fine, he tells himself, but the thought doesn’t stick.
The bathroom tiles swim, edges bending, and suddenly there’s blood on them — Riko’s. No, Toji’s. No, his. It runs toward the drain in threads too thin to be real and he blinks hard enough to shake them loose.
His chest heaves.
It would be so easy to let Infinity snap back on and never feel anything again.
He grips the edge of the tile wall instead, breath shuddering shallow, and forces himself through it.
“Stop it,” he mutters, too sharp, too loud. “You’re here. You’re fine. You’re Gojo Satoru.”
It’s what Shoko told him once, the grounding trick. Say where you are. Say you’re safe. Put it in the air so it feels real.
Water hits his shoulders, scalding now, running down his spine in rivulets that feel like knives tracing seams he didn’t consent to. His fingers twitch against the tile.
“You’re here,” he says out loud, hoarse and unsteady. “You’re fine.”
He swallows, tastes metal.
“You’re Gojo Satoru.”
The words should root him. They don’t.
Instead, the thought blooms uninvited, quiet and merciless: Are you Gojo Satoru because you’re the strongest, or are you the strongest because you’re Gojo Satoru?
He freezes, breath snagging mid-rib. The question wasn’t Suguru’s, but it might as well have been. It’s written in the space Suguru left behind, in the fight they never finished, in the silence where an answer should be.
His stomach flips. His throat locks. He tries to swallow and can’t.
The water is too much. Too heavy. Every drop a weight he can’t bear. He slaps the handle off so hard it squeals. The spray cuts, silence collapsing fast around him.
He doesn’t dry his hair. Doesn’t move for a moment, water dripping down his chin, his chest, pooling at his feet until the grout lines vanish. The steam thickens and he stands in the middle of it, caught between weightlessness and gravity.
Eventually, he walks out still dripping, leaving a dark trail across the floor.
He doesn’t bother with clothes. Collapses onto his unmade bed, damp hair soaking the pillowcase, the air cold on his bare arms. Infinity hums back on without him asking, wrapping the room in a thin, electric hush.
The mantra presses against the inside of his skull, louder than the radiator, louder than the dripping.
The Six Eyes is above. Bow to no one. Need no one.
And yet, beneath it, a softer truth claws for air: the shower didn’t wash anything off. Not the blood nor the question.
The first thing Suguru notices back home is how loud quiet can be. He can’t believe he forgot about that. Maybe it’s the years of having a room beside Satoru that makes him so uneasy with the sound of silence.
Morning breathes against the shoji like it’s been holding its lungs for years. Crows perch along the power lines outside the gate, fat from an easy winter, their weight bending the wires into a low, humming arc. The damp air tastes like rain on old stone. Even the tatami holds a thin undercurrent of incense and time, like the scent has been steeping here since before he was born.
He thought returning would mean familiarity. Instead, it presses like a shirt he outgrew years ago, fabric too tight under the arms.
He rolls the grocery list between his fingers until it softens at the edges. He hates that he still recognizes his mother’s handwriting — the neat, polite tilt of each kanji, drawn like art. He shoves the note into his pocket before stepping into the street.
The market’s already busy by the time he gets there. Old women haggle over daikon in bright patterned aprons, voices sharp as gulls. A man slices fish with neat, efficient movements, his hands so steady they might as well belong to another era.
Suguru moves between them like a ghost, basket swinging at his side, shoulders loose, expression blank. He knows how to pass unnoticed, even when he never really does.
Burdock root. Shoyu. Mackerel. Dried shiitake for soup. His hands move automatically, muscle memory from a childhood he didn’t ask to return to. He pauses by a crate of apples, thumb brushing over the waxed red skin. Places it back. Moves on.
A small boy darts between aisles chasing a runaway top. He skids on the stone, knees knocking, laughter spilling out in breathless, uneven bursts. Suguru watches for a moment too long — a hand reflexively half-lifting, like he might steady him — before he remembers himself and turns away.
The grocer bags his things with an easy smile.
“Your mother’s lucky to have you back,” she says, passing him the receipt with both hands, voice soft and certain, like she knows what that should mean.
He nods, returns the courtesy, says nothing. Leaves.
On the way home, he takes the long route and regrets it.
Because the long route passes the old neighborhood dojo.
The gate is the same iron he used to trail his hand along as a child. The yard still smells of polished wood and sweat. But what stops him cold is the sign hanging crooked on the gate, the brushstrokes fresh and careful:
“Assistant Instructor Wanted — Children’s Classes.”
Suguru stops.
The characters are brushed carefully, the kind of strokes done by someone who practiced them over and over until they looked effortless.
Through the window, he catches sight of the floorboards gleaming like honey. A handful of kids tumble through drills, their gis slipping loose, laughter tripping over itself.
One boy misses a step and lands flat. Another reaches out a hand before the sensei can move. Suguru watches the little hand pull the other up, fingers sticky with effort, and something in his chest folds in on itself.
He almost turns to make some dry comment to Satoru — look, they’re better at teamwork than we ever were — before he remembers there’s no one beside him to hear it. His jaw sets.
He forces himself to keep walking, fists are balled so tight around the grocery bag handles that the plastic has left clean red crescents in his palms.
Three streets later, he realizes he’s still thinking about the sign.
The house smells the same as it always has.
His mother is wiping the kitchen counter with sleeves rolled up, humming under her breath. His father sits cross-legged in the corner, glasses sliding low on his nose as he sorts through the day’s mail, brows drawn in that way they always are when he’s concentrating. The creak in the hallway floorboard still gives Suguru away before he steps into view.
His mother looks up immediately, smile blooming warm as summer. “Ah, you’re back! Thank you, sweetheart.”
His father glances up over the rims of his glasses, the edges of his mouth tugging into something softer than his usual reserve. “Found everything?”
Suguru sets the groceries down where he used to drop his schoolbag as a kid, nodding. “Yeah.”
“Good. Come sit for a minute.” His father gestures to the table without looking up from the envelopes, like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
His mother’s hand cups his elbow as she takes the bags from him, the touch light, familiar, grounding. She moves easily around him, busy unpacking mackerel and burdock root, filling the space with her quiet competence.
He washes his hands at the sink, lets the warm water run longer than necessary just to feel it. The kitchen hums around him with small, steady sounds — knife on cutting board, envelopes shuffling, a kettle beginning to murmur on the stove.
This house loves him in a way he had almost forgotten, and yet, standing there, he feels heavier than he did outside.
He pulls a chair out when his father gestures again, sits with his elbows braced on his knees. His parents fill the room without trying, soft in a way that aches if he looks too closely. There’s no judgment here, no orders, no weight of expectation. Just love, simple and unspoken, woven into every movement.
And still, Suguru feels the silence stretching inside himself, untouched by it.
He wants to tell them things they wouldn’t understand: how curses are born, how sorcerers die young, how the system wrings you dry and calls it service. He wants to tell them how his best friend doesn’t sit beside him anymore, how he wakes up some nights with Riko’s blood still under his fingernails in dreams.
Instead, he thanks his mother when she hands him a plate of sliced persimmon. Lets the sweetness sit heavy on his tongue. Smiles when his father tells him the neighbor’s son finally got into university.
The words come easily, automatic. He’s always been good at making himself sound whole.
But when he slips away to his old room later, the weight follows him inside.
There’s a new message on his phone when he sits down: a video from Mimiko and Nanako.
It’s filmed vertically, shaking like they’re fighting over who gets to hold the phone. Konbu the cat is in frame for maybe three seconds before bolting, tail flagging indignantly. Mimiko squeals; Nanako laughs so hard she drops the device, and the last shot is nothing but an unflattering close-up of tatami.
Suguru laughs before he can stop himself. The sound startles him. It feels like it belongs to someone else entirely.
He watches the clip three more times, just to be sure it was real.
The next morning, he senses the curse before he sees it.
It’s small — barely more than a stain of malice clinging to the edges of the neighborhood playground where he used to walk as a kid. The thing hovers near the slide, twitchy and unfocused, feeding off children’s scraped knees and bruised egos. Weak. Harmless, almost. He considers ignoring it.
Then he sees her.
A little girl stumbles down the slide, giggling, her mother waiting at the bottom with outstretched arms. On the bench nearby, an older woman sits cross-legged with a laundry basket beside her, hands pressed together in a quiet, nervous prayer. A Window. Her gaze keeps flicking to the curse, jaw tight, eyes bright with the kind of awareness ordinary people don’t have.
Suguru sighs, presses his thumb to his temple, and lets his technique unfold. One simple move, a ripple of cursed energy, and the thing dissolves into harmless air.
He’s halfway past the gate when the woman calls softly after him.
“Thank you.”
He stops, turns. She’s balancing the basket of folded laundry against her hip, bowing slightly. Her voice is quiet but steady — no fear, just recognition.
She bows low, the basket tilting dangerously as she does.
“We’ve been worries lately,” she says, voice steady despite the weight in it. “We’ve all felt something here the past week. The children were starting to have nightmares.”
He freezes for a fraction of a breath too long. Inclines his head just enough to acknowledge her. Keeps walking without a word.
Her gratitude lands anyway. Lodges under his ribs like splintered wood.
He wonders if Satoru would’ve laughed at him for letting two words matter this much. He almost laughs himself — but it catches, dry, and doesn’t make it past his teeth.
It shouldn’t matter.
Ordinary people will never understand what sorcerers give up for them. He’s spent years watching jujutsu society chew children up and spit them out, logged in ledgers, buried in training whites, while the world carries on untouched. He knows exactly how disposable he is.
But the thank you sticks anyway.
Just like Mimiko and Nanako’s video sticks. Just like the crooked dojo sign does, lodged somewhere behind his ribs.
He tells himself staying angry is cleaner. Easier. That there’s nothing left worth saving, nothing left worth softening for.
And yet —
That night, lying in his childhood room beneath the faint pattern of clouds on the curtains, the quiet presses against him like a weight. He scrolls through his phone until the screen dims itself to sleep, then stares into the dark, watching the afterimage of the dojo sign burn behind his eyelids.
He turns onto his side, curling toward the wall, and can’t shake the sound of her voice: Thank you.
Two words. Light as breath.
But they sit in him heavier than curses, heavier than death.
He wishes he could forget it. Wishes he didn’t care enough for it to matter.
He doesn’t know what scares him more: that he can’t forgive the world, or that part of him still wants to.
Notes:
why must i hurt them so? why is it also like... fun to hurt them so? 🙈
did you see what i did there? did you? did you??
they're both so so stupid your honor. i said this was a fix-it, not that it's fluffy 🤷♀️thanks for reading, as always!! kudos, comments, or whatever you decide to leave is always appreciated <3 its so much fun sharing this with y'all, and even more fun when i get a peek into everyone's thoughts!!
Chapter 4: how much distance breaks a body
Summary:
A body folds under its own weight; another builds balance from small hands and gardens.
Notes:
this chapter is brought to you by your needs, my needs by noah kahan and machine by amber run. it's a little longer than the usual ones but believe it or not, it was gonna be double the length until i realised i can cut it off where i did.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Jujutsu headquarters keeps it cold indoors all year.
The corridor to the council chamber is polished to a shine that remembers every heel. Camellia oil and antique paper—someone has wiped the screens until the wood has no fingerprints left to hold. When Satoru steps out of his shoes, the tatami gives him nothing back. No creak, no complaint. Just a surface that has decided it will outlast every boy who dares to stand on it.
The room itself is simple the way altars are simple: emptiness doing the heavy lifting. Shoji screens line the far wall in a neat row, light seeping through them like a correction. The elders sit behind them, silhouettes careful as brushwork, voices already waiting in the hush. Yaga stands square in the center, ready to argue. Ledger tucked under one arm; a stamp he didn’t ask to carry.
“Masamichi Yaga,” says a voice that has been old longer than he’s been alive, reed-dry, ritual-sharp. “You have lost control of your students.”
Satoru does not sit. He tips his sunglasses down his nose the way the room expects and leans his shoulder to the pillar like he owns the wood. Infinity hums low at his skin, a second breath. He watches Yaga’s jaw notch once, then smooth. The man swallows whatever he meant to say first and chooses the one the screens will tolerate.
“Geto Suguru is on leave,” Yaga says. “Medical. Authorized by Ieiri Shoko. He requires time.”
“A special grade on ‘leave’ without escort.” Another voice, colder—paper cutting a finger. “Unmonitored. Unaligned. He is not of a main house. He is not restrained by clan obligation.”
“Curse Manipulation,” a third voice adds, savoring the syllables like saying the name is proof of guilt. “An ingestion technique capable of unchecked growth. A risk to the public. He has already absented himself from campus and contact.”
“Rogue behavior,” says the first, patient as a kettle coming to boil. “We propose designation.”
The word hangs behind the paper like a blade laid on cloth: traitor.
Yaga’s hands don’t move. “He is a child.”
“He is a weapon,” the paper says back, almost kind. “Your failure to sheath him is noted.”
Satoru laughs once under his breath, sharp as a chip of glass. It makes three of the silhouettes pause. He can feel Yaga not looking at him like a hand on his shoulder. He ignores it.
“You will present him for containment,” says another—legalistic, the voice of a man who files everything. “Pending evaluation, motion to label Geto Suguru a threat to the stability of the school and society at large.”
“Containment,” Yaga repeats. The word is too big in his mouth.
A soft, collective breath behind the paper. “We would protect the many from the one.”
He has let them talk long enough to make his teeth itch.
Satoru peels himself off the pillar and steps into the round of empty floor like he’s stepping into a ring. He keeps his voice easy, friendly as a knife you forgot was sharp.
“Quick question,” he says, bright. “Which of you has came back from missions exhausted because you spent all afternoon swallowing the worst parts of the world? Which of you, oh wise and creaking, went to that village where they put children, sorcerer children you claim to care about, in cages and told them no?”
“Gojo—” an elder begins, weary, warning, prayer.
“No, really.” He grins wider. It feels like splitting. “Because I’m trying to remember if any of you were there for any of that. I must’ve missed you behind the shoji.”
“Watch your tone.”
“I am watching,” Satoru says, even brighter. “I’m watching you dress up a boy’s breakdown in those pretty administrative words you love—containment, designation, stability—because it punctures your neat little world that he didn’t die on schedule or behave politely enough while he was breaking.”
Silhouettes shift. The paper keeps their faces holy and safe. Only their hands betray them: a sleeve edge that wavers; a fingertip that taps once against an armrest and stills.
“Special grades are not afforded the latitude of lesser sorcerers,” the clerical voice says. “The risk—”
“—was cultivated by you.” Satoru’s smile stays. He can hear Shoko in his ear telling him to breathe. He does not obey. “You took a kid who could hear the worst of humanity and told him that was holy work. You burned him down to bone and called that service. And now that he’s stepped away to keep himself from dying the kind of death that’s useful to you, you want to stamp traitor on his forehead so you don’t have to ask if maybe the system is the problem.”
Yaga’s head turns a fraction, enough to mean easy , enough to mean don’t make yourself the crucible . He doesn’t say it out loud. He doesn’t have to. Satoru keeps going because stopping now would kill him faster than any knife has managed yet.
“You want to talk dangerous techniques?” Satoru asks, lighter now, almost joking. He flicks a hand and lets the air hum at his wrist. The room does not breathe. “I am a walking calamity with a smile. You have never once asked if I’m sleeping before you send me to undo your messes. You call it duty when I break myself into something that can be used.”
He steps closer until his reflection ghosts the white of the screens. If he pressed his palm flat, he could make a hand-print in light and nothing else.
“If the only way you know how to keep someone alive is to brand him a criminal the first time he stops moving exactly how you like,” he says, calm now, clean as bone, “what good are you?”
“Gojo Satoru,” says the oldest voice, patient, patient. “You are out of line.”
“Lines are for people who need help standing up.” The joke lands like a dropped dish. “Lucky for me, I was told since I was born that I don’t need anyone. Don’t you know? The Six Eyes is above.” He tilts his head toward the ceiling. “I bow to no one.” He almost laughs at how small his voice sounds in his own ears when he says it.
“Enough.”
He obliges. He lets the grin soften until it isn’t anything at all. He lets the hum under his skin settle to something a room can ignore. When he speaks again, he pitches it like a compromise, knowing exactly where the cut will be.
“What do you even need him for anyway?” he asks, gentle. “You’ve got me.”
Silence as efficient as a stamp. The paper eats their faces whole.
Yaga breathes out through his nose, a sound so soft a normal room wouldn’t hear it. This room hears everything. The screens do not consult each other; they do not lean for comfort. They simply bend the world back into the shape they prefer.
“Motion to designate is tabled,” says the clerk, as if he invented mercy. “Pending further observation. The student’s absence will be recorded as unauthorized leave. Ieiri will submit updated medical documentation for review.”
“Yaga,” says the oldest voice, “you will keep your school in order.”
Yaga bows, precise. “My school is my students.”
No one answers that. Of course they don’t.
The meeting dissolves the way ceremonies do when no one wants to be caught in the light of what they almost did. Papers. A stamp. The clean slide of a door. The tatami receives them all without comment.
Satoru does not bow. He has performed enough worship for one morning. He pivots on his heel and lets the corridor swallow him, shoulder banged once against a beam to prove the building can still touch him. It does. No bruise will flower later; Infinity is always cloaking him even from angry clumsiness.
Yaga’s footsteps are the kind gravity respects. They find him half a bend down, where a window gives the garden a rectangular permission to be seen. Summer clings to the air. Somewhere a bell counts time like a pen ticking against a desk.
“Gojo,” Yaga says.
Satoru tilts his head without looking. “Sensei.”
“You were reckless in there.”
“Thank you,” Satoru says with a grin, because if he doesn’t turn everything into a bit he is going to sit down on the floor and let whatever is inside his chest do whatever it has been threatening to do for days.
Yaga lets the silence stand long enough to dry out. He looks at Satoru the way he looks at broken things he plans to fix whether or not they consent.
“You won him a reprieve,” he says. “But you gave them something they wanted.”
Satoru finally looks. Yaga’s face is carved out of stubbornness and sleep debt and a love he would never dignify with the name. It is not a forgiving face. It is a loyal one.
“What, the monologue?” Satoru asks. “I thought it was one of my better ones.”
“You offered yourself up as the machine,” Yaga says, not unkindly. “You told them they don’t need him. You told them one tool is enough.”
Satoru’s grin turns sharp, then sets. “They already thought that.”
“They think easier now.” Yaga’s voice softens in the way mountains do when the light goes gray. “You defended him with your mouth and stupid bravado, and I’m grateful for that. I am. But you built a different kind of cage than the one you left when you left your clan.”
The window holds a tree. The tree has mastered being a shape that does not break when rain insists. Satoru wants to climb into the glass and be a season instead of a person. Satoru doesn’t bring up that Yaga hadn’t filed Suguru’s withdrawal yet.
“What would you have had me say?” His voice comes out normal. He is too tired to be impressed by it. “They were tasting the word traitor. I made them spit it out.”
“I would have had you say nothing that gave them permission to forget him,” Yaga says. “I would have had you say, ‘We’re both Yaga’s students so he’ll deal with us,’ and then I would have swallowed my own tongue so I didn’t ruin the moment.”
Satoru laughs, for real this time. It sounds like it belongs to someone standing somewhere warm.
“They already forget what doesn’t sit behind a family crest,” he says. He pushes his sunglasses up with one finger. “You know that.”
“I know,” Yaga says. “And still.”
And still.
Satoru checks his pocket for a phone he doesn’t remember putting there. The screen is a clean sheet of nothing. No messages that count, just the quiet landscape of a day that will ask him to be the strongest again and then pretend it never did.
“Will you tell him?” Yaga asks.
“That I threw myself at a wall for him?” Satoru smirks. “He’ll just be annoyed he didn’t get to watch.”
Yaga’s mouth does the small thing it does when he’s trying not to be fond. Then the humor leaves his eyes and the teacher stands where the man was.
“Don’t make a habit of offering to be enough,” he says. “They’ll take you at your word. You are Gojo.”
Satoru wants to say I am enough and it is killing me . He wants to say I am not enough and it is killing him . He says none of it. He leans a hip to the sill and squints at the sun as if he can make it confess to a kinder fall.
“What do you need from me right now, sensei?” he asks lightly, because the only way out is forward and the only way forward is pretending he isn’t already walking with a hole where something important used to be.
“Go to class,” Yaga says. “Let Ieiri look at you even when you don’t think you need looking at. Don’t take every mission they send just because you can.”
“Mm,” Satoru says. “One out of three.”
Yaga sighs in a register that could sand wood. “You’re not made to be reasonable.”
“I am made to be useful,” Satoru says, and hates how easy the sentence is in his mouth. He pushes off the sill. The phantom bruise on his shoulder complains; the rest of him does not.
“Gojo.”
He stops. Yaga is not looking at him. He is looking at the garden like it owes him an apology.
“I’m proud of you,” Yaga says, as if the words are contraband he could lose his job for carrying. “And I am terrified by you.”
Satoru swallows around the thing that tries to be an answer and settles for the only worship he can stomach today. He bows, quick, shallow—disrespectful to the building, perfect to the man.
He walks the corridor back out into the kind of air that adds your breath into the humidity and suffocates all. Headquarters shuts behind him like a mouth remembering it doesn’t have to speak. He stands on the stone for a breath too long, sunglasses in his hand, eyes doing their merciless accounting. The win sits in his chest like a piece of metal he forgot to remove, heavy, cold, catching the light.
He got them to drop the word. He pulled the blade back behind the paper.
He told them he would be enough.
He feels—hollow isn’t the word. Hollow can be filled. This is the aftermath of a bell: the air remembering it was struck. He’s ringing. He’s the quiet after.
He tucks the sunglasses back on, unbuttons his collar against the summer heat, and steps off the temple stone like he’s a person and not a promise. The day opens its palm, full of work. He offers it his throat.
Suguru’s hometown wakes like steam lifting off freshly cooked rice.
Morning threads itself through the house in thin, useful lines: the click of a gas knob; feet in the corridor making the kind of sound that doesn’t rouse anyone who isn’t supposed to be awake yet; wind slipping a shoulder through the gap in the window and then deciding not to pry.
His father is already outside in a hat with the brim battered into obedience, knees dark with soil and patient intent. The carnations by the kitchen window look like they were made out of someone’s idea of celebration; the tulip bed is only a bed for now, a rectangle of belief laid down in reasonable weather. The garden hums a small, unshowy hymn: earth taking a breath, water deciding where to gather, birds changing their minds midflight and committing to the new plan.
Color has returned to Suguru’s face without asking permission. He sees it in the mirror and doesn’t trust it until it holds through breakfast. His mother sets chopsticks parallel without saying anything about the night he barely slept last week because he kept tasting wire at the back of his tongue. She has a way of arranging bowls that turns a table into proof: this is where you live; this is what you are meant to do; this is how a day begins when the day is yours to begin.
“You’re up early,” she says, which is mother for I counted your breaths while you were asleep and they were too shallow.
“The sun was loud,” he says. It was. Cicadas have woken. Even the light is a chorus.
She pours chamomille tea anyway, in case the loudness was a different kind. When he reaches for the miso, his hand is steady. When he swallows, nothing kicks. He catalogs these ordinary miracles without ceremony because ceremony is what got him here; he will accept ordinary like a man stepping into shade.
Outside, his father is kneeling with the gravity of a prayer someone taught him before his bones knew what to do with it. Carnations crowd his hands without apology. He’s laid a line of bamboo for a little windbreak, tied with twine soft as breath. It isn’t necessary. He’s doing it because his wife likes to watch the flowers from the kitchen while she’s boiling water. Because she once said, offhand, that it makes bitter tea kinder to look through color.
“Too hot already,” his father announces to the dirt, then, to Suguru: “You’re good for hauling. The bags lied to me about their own weight.”
“They all do,” Suguru says, stepping into the garden in his socks like a boy who was warned and ignored it and matured into a person who can’t tell the plants from the rules.
He doesn’t talk about curses here. His father doesn’t ask. They discuss the outrage of slugs. They debate whether the mulch is performing its duties or merely napping. They move soil the way two people move a piano: listening, lifting, placing, checking the floor for weaknesses. When they’re finished, his father leans back on his heels and squints at the window as if he can see his wife standing there later, making a face at a kettle then the window, and he smiles like a man who has met proof in the wild.
“You’re ridiculous,” Suguru tells him, because love dressed up in errands embarrasses him enough to make him want to be mean to it.
“Correct,” his father says, wiping his forearm with the part of his shirt that will be mud until laundry forgives it. “We’re planting color where your mother can reach it. You use your talent your way; I use mine.”
His mother appears in the doorway with a damp cloth over her shoulder like she’s about to negotiate with the stain. “Don’t let him talk like he’s not prouder of these flowers than anything I’ve done in this house,” she says.
“I’m proud of many things,” his father replies. “These include: you, your mother; these plants; and today’s very competent clouds.”
Suguru’s mouth finds a shape it hasn’t held long enough: the start of a laugh that doesn’t have to bite something on the way out.
He still doesn’t trust people. Not as a category. The word has too many hands in it. He remembers a house with a cage in it and adults whose mouths made the shape of no until it became a rope.
He remembers prayers that sounded like threats and the way relief can smell like rot if you have to breathe it in long enough. The village isn’t innocent because it’s small. It’s smaller than its sins; that’s all.
But love keeps showing up disguised as cheap plastic and long afternoons. The man down the lane is on a ladder that should have been retired last year, pretending to fix a gutter while his daughter holds the bottom like a champion and corrects his balance with one finger when he leans west.
The aunt two doors over leaves a bowl of peeled tangerines on a sill like an apology she can’t say without laughing.
A teenager with a streak of bleach in his hair composes a text on the walk and somehow still manages to notice the toddler about to step into the road; he reaches out without looking and hooks a shirt collar, gentle as snagging a cloud.
Suguru hates mawkishness. He catalogues everything anyway, evidence that the world is more than what curses and ill intent told it to be. He keeps the ledger in the language his body understands: the hum behind his teeth lowering from siren to line; the sourness that used to live under his tongue receding like a tide that got bored. He doesn’t call it healing. He calls it a better frequency.
By the second week, someone from the old dojo knocks. The doorframe knows him; the threshold tries to grab his sock to keep him. It’s Fukuda-san, hair pulled back like a promise to herself, gi jacket thrown over a t-shirt with a faded fish on it.
“Your mother said you were pretending not to be bored,” she says without greeting. “Come be useful. The kids are overthrowing my government.”
“I don’t like children,” he says on instinct.
“They like you,” she says, which is a separate problem entirely. “One hour. They’re five to twelve. If one of them cries, I will mark it in a book and blame you.”
He goes. He tells himself it’s because his hands need work that doesn’t end with anyone writing a report. The floorboards of the dojo have been polished by decades of feet into a surface that prefers humility; they creak in the key of apology and then forgive you because you are small and trying. The air smells like clean sweat and wood that remembers rain.
The first class is a collection of nervous energy wrapped in belts that don’t believe in knots. A boy with a missing front tooth presents himself with the seriousness of an ambassador and then trips over his own enthusiasm. A girl with a very stern ponytail stares him down like a cat that has read his file.
“Line up,” Fukuda says, clapping once.
They don’t. They make a new geometry he hasn’t seen before, composed of diagonals and ambition. He finds himself grinning because their ineptitude is a kind of music.
He doesn’t teach them anything jujutsu would recognize. He teaches them how to make a fist that won’t break their hand. He teaches them how to land without asking the ground to hate them for it. He teaches them to let their knees be springs and to keep their eyes where they want their bodies to go.
He says, “Make your breath longer than your thought,” and has the momentary sick recognition that Shoko has said a version of that to him more times than he can count.
A child named Riko (different Riko; he tasted copper just seeing her name on the roster and then swallowed the taste because she’s here, she’s loud, she’s made of now) shouts, “Watch this!” and stumbles into a cartwheel that is more statement than fact.
He says, “I saw it,” like a benediction, and shows her where to put her palms so her wrists don’t have to file a complaint. She tries again and doesn’t break; she looks astonished at her own ability to exist. He remembers that look from a hundred little faces who killed things for him before they lost their baby teeth.
He doesn’t let bitterness win the hour. There are phases to grief; there should be a phase where you are allowed to stand in a room with ten noisy bodies and admit that somebody should have let you be this useless for longer.
He is good at this. The realization makes him furious for a second—because it’s easy to be good this way and it was not easy to be good the other way. His anger arrives, does a circuit of the room, and then sits on the bench like a chaperone who’s decided to be respectful.
By the end of class they have decided he knows everything. He knows maybe four things and he knows how to keep them from hurting themselves with those four things. A little boy hands him a sticker that doesn’t stick. A very small person in purple socks who is not enrolled in the class but will not be persuaded to leave the mat toddles up with a plastic dinosaur and calls it Sensei. Fukuda pretends not to cry laughing.
“You’ll come back,” she says afterward, not a question.
“I have conditions,” he says.
“Name them.”
“Ventilation. Water breaks. No incense.”
“Done,” she says. “Also, I’m paying you.”
“No,” he says, ugly and quick.
“Yes,” she says. “Otherwise you’ll start feeling noble about it and I don’t have time to watch you martyr yourself in my doorway.”
He takes the envelope because arguing would turn it into ceremony and he is allergic. On his way out, a mother bows too low for his comfort and thanks him with both hands out like she’s returning someone else’s child. He nods and tries not to flinch. Gratitude is heavy. Joy is heavier. He will learn to carry both.
In the hour between classes, he sits on the edge of the engawa and watches heat make the road look like a trick. A boy in a baseball cap comes by with a dog that looks just like him. The dog is offended by everything except Suguru’s hand. He obliges it and pretends it isn’t medicine.
His phone buzzes.
A picture arrives: two girls making the worst castle you’ve ever seen out of cardboard, tape, and hope. In the center of the frame, a kitten has fallen asleep inside Shoko’s lab coat sleeve like a glove that forgot its purpose. Nanako has written KONBU 2 ❤️ in marker on the side of the castle and underlined it eight times with the forensic confidence of a person who refuses to be edited.
The caption is three words: he bit me. The heart at the end contradicts itself.
He calls. They fight each other to get the hello out first.
“We’re architects now,” Nanako announces. “Shoko-san says our building won’t pass inspection and we said who do you think you are, the mayor, and she said she is a doctor and we said that doesn’t make you the mayor and she said it makes her tired.”
Mimiko whispers confidentially, “He sleeps in the sink.”
“Do not let him,” he says.
“We won’t,” they lie.
“Do you have scratches?” he asks.
“Only where we’re alive,” Nanako says, smug.
Shoko’s voice floats in from somewhere out of frame: “Tell him to get over himself and send me pictures of the stupid flowers he’s pretending not to love.”
“Please inform your attending that her bedside manner is insupportable. She shouldn’t be rude in someone else’s house,” he says, and Nanako, delighted, repeats insupportable wrong three times until it becomes a poem.
“Come visit,” Mimiko says, quick, before her courage expires.
“Soon,” he says, and intends it the way people intend to be human the rest of the day.
He hangs up and watches the curve that phone calls carve through a body. The ache is cleaner than it was. Missing someone used to taste like knives. It tastes like want now, unarmed and honest. He presses the heel of his palm to his sternum anyway, because some habits are there for a reason.
At home, his mother has begun a campaign against lint. She’s set a chair by the window and mended his father’s hat with a stitch so small that thread forgets where it ends. She reaches up as he passes and makes him stand as she repairs a loose button on his shirt with the kind of attention you give a ritual—thoughtful, disproportional, saving something bigger than the object in your hands.
“You smell like wood polish,” she says.
“Children,” he corrects.
“Both,” she says. “Wash up. Your father is pretending to consult the weather but what he means is he wants you to come argue with him about where to put the watering can.”
He goes. They argue, politely, in the language of pointing. The can ends up where his mother would have chosen, because love has a vote and the house knows how to count.
He walks at dusk because dusk in a place like this is an instrument; it tunes you without consent. Between one alley and the next, night discovers itself. Moths appear with opinions about the porch lamp. An old neighbor sits on her step shelling edamame into a bowl the color of television static and listens to the radio with impossible focus. Someone practices the same bad riff on a guitar until it turns into a tolerable one.
At the edge of the irrigation channel, a little malice has collected. It’s the size of a pocket and the shape of a sulk. You could miss it if you didn’t know the smell of old fear when it dries. He stands over it until it gets uncomfortable and then suggests, with a nudge of intent, that it forget how to be.
Water passes as if someone taught it kindness. A man on a low stool a few meters away, smoking like he is paying rent to the night, lifts two fingers in a salute he doesn’t know is a salute. Suguru raises his hand back. He doesn’t want thanks for undoing what people make by accident. He wants them to stop making it. He knows they won’t. He knows he will keep bending the air anyway.
He still hates what he hates. Hates the way the higher-ups measure children like wood. Hates the part of himself that wants to light a match and ask the village if it can spell its own name after the fire. Hates the way he still uses the phrase non-sorcerers like the problem is taxonomy instead of appetite.
But he keeps seeing hands. They are always doing the slow work.
His father’s hands, blunted by tools and time, tying string around a stake so a stem doesn’t snap and pretend it broke itself.
His mother’s hands, knife and towel and pot lid, making the evening make sense.
Fukuda’s hands, smacking a mat in demonstration of how to fall without letting gravity get ideas.
Nanako’s hands, inked, fiercely placing a kitten where the sun lands on the floor at noon.
Mimiko’s hands, carefully not dropping the phone when she says please.
He dreams twice that week. In the first one, he is still running down a corridor that insists it’s a corridor even though it opens onto dirt. In the second, he is sitting on the dojo floor, and the room is full of children making excellent, terrible noise, and Satoru is leaning in the doorway trying to look unimpressed and failing.
He wakes up with heat in his face and a laugh he can’t name. He does not pick up his phone. He doesn’t trust what his fingers would do between the first and the second ring.
On a day that goes nowhere and is perfect for it, a boy from the second class refuses to say please because he has decided words are stupid and only motion counts. Suguru kneels to his height and asks him to demonstrate his thesis with his feet. The boy does and promptly invents a new way to lose his balance that the dojo will be talking about for years. They fix it. The boy looks betrayed and then victorious and then hungry. Someone’s mother passes out orange slices like absolution. He takes one. It tastes like a win he didn’t have to earn with blood.
After class, Fukuda is filling out something that pretends to be a form while also being a placemat and says, not looking up, “You’re staying.”
“I’m not,” he says, on reflex.
“You are,” she says. “At least until whoever made you restless gives you back to yourself.”
He considers it. He has been considering a lot of things he would have punched before.
“I can do Tuesdays and Thursdays. Maybe Saturday mornings if no one else decides to waste their weekend.”
“Done,” she says. “I’ll bribe the Tuesday parents with free towels and pretend I’m not thrilled.”
He pretends he doesn’t hear the gratitude braided into the joke. Pretends he doesn’t want to set his head down on the clean wood and keep it there until he forgets the names of any months that ever hurt him.
He goes home and his mother has left a note on the low shelf by the genkan: Eat first . There’s a bowl covered with a plate to keep the air from touching it. There is a damp cloth over the plate so nothing forgets to be kind.
There is a second note peeking out from under the bowl: Your father watered too early. Tell him he’s a traitor.
His laugh surprises him, ragged and soft. He eats. He finds his father in the dark pretending to listen to frogs. He delivers the message with the solemnity of a courier.
His father groans like a stage actor and says, “You always take her side,” and Suguru says, “Correct,” and sits down in the dark with him because the dark is a kind of honesty the day doesn’t allow.
When it rains, he stands under the eaves where the runoff threads itself into ropes and thinks about vows. He could make one. He could take one apart. He could do both and call it growing up.
He imagines telling Satoru: I am learning the names of parts of myself that don’t want to be knives . He imagines Satoru saying, melodramatic, “Betrayal,” and flinging himself across a chair, and then looking up from the silliness with that open, ruinous face that says say it again, but slower.
He doesn’t call. He sends Shoko a picture of a single ridiculous carnation face-planting against the glass after a wind gust and captions it: medical emergency .
She replies with a photo of her shoe next to a kitten with the words no. defunct. absolutely not .
He sends her a drawing, badly done, of an ear with a tulip growing out of it. She types and stops typing and types: keep going.
He does. Not bravely. Not cleanly. Not with any mantra he trusts. He gets up when the day gets up and lies down when the house tells him to or when his body has successfully argued with his pride.
He teaches.
He eats what he can keep.
He refuses missions that smell like someone else’s fantasy about his capacity to be a container.
He says yes to errands, to small requests that don’t require a ledger afterward.
He stands next to his father while his father explains the advantages of watering from below and pretends to disagree so his father can enjoy winning.
One afternoon, a boy from the dojo runs across the street like a comet and stops so abruptly he almost returns to space.
“Sensei!” he announces at a volume that does not respect distance. “I kept my balance in the kitchen and I didn’t drop the pot and my mom said I was a genius.”
“You are a genius,” Suguru says, grave. “But don’t tell anyone. The world is not ready.”
The boy nods vigorously, like someone entrusted with state secrets. “Can I show you a kick?”
“Not near anything with corners,” Suguru says, backing up while the boy drafts an arc in the air with a foot that has not yet met its ceiling.
The mother bows from the step, weary and proud, and Suguru does not think, monkey , even though the word flares up like a reflex. He thinks, person. He thinks, hands. He accepts that his disgust and his love will share a room for a while and hopes they don’t kill each other in their sleep.
In the evening, he tells his mother about the boy.
She says, “That’s the one who always tells the crows to be quiet. I like him.”
He tells his father that the watering can location is a crime against tulips, and his father says, “Jail me,” and they stand at the kitchen window and wait for the light to choose which plate to land in.
He is still angry. He is still himself. But when he lies down at night, the hum in his molars is not a scream. The floor does not tilt. The ceiling is uninteresting and that is mercy.
He closes his eyes and misses Satoru in a way that doesn’t make him want to smash something in order to find air.
He thinks: I am going to have to choose, again and again, not to be useful to people who would be better served by a fire. He thinks: I am going to have to choose, again and again, to be loved by people who never asked me to be anything but their son.
He sets his phone face-down and lets the house do its night work around him. Somewhere beyond the field the train breathes like a distant animal. Somewhere in the next room, his mother places a dish where he will find it in the morning and think it arrived by accident. Somewhere under the kitchen window, his father tells the carnations to stop showing off and they refuse.
When sleep comes, it doesn’t have teeth. When morning comes, he is ready to try again. He isn’t forgiven. He isn’t cured. He is held by a place that knows his names and by hands that do their work without asking to be saints. He will go to the dojo and teach a child to fall in a way that feels like flying. He will stand in the garden and make fun of a man who loves his wife so loudly he has to disguise it as horticulture. He will answer a call from two girls who renamed a cat after kelp and told the world about it with a marker. He will keep the worst part of him leashed without starving it. He will be better at being alive than he was yesterday by the width of a string tied to a stake.
He will not stop missing the boy who learned to be a miracle and a mess in the same year. He will not stop waiting for the day when needing and choosing can live in the same sentence without making the air hard to breathe.
For now: carnation faces against glass, a dojo that smells like wood and good sweat, a kitchen where the kettle knows its job, a town that thinks he is simply the Geto son and treats him accordingly.
It is not enough.
It is, unbelievably, enough to get through the day.
The mission briefs pile on his desk, but Satoru doesn’t read them. He only ever needs a location anyway.
He sprawls across the dorm steps instead, sunglasses hiding eyes that won’t rest. Shoko stands beside him smoking air, and for a moment he pretends that if he tilts his head just so, Suguru will come wandering down the walkway, staff in hand, ready to mutter “idiot” like it’s punctuation.
He doesn’t come. He never does.
Satoru laughs anyway, because the alternative is letting Shoko see how badly he wants to ask if she’s heard from him. He holds the laugh until his ribs ache. When he finally lets it go, the silence that rushes in is heavier than before.
Dinner is warm, bright, full of his mother’s voice threading stories between bites. His father listens with that grave nod that makes every anecdote sound like a revelation. Suguru eats, laughs at the right places, passes the soy sauce without being asked.
But the moment his parents retreat to their room, the house becomes too quiet. He sets his chopsticks down and realizes he hasn’t spoken Satoru’s name aloud in two weeks. It startles him—how language can vanish if you don’t keep it alive.
He whispers it once into the empty kitchen, just to make sure it still fits in his mouth. It does. Too well.
One of them sleeps under the hush of crickets, the other under the static of the city. One listens for a breath that isn’t there; the other talks too loud to drown out the missing answer.
Both of them lie awake longer than they should, staring at ceilings that will never tell the truth, bruised by the same absence: the space where the other should be.
The dispatch comes at midnight, the way trouble usually does.
Ping. Coordinates. No explanation beyond “special grade.” Which is either laziness, or the kind of understatement that means even the higher-ups don’t want to write the details down.
Satoru doesn’t bother changing out of his uniform pants. He slides his glasses up, folds the city in half with one careless motion, and steps through.
The air tastes wrong before he even arrives.
An abandoned tram yard, tracks rusting in long, crooked lines. Steel hulks sit like grave markers, windows smashed out, graffiti peeling in flakes. Crows scatter at his arrival, the sound of their wings harsh in the frozen dark.
The curse waits near the far shed, a body built of ribs and whispers and too many eyes. Its gaze scatters across him like broken glass.
“Well aren’t you pretty,” Satoru says, voice bright, sunglasses tilted down just enough to mock. His grin feels like armor. “Shame about the face, though.”
Infinity hums alive as it always does, a thin barrier of air bending around him, untouchable. He moves through the yard like he’s already bored.
The curse shifts its weight, a ripple through ribs that don’t belong to anything human. Its eyes stutter in a dozen directions at once, each pupil fixing and unfixed like bad cameras.
Satoru twirls his wrist lazily, lets blue flicker between his fingers just to see the thing twitch.
“C’mon then,” he drawls. “I don’t have all night.”
(He has nothing but night, but that’s not the point.)
The thing lunges. Infinity hums. Space folds. He’s already stepping sideways, body a machine built for this.
Autopilot. Smooth. Efficient.
Until—
A sound.
Not a curse’s sound. Something dumber, sharper: metal slamming, a door knocked shut by wind. A sound that doesn’t belong to this yard.
And suddenly he’s somewhere else.
Sandy beach. Fluorescent buzzing. Riko’s shoes squeaking across tile. Toji’s knife flashing silver.
The smell of iron. The pop of ribs opening.
His own breath, not working, not catching, too much blood clogging the math of his body.
Suguru shouting his name like it could change anything.
It happens in a blink, but the blink doesn’t end.
The tram yard buckles sideways in his head. The curse stutters, blurred at the edges, like bad reception. He can’t line the sight up. His hands are useless things at the end of his arms.
He knows he should move. He knows the sequence. Pull space. Fold blue. Tear. Easy. Easy . He’s done it a thousand times.
Instead he freezes.
Every nerve goes glassy. His chest won’t obey him. His throat tightens like it’s holding back a blade.
The curse notices before he does. It rushes him in a surge of bone and teeth, a noise like grinding brakes. Its limb slams across his ribs—hard, too hard—and Infinity drags itself up at the last possible second, sloppy, late. The blow lands anyway, enough to send shock ringing up his side, breath tearing out of him in a ragged laugh that isn’t a laugh.
The yard tilts. His vision doubles, curse and man and Toji’s knife all layered on top of each other. He sees his own blood when it isn’t there. He feels his lungs seize like they did the first time.
He can’t tell if he’s fighting now or remembering.
Pain wakes him the way nothing else can.
He doubles over laughing—too loud, too sharp, his voice bouncing off the empty trams like a maniac in a cathedral.
"Ha, close one! That would've been embarrassing."
The curse shrieks. He doesn’t give it a chance to lunge again.
Not now. Not with his chest buzzing like broken glass, his heart racing like it’s still back there in the Hotel, in the shadow, in the blood.
He lifts his hand and rips the world apart.
Blue. Red. Hollow Purple.
The yard implodes in a blossom of absence. Metal screams, sheds collapse, crows scatter in a storm of wings. The curse doesn’t even get to die; it just ceases, erased from existence with one overkill strike that leaves the air tasting scorched.
Silence drops heavy.
Satoru stands in the ruin, uniform torn across his ribs, breath loud in his ears. Infinity buzzes too close, wrapping him like a second skin he can’t peel off. His heart won’t slow down. His fingers twitch, wanting another target.
There isn’t one.
For a long moment he just stands there, staring at the empty space where the curse had been, chest rising too fast. He’s alive. He knows he’s alive. He knows.
But his body doesn’t believe him.
He laughs once more into the hollow—short, too sharp—and the sound ricochets wrong, comes back like someone else made it.
His ribs throb in steady pulses. Every inhale rasps. He glances down and only then notices the blood crusting under the tear in his uniform, tacky dark against white. It takes him a beat to understand it’s his.
“Oh.” He says it lightly, like he misplaced a key.
RCT. Simple. Obvious. He should’ve triggered it immediately, the way Shoko’s drilled into him when she found out he finally figured it out—injury, assess, heal. A reflex by now. Except it wasn’t. Except he forgot.
He lifts his hand, fingers trembling minutely, and sets the circuit running. Warmth floods his palm, threads into his ribs. The ache dulls, pain turning clinical, the sharp edges rounding down until his lungs stop clawing at him.
Relief should follow. It doesn’t. The buzz under his skin only climbs, Infinity purring too loud, wrapped tight against his body like it doesn’t trust the world to stay on its side.
He exhales. It shudders on the way out.
“Pathetic,” he mutters at himself, tugging his jacket closed like it could erase what just happened. He plants both hands on his knees and laughs again, quiet this time, like maybe softening it will make it truer.
It isn’t true.
He straightens, shakes the hair out of his eyes, and pulls. Space folds, obedient as ever, the city snapping into a seam only he can see.
When he steps back onto campus, the air feels too clean. The lamps buzz faint against the path, the dorm windows lit here and there like small ordinary lanterns. He’s still humming with adrenaline, a storm sealed inside a skin. His shoes crunch on gravel louder than they should.
For one moment he thinks maybe he can make it to his room, lie down, laugh about it in the morning. Pretend it didn’t happen.
That’s when Shoko steps out from the side path, in soft cotton, hair tucked behind one ear and cigarette already balanced behind the other. Her eyes find him at once, sharp as scalpels.
“You look like shit,” she says, flat, and starts walking toward him.
Satoru tips his chin up, grins wide, reflexive. “I’m starting to think you want to hurt my feelings, Sho.”
She doesn’t answer.
Her gaze drops once, quick and surgical, to the way his palm stays pressed to his side. She doesn’t miss the crusted dark at the edges of the tear in his uniform, the hum of Infinity just a shade too close to the skin. Her jaw sets.
“You were bleeding.” Not a question.
Satoru shrugs, too loose. “Not anymore. Fixed it. You know me—one-man trauma center and all.”
“Don’t give me that,” she says, closing the distance. “I’ve seen you patch worse in under a minute. You wouldn’t still be holding your ribs if you’d done it right away.”
His grin flickers. “What, you timing me now? Didn’t realize I was being graded.”
She stops in front of him, just far enough that the hum between them prickles against her skin. “What happened?”
“Curse,” he says, bland, singsong. “I won. Obviously.”
“Satoru.” Her voice is stripped of patience.
He almost says it then—almost lets the knife and the blood and the way the world slid sideways out of his mouth. But the words catch sharp in his throat, snagged on something uglier.
He flashes teeth instead. “Don’t worry. Just a scratch. Can’t keep me down.”
Her eyes narrow. “You froze.”
He blinks, the laugh too late to sound real. “What? No. Come on. When would I ever freeze in front of a curse ?”
“Cut the crap.” Her voice doesn’t rise, but it lands harder than a shout. “You didn’t heal yourself until it was over. You forgot. The only reason that happens is if you weren’t there long enough to remember you were bleeding.”
His hand curls tighter against his side, fingertips whitening. The hum of Infinity spikes like a reflex. “Still standing, aren’t I?”
“Barely.” She leans in, clutching her lighter between her fingers, like she’s considering setting fire to his excuse. “You think I don’t know dissociation when I see it? I spend half my week stitching it back into the kids who can’t laugh it off.”
He tips his head back, laughs loud enough to scrape the night open. “Wow. Diagnosis for free? What a deal. Want me to lie down on the couch too?”
“Do you hear yourself?” she asks. Not sharp now, but tired, the kind of tired that carries disappointment heavier than anger. “You can’t keep doing this. Not alone.”
“Alone’s my specialty.” He lifts his chin, grin glassy. “I’m Gojo Satoru. I don’t break.”
Her eyes drop once more to the stain on his shirt, the way his knuckles tremble where they’re hidden in the dark. When she looks up again, it’s with something harder than pity. “It looks like you already have.”
The grin falters for half a second, and she sees it—the crack, the truth he won’t give voice to.
He recovers fast, jaw tilting, shades sliding back into place like armor.
“You’re seeing things,” he says.
She doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t even blink. “You can joke all you want, but the fact is you’re scaring me.”
That pulls him up short. He tries to cover it—louder laugh, bigger shoulders—but the sound lands hollow. “Scaring you ? That’s a first.”
“You think you’re the only one who’s tired?” she shoots back. “The only one dragging bodies off fields, keeping them breathing long enough for paperwork to count it as survival?”
Something in his throat clicks, too loud for the silence. He looks away.
She takes a breath, lets it out slow, smoke-less but sharp. “You froze out there. I don’t know why, but I can guess. You’re not untouchable, Satoru. You bleed. You panic. You’re seventeen.”
His head snaps back toward her, mouth half-open on some cutting retort. It dies before it gets teeth.
“Don’t—” His voice roughs. He clears it. “Don’t treat me like—”
“Like what?” she presses. “Like a person?”
The hum of Infinity buzzes between them like a live wire, too close, too defensive. His hand spasms once against his ribs. “I can handle it.”
“No,” she says, quiet now, steady in a way that brooks no argument. “You can’t. You haven’t been.”
The silence stretches. His sunglasses catch a slice of light, hiding his eyes, but not the tremor that runs through his jaw.
Finally, he tries for levity again, but the words come out wrong. “What, you gonna ground me? Write me a prescription for sleep and soup?”
“If I thought it would work, yeah.” Her hand hovers for a second, then falls back to her side. “But you don’t need sleep or soup. You need someone to pull you back when you can’t do it yourself.”
His chest hitches once, like he’s swallowing down the wrong kind of air.
And that’s when she makes the choice. Flicks her lighter back into her pocket. Reaches for her phone.
“Shoko—” His voice sharpens, too fast. “Don’t.”
She looks at him, unflinching. “I can’t hold you up alone. Not anymore.”
Her thumb moves. The line rings once, twice.
When the call clicks open, her voice is simple, stripped bare.
“Geto. It’s me. He’s alive. But he’s hurt. And if this keeps up, he’s not gonna stay that way. You need to come.”
She hangs up before Satoru can rip the phone out of her hand.
His grin is gone entirely now, jaw tight, throat working like there’s bile there. He leans back against the wall, Infinity buzzing sharp enough that the air between them aches.
“You had no right,” he says, low.
“Maybe not,” she answers, steady. “But I’m not gonna sit here and watch you die proving a point.”
For the first time all night, he doesn’t have a joke.
Shoko’s “you need to come” clicks off and leaves the kitchen too loud. Suguru doesn’t put the phone down so much as forget it’s a separate object. The house looks at him with all its small, ordinary kindnesses—towel folded by the sink; sandals squared at the genkan; a note on the calendar about the neighbor’s plum jam—and none of it is a reason to stay.
He writes A friend needs me. Don’t wait. I’ll call. and props it against the kettle. Then flips the paper, writes smaller: I’m safe. He adds a period like a dare.
Outside, the carnations by the kitchen window have their heads bowed together like conspirators. He doesn’t pray. He licks his teeth, whistles low.
The dragon uncoils out of him the way breath fogs glass—quietly, inevitably. Oil-slick scales catch the yard light and turn it into a private aurora. Old eyes blink open like coins. He doesn’t say please . Intention is a language older than manners.
“Campus,” he says. The dragon dips to make a step where there wasn’t one.
The night air comes up under his jacket and argues everything unnecessary out of his head. The roof slides past; the garden becomes a drawn map: watered dirt, a hat left where a head will find it in the morning, a bowl on the sill because someone believes in midnight hunger. The village unlatches, lets him go without asking for an explanation.
“Satoru,” Shoko says, and doesn’t blink.
“What now? You won, didn’t you?”
Her eyes flick to his hand welded to his ribs. “Your hands are shaking,” she says evenly.
He shoves both into his pockets before they can testify. Infinity hums up, down, indecisive as a bad light.
Between breaths, the tram yard is back in his eyes—Toji’s knife, Riko’s laugh cut short, the color of Suguru’s face when the universe made him watch—and his skull tightens like a fist.
Shoko sees the words land. She doesn’t say I know . She says, “Follow me.”
He trails behind on mechanical legs. The door of his room does the little hiccup it always does before it catches; the ceiling fan nails its lazy circle; his bed looks like a death sentence. The air is too clean. It smells like detergent and the faint metallic bite of old pipes. No smoke, no hair oil, no next-room breathing.
He tells himself to sit. He stays standing because his knees would be an admission.
Shoko turns the overhead light down and lights a lamp, and the room decides to be smaller. She opens the window two inches wide; cool air slides in and brushes the back of his neck the way good hands used to. She pulls the wastebasket an inch closer with the toe of her shoe and pretends not to.
“You’re going to hate the questions,” she says, sleeves shoved to her elbows. “Where are you?”
“In my—” his mouth says, while his eyes are still locked on a hallway that isn’t this one “—room.”
“What’s under your feet?”
“Floor,” he says, half-laughing. “Advanced.”
“What do you hear?”
He listens because she asked like a doctor and not like a test. “The fan. The… stupid buzzing from the light outside. You, talking.”
Her lip tugs. “What do you smell?”
“Detergent.” He inhales. The inhale snaps in half. “Electricity.”
“Good,” she says, and moves closer, slow, like you do when a wild thing is deciding whether you’re a cliff or a path. “Take Infinity down a notch.”
It drops and rockets back up so fast the air hisses. He flinches at his own reflex.
“Not your fault,” she says. “Try again.”
“It won’t—” He stops because the sentence would be it won’t let me , and he doesn’t give agency to anything he built himself, not even a shield that won’t stop guarding him. “Two notches.”
The hum thins. He feels the room land a little nearer to his skin. It’s sickening. It’s relief.
“Sit.” She says it like an instruction you give a storm. He makes it to the bed. The mattress tries to be kind. The kindness is offensive.
The headache arrives like someone opened a bright drawer behind his eyes. He knows its shape—the bloom at the back of the skull, the way sound moves too slow and then all at once—and normally he would run RCT along the seam and file it down.
He tries; the warm wash climbs his forearm, smooths the ache at his ribs, rounds off a corner of pain behind the right eye. The alarm keeps blaring anyway, pure and stupid, ignorant of technique.
“Breathe with me,” Shoko says. “Slow in. Hold. Longer out.”
He follows the count because she set it and because doing not-his-count is sometimes a door. In four. Hold four. Out six. His lungs hitch on the hold like they tripped. He cheats the out. He tries again. The ceiling sways like a thing that wants to get in close.
“If you throw up, aim for the floor and I’ll pretend I didn’t notice,” she adds, almost weary, almost kind.
He laughs and it turns into a swallow. “I’m not—”
He is.
The nausea is clean, rising, a tide with rules. His mouth floods with saliva. He leans forward, elbows on knees, head in his hands because that gives the world a different shape. The fan becomes tolerable when seen between fingers.
“Say three true things,” Shoko says, low, steady. “Not clever. True.”
“Shoko is here,” he manages. “This is—my room.” He stares at a screw head on the vent, counts four, five, six. “The wall is a wall.”
Her hand hovers, stops at the edge of the hum. “Can I touch you?” she asks, a formality, a wedge into his habit.
“Not yet,” he says, hoarse. Infinity buzzes its discontent. He breathes around it. “I’ll—give you my wrist in a second.”
She nods like that’s a plan and not a favor he’s failing to do her. “Then keep going. Three lies.”
He barks out something that was meant to be a laugh and tastes like old coins. “I’m the strongest. I can’t break. I don’t—” need you— “I don’t mind this.”
“Good.” She watches his face the way she watches stitches take, attentive without ceremony. “Name the worst thing your head is telling you right now.”
He sees the tram yard again, sharp as first impact. He sees Suguru turn away under the trees. He sees a bed in another room he didn’t dare look at.
“That if he sees me like this he—” he swallows, hard— “won’t want to look at me again.”
“Okay,” Shoko says. “And what’s more likely?”
“That he’ll—” his vision bleaches for a second, pure white— “make it worse by being kind.”
“Also possible,” she agrees dryly. “Infinity.”
He drops it a fingertip. The air changes temperature. She slips two fingers around his wrist, cool and ordinary, and the contact is a door someone forgot they were allowed to open. His pulse is fast under her thumb; it stutters, tries a different track, finds the old one again.
“Good,” she says. “Stay with me.”
He nods, tiny, a movement he can do without throwing the room off its hinges. The nausea crests, breaks; he breathes through it, a shiver running through the muscles of his back like ropes pulling taut. Cold hits the back of his neck. He startles before he understands: her other hand, a washcloth she materialized from somewhere, damp and almost painfully cool.
“Count twenty,” she says. “Not out loud. Don’t let the numbers argue.”
He does. The numbers try to become thoughts; he beats them back with their own teeth. At eleven, the room edges away from the cliff it was determined to jump.
His phone buzzes. The sound goes through him like a hook. He flinches; Infinity jumps up without permission, hard and human-proof. Shoko’s fingers get pushed off his wrist with the softest shove. He hates himself instantly.
“Sorry,” he says, breath clipping. Wet cloth, air, hum. He tries again. “I’m—fuck—sorry.”
“Not the point.” She rolls her chair a fraction back so the field can have its sulk. Checks the screen without announcing it. “It’s not dispatch.”
“Who—” he hears himself and wants to bite his own tongue off. He knows who.
“Two minutes out,” she reads. No name, just the shape of a person in that brevity. “Gate.”
The room goes smaller, somehow, without shrinking. The headache steps forward to be counted. His stomach pulls its stupid trick. His body tries to armor up and down at once. Want rises, uninvited, so big it looks like fear.
“No,” he says, to no one, to the air, to the worst part of himself that would undo progress in a heartbeat if it meant not being seen. “He doesn’t—don’t let him—”
Shoko moves without hurry. She cracks the window another inch; night pulls itself thin through the gap and lays across the back of his neck. She unlocks the door and leaves it half a hand open. She turns the lamp lower, then up a notch, then lower again, watching the way his shoulders react.
“I didn’t invite him to look at you,” she says, voice like clean gauze. “I invited him to be here. You can face the wall. You can put a blanket over your head and pretend you’re luggage. You can tell him to leave. I’ll back you.”
He wants to say I’ll be fine and finds his mouth full of something more honest. “I don’t want him to see me small.”
She sits back down, a triangle of steadiness in a room that refuses to square.
“Every person who loves you has already seen you small,” she says. “They were just polite about it.”
He laughs once, a broken pane. The sound turns into a swallow. He taps RCT through his temples like a man tapping a stuck barometer. The pain obliges a little, shifts rooms. The alarm doesn’t move an inch.
“Look at me,” Shoko says, soft. He does. Her face is ordinary and brutal. “You know what happens when you run? You make it louder. If you want him, that’s a kind of medicine. If you don’t, that’s a kind of medicine too. Pick one. Don’t let the panic drive.”
“Bossy,” he says, out of habit, and it sounds like gratitude that’s been filed down to a more survivable shape.
“Professionally,” she says, and squeezes the washcloth against his neck until cold wakes his spine up again. “Five more breaths. Then you can decide if he comes in.”
He takes them. They’re ugly. The fifth one reaches the bottom of his lungs and doesn’t break. He nods. He doesn’t have to say anything. She hears yes in the way he doesn’t bolt.
Suguru hunches low along the dragon’s curve and the night answers by getting clearer. He is not built for speed, not exactly, but wanting is an engine older than lungs.
Alive, he tells himself, because it was the first word and first words get to be laws for at least an hour.
His mind offers every other possibility anyway, faithful and cruel: he’s alone in a hallway; he’s leaning over a sink and not breathing; he’s laughing so hard the edges of it are bright white; he’s asleep and the sleep looks like drowning.
He keeps his eyes on the next patch of dark. He does not argue with the pictures; he outruns them.
City. The radio tower earns its blink. The river lets him cross for free. The dragon folds and refolds itself like something practiced at passing unnoticed. Steel, glass, cedar. The wall and its particular brand of contempt.
He texts Gate . Shoko’s reply is a single bubble: Open .
He drops to the path because his legs need to remember the work. The dragon bows its head to the stone and slides back into him, that long ribbon of light and old breath taking up residence beneath his sternum where the worst and best things cohabitate on good days.
The cedars give up their resin-scorn. The breezeway keeps its echo ready. He won’t look at the strip of shadow that remembers a knife. He doesn’t owe it anything.
Shoko is a shape at the edge of the lamplight, hair tucked behind one ear, a shadow under her eyes that isn’t smoke.
“Room,” she says, and turns—not to lead him (he knows the route in his bones), just so he can borrow her pace. He matches it without thinking. Footsteps make a braided sound in the corridor. The old metal sign knocks once because it doesn’t know better.
“Thank you,” he says to the air by her shoulder.
“Later,” she says. “Decide if you’re going to be useful first.”
He laughs—not out loud, exactly; it happens in the meat of his chest, a small broken thing grateful for orders.
She stops at the door and tilts her head toward it. It’s open two fingers. The room light has been trained to be kind.
“You go in,” she says. “I’ll run interference with anyone who gets curious. He’s in the middle of it. Don’t turn it into a test.”
“I know what it is,” he says. He doesn’t, not this version, not with this much quiet around the edges. He puts a hand to the jamb and remembers the feel of this wood against the heel of his palm when he used to knock like a joke. No ceremony. He breathes once, the way you do before you step into cold water.
Satoru feels him from the hallway before his ears get the fact. It’s nothing mystic; his body recognizes footsteps when it needs excuses to stay alive. Infinity spikes on reflex. He grits his teeth and drags it down, obedient just enough. He looks at the wall because the wall will not tell on him.
His mouth shapes the mantra like a shield with too many cracks: The Six Eyes is above. Bow to no one. Need no one. The words land, useless as paper.
He closes his eyes. Opens them. The fan does its idiot circle.
Suguru steps through the two-finger door.
For one stupid, unbearable second, the part of Satoru that’s all reflex stands up inside him and reaches. The field surges, traitor. He bites back a sound that would have been an apology and remembers how to breathe through his nose.
“Hey,” Suguru says, in the voice you use for animals curled under porches. Not pity. Not fear. Just a line laid across a gap. He doesn’t come close enough to set off anything. He kneels in front of him without breaking eye contact with the floor, like reverence disguised as practicality, like he’s making a smaller room inside the room and inviting Satoru to be in that one instead.
“Don’t say—” Satoru starts.
“I won’t,” Suguru says. “Not that.”
“Okay,” Satoru says, because there’s nothing left to hold like a knife.
Shoko puts the damp cloth in Suguru’s hand and stands. “Yell if either of you does something heroic.”
Neither of them laughs. She leaves anyway, because she is merciful.
The room hums. The city presses its face to the window and pretends it isn’t watching.
Suguru does not reach for him. He sets the cloth on the back of his own neck, like demonstration, and waits until Satoru rolls his eyes without malice and tips his head forward just enough. Suguru trades his own skin for Satoru’s and the cold sinks in with a permission Satoru didn’t remember he could give.
“Count with me?” Suguru asks. It is almost funny. Satoru nods because some part of him was waiting for the math to come from somewhere else.
They count. The numbers behave for once. The fan goes back to being a stupid fan. The nausea turns into a heavy, manageable thing curled low, a cat you can step around.
He risks a glance; Suguru is a line of dark calm with color returned to his face and his mouth set in a way that means I am not joking, but I am not going to make you choose my version of you either.
The alarm doesn’t turn off. It turns down. He’ll take it.
“Alive,” Satoru says, eventually, in the cadence of a child practicing a first-grade reader. “I’m alive.”
Suguru nods. “Correct.”
“And you’re—” he gestures, helpless, at the shape of him, of this, of the part of the world that had to let him in again. “You.”
“Also correct,” Suguru says. It is not a joke and somehow it saves Satoru from having to make one.
He gives up and puts his forehead on Suguru’s shoulder for exactly three breaths and no more, because dignity is not a religion but it has a few good holidays. Infinity stays down. The room doesn’t crack.
He can hear Shoko stomping around in the hall and it is the sweetest music he’s ever known.
“Okay,” he says into fabric, hoarse. “Okay.”
“Okay,” Suguru echoes, and means not fixed, not forgiven, not finished—just, for this minute, okay.
They stay like that until the numbers get bored and wander off and the night decides to let itself be night again.
Suguru stays still. Moving would be betrayal. Moving would mean acknowledging how badly he wants to keep this weight exactly where it is.
Satoru stirs first. Just a shift of muscle, a swallow against his throat. “You came fast,” he mutters, like it’s an accusation.
“You needed me.” Suguru says it plainly, without teeth.
A humorless snort. “Shoko exaggerates. I was fine.”
Suguru doesn’t bother to answer that. They both know fine when they see it, and this isn’t it.
Silence folds back in. It isn’t comfortable—never has been—but it isn’t empty either. For the first time in weeks, Suguru feels like he can breathe without choking on the space between them.
But then Satoru’s shoulders twitch, restless, and he pushes back from the contact, sunglasses askew, grin jammed into place like a bad patch. “Well. You’ve seen the freak show. Congrats.”
Suguru watches him for a long moment, steady. He doesn’t let the grin scare him off. “You need to rest.”
“Rest is boring.” His voice is too bright, too sharp. He pushes to his feet, sways, covers it with a stretch that nearly cracks his spine. “Besides, I bounce back. Strongest, remember?”
“Strongest,” Suguru echoes, dry, like the word itself has gone sour.
That shuts Satoru up for half a breath. Long enough. Suguru makes the decision then—quiet, internal, absolute.
He crosses to the desk, pulls Satoru’s half-collapsed duffel from where it’s been sulking under a chair. Starts folding clothes—not neat, not ceremonial, just efficient. Shirt. Socks. The cracked sunglasses case he finds abandoned on the floor.
“What the hell are you doing?” Satoru demands.
“Packing,” Suguru says, calm.
“You can’t just—”
“I can,” he cuts in, sharper than he means to. Then softer, steady: “You’re coming with me.”
Satoru blinks like someone slapped him harder than any curse could. “To the dorm next door?” He tries to laugh, fails. “Sorry, Suguru, but I don’t think Yaga would—”
“My house.” Suguru doesn’t look up from the bag. “In the country. You’ll stay a few days.”
“You’re out of your mind,” Satoru says, voice climbing, frantic in the way he only gets when he’s cornered by kindness. “I can’t just—this isn’t—”
“You can,” Suguru says, and zips the bag shut. The sound is final, like a blade sheathed. “You’re not doing this alone anymore.”
Satoru laughs then, sharp, desperate. “Don’t play nurse, Suguru. You’re not built for it. I don’t need—”
“Yes, you do.” The words snap out of him before he can pretty them. He forces his voice lower. “I can see it. Shoko sees it. Everyone sees it. And if you stay here, this place is going to grind you down until there’s nothing left but Infinity humming in an empty room.”
That lands. He can see it in the way Satoru’s grin falters, the way his throat works around words that won’t come.
Suguru softens, just a fraction. “Come home with me. Just for a little while.”
For a moment, Satoru looks younger than he ever allows himself to. The strongest, undone by an invitation. His sunglasses hide his eyes, but his mouth twists—not refusal, not agreement, just a crack in the mask.
Suguru takes his phone out, thumbs his mother’s number without hesitation. The line clicks.
“Mom? It’s me. I’m bringing a friend home. For a few days.” A pause. “Yes, that one.”
He glances at Satoru, who’s staring like the floor has betrayed him.
“He’s not doing well,” Suguru adds, quiet, private.
On the other end, warmth blooms audible even through the static. His mother’s voice is brisk, practical: futon ready, don’t worry, I’ll cook something sweet. She asks what kind of food Satoru likes. Suguru doesn’t have to think. “Anything, as long as there’s sugar.”
He hangs up before his throat can betray him.
Satoru’s voice is hoarse when it finally scrapes out: “You didn’t ask me.”
“I didn’t need to.” Suguru slings the bag over his shoulder. “You’re coming.”
And the part of Satoru that should argue—the part that always argues—stays quiet.
The bag feels too light for what it’s supposed to carry. Suguru slings it over his shoulder anyway, then nudges Satoru toward the door with more stubbornness than force.
“You can’t just drag me onto a train like—”
“I can,” Suguru cuts him off, patient as a stone. “And I am.”
Satoru’s mouth twists. The grin doesn’t come. For once, he doesn’t fight the momentum.
They leave campus in silence, corridors echoing in their wake. Suguru can feel Infinity brushing against him like static, restless, twitching on and off as if even Satoru’s own body doesn’t know what to do with it. He doesn’t comment. Some things, naming only makes worse.
He texts Shoko: Whatever leave you wrote me then, write one for Satoru too, and gets a thumbs up in return.
The platform is nearly empty. Last trains draw thin crowds: salarymen wilted against benches, a couple teenagers leaning into each other with the kind of exhaustion that’s also joy. The fluorescent lights buzz. The chill sneaks under his collar.
Suguru buys two tickets without asking. When he presses the slip into Satoru’s hand, their fingers brush. It’s the most solid thing either of them has felt all week.
The train shudders up, doors yawning open. They step inside, the air smelling faintly of dust and oranges from someone’s bag. Rows of plastic seats, a heater that only half works. The countryside waits outside, black fields cut by the occasional scatter of house lights.
Satoru drops into a seat like gravity’s finally noticed him. Sunglasses still on, though the fluorescent glow makes him look hollow behind them. He tilts his head back, jaw tight. Suguru settles beside him, close enough that their knees nearly touch.
The train lurches forward. Town melts into dark.
Neither speaks for a long while. The rhythm of the rails fills the space between them, steady, hypnotic.
Suguru watches the reflection of the window: two boys, older than they feel, younger than the weight in their chests. Satoru’s outline is blurred, almost spectral. He wonders if that’s what it’s been like for him too—watching Satoru fade around the edges every day these past weeks, the strongest turned ghost of himself.
Then Satoru sways. Just slightly. His shoulder tips, brushes Suguru’s arm.
Suguru doesn’t move.
Satoru doesn’t pull back. Instead he leans—too heavy to be casual, too fragile to be anything but need. His head finds Suguru’s shoulder like it’s been remembering the shape all along.
Suguru goes still. Breath shallow. Afraid to disturb it.
Satoru mumbles something that might be his name, soft, hoarse, already half-dreaming. Infinity flickers, then eases, leaving the air calm for the first time in weeks.
The weight of him is shocking. Not because it’s heavy—Satoru is all bone and muscle and restless energy—but because it’s real. Present. Trust pressed into Suguru’s shoulder like a brand.
Suguru tips his head just slightly, enough that his cheek brushes pale hair damp at the ends. It feels like an admission. It feels like an answer.
Outside, the countryside slides past—dark fields, skeletal trees, the far-off glimmer of shrines tucked against the hills. Home is waiting. For both of them, maybe, if only for a night.
Suguru keeps perfectly still. Lets Satoru sleep. Lets the train carry them forward, the rhythm of the tracks a promise neither of them has dared make aloud: you don’t have to do this alone.
Notes:
i hope you enjoyed reading as much as i enjoyed writing!! i loved exploring so much with this and i'm even more excited for what's to come because when have these two ever had it easy.
Chapter 5: how much of love is restraint
Summary:
A hand to a cheek, a heartbeat steady under a palm. A vow half-formed, half-broken. The strongest wants, but wanting is not allowed.
Notes:
all i'll say is i broke my own heart writing this, actually
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The train wakes him before his body does.
A lurch over the junction, a judder that makes the glass shiver. Satoru blinks, slow, sunglasses slipping just enough for the light to jab at him. He doesn’t remember closing his eyes. He doesn’t remember letting his head tilt until it found Suguru’s shoulder like it was a destination.
For a second, the Six Eyes is merciful. Quiet. Just the dark and the hum of rails.
He realizes, with a start, that most of the panic has ebbed. The awful buzzing under his skin, the twitchy reflex of Infinity bristling too close—it’s thinner now, gentled. He isn’t holding it down with grit the way he usually does. It feels… self-regulated. Like Limitless knows, bone-deep, that someone else has his back. That Suguru is here.
The thought is dangerous, so he smothers it quick, presses it into the corner of his grin. But Infinity keeps humming steady under his skin instead of shrill, and that tells the truth anyway.
Then the Six Eyes comes back on in full color, greedy as ever, and everything about Suguru sharpens into unbearable detail.
His skin. Not sallow anymore, not hollowed out by neglect. There’s warmth under it now, a sun-burnished gold that doesn’t look borrowed. His hair—black, heavy, catching the faint trainlight like silk—falls neat, soft, deliberate. Maybe his hands did it. Maybe his parents’. Either way, cared-for. His nails: black polish, every edge precise, no careless chips. His mouth: not flat with exhaustion but soft, steady.
Satoru stares. He can’t help it. The Six Eyes feeds him too much, every heartbeat and breath and shape of cursed energy around them, and for once it isn’t screaming ruin. For once it’s clean.
He hates it. He loves it. He doesn’t want to know what to call it.
Suguru looks… better.
Better than he had any right to, after weeks of walking around Jujutsu Tech like the halls had eaten the marrow out of him. Better than the sunken, sick-eyed figure Satoru had kept one step behind, pretending not to notice how his hands shook when he thought no one was watching.
He shifts his head back half an inch, enough that he’s not leaning anymore, because the closeness feels like confession. His temple thuds against the window. The glass is cold; he doesn’t deserve warmth anyway.
Suguru doesn’t stir. Sleeps like he means it. His cursed energy curls easy around him, low tide instead of storm surge. It’s so steady Satoru wants to dig his nails into something just to prove the world is still sharp.
He’s supposed to be the one taking care. That’s how it’s always been.
Suguru fights with his hands; Satoru erases whatever they miss. Suguru swallows the filth; Satoru laughs it off. He’s the strongest. He can handle the weight. He can handle Suguru. That’s the math. That’s the job.
Except here’s Suguru, shoulders solid under Satoru’s accidental nap, skin golden, hair shining, breaths soft and measured, deep like the air is cleansing his lungs. Suguru, with polish on his nails and sleep deep enough to trust the world not to eat him for an hour. Suguru, better.
Satoru presses the heel of his palm into his eye until he sees stars. It doesn’t change anything. The Six Eyes keeps handing him evidence. Suguru looks alive here in a way he didn’t when Satoru was right beside him. That’s the truth. It gnaws at him.
He thinks about the last few weeks—the blood in his mouth that wasn’t his, the way the curses kept getting heavier, the way Suguru’s laugh kept getting thinner. He’d thought: it’s fine, I’ll carry it. I’m built for it. Suguru can lean on me. I’m the strongest, that’s the whole point.
But what if he was wrong?
What if Suguru doesn’t need his strength? What if he needs this—whatever this place has done to him, whatever home smells like, whatever kind of love oils your hair and helps you eat?
Satoru grins out the window, too wide, because that’s the only way to keep the thought from bleeding. He’ll still take care of him. That hasn’t changed. Suguru can sleep deep beside him, can wake up golden and steady again, and Satoru will keep the sky from falling on his head. That’s what he’s for.
His head tips back against the glass again. He pretends he’s tired, but his body is buzzing. Infinity hums under his skin, restless, like it’s impatient with him for sitting still. He wants to laugh, to break the quiet with something flippant, but Suguru’s breath is even, his shoulders warm, and the idea of waking him feels like sacrilege.
So he sits there, quiet, cataloguing details like a thief.
The faint shine where the oil’s soaked into Suguru’s hair.
The pulse visible at his throat, steady, unbothered.
The way his mouth twitches, almost a smile, like sleep is kinder than the world’s ever been.
And Satoru thinks—without naming it, without daring—this is what he’s been orbiting all along.
He doesn’t know when it started. Maybe when they were first-years, shoulder to shoulder in the dorm, daring each other into stupid trouble. Maybe on a mission, backs against each other, curses howling, and Satoru thought if I die here, at least he’ll see it. Maybe it was always. Maybe he’s just noticing now because the Six Eyes won’t let him look away.
He’s not in love. He can’t be. That word is too big, too soft, too dangerous. He’s the strongest; he doesn’t get to need anyone.
But the feelings sit there anyway, heavy as fruit in his lap. Want. Worry. The ache of knowing Suguru looks more alive without him than with. The refusal to let that stop him from reaching again.
The train hums along. Suguru sleeps. Satoru presses his fingers to the window and watches the reflection: his own sharp grin, Suguru’s softer face, two ghosts traveling nowhere together.
He doesn’t close his eyes again. He doesn’t dare.
The train coughs itself to a stop in a town that smells like salt and soil.
Satoru blinks against the sudden quiet. No endless corridors, no fluorescent buzz that makes his molars itch. Just cicadas drilling the air, the low murmur of water slipping somewhere under the street, a faint perfume of grilled fish drifting from someone’s window. Even the platform feels different—boards worn down by feet that belonged here, not by the endless shuffle of students marching toward their next assignment.
He nudges Suguru’s shoulder, soft, and watches him stir. For a split second it feels familiar, almost like a mission—train ride done, destination reached, time to move. He can almost trick himself into thinking the two of them are about to step off into another job, another cursed pocket of the world only they can clean.
Almost.
Suguru stands, stretches once, and looks like he’s unfolding back into himself. The color in his skin is something Satoru can’t take credit for. He insists on carrying Satoru’s bag that he’d packed.
They step off the train, and the air folds around them like it knows their names.
The road into town is narrow, paved in the kind of stone that remembers every storm. Houses line it in neat rows, each with their own little declaration of self: a potted plant outside the door, a wind chime shaped like a carp, laundry strung like quiet banners.
Satoru walks half a step behind, pretending it’s laziness. Really he just wants to watch the way Suguru moves here—shoulders looser, pace steady, like the ground is a rhythm his body knows.
The first ambush comes fast.
A pack of kids, half in gi pants, half in pajamas, swarm from an alley like a tactical unit that hasn’t learned the word discipline. They shout his name, trip over each other, cling to his hands and sleeves like they’ve just captured their general. Suguru laughs, low and warm, lets them tug him into a lopsided circle.
“Line up,” he says, mock-stern. “Or do I have to report every single one of you to Fukuda-sensei?”
They squeal, scatter, reassemble into something that resembles a line if you squint. A boy with a missing tooth presents a half-crushed sweet wrapped in foil. A girl with a ponytail too tight for mercy insists on showing off her kick, nearly toppling into the ditch. Suguru catches her by the collar without missing a beat and sets her upright.
“Show me again tomorrow,” he says, gentle. “On the mat, not the road.”
They nod, wide-eyed, because he has just made tomorrow sound like a promise.
Another boy pipes up, tugging at his sleeve: “Geto-sensei, are we still learning the rolling thing on Thursday?”
“Yes,” Suguru answers, crouching to their level, voice low but certain. “We’ll practice our falls too. If you fall, you get up twice. That’s the rule. ”
Two of them giggle. One, braver than the rest, leans toward the tall stranger in sunglasses. “Sensei, who’s that?”
Suguru glances back at him, faint amusement tugging his mouth. “That’s my best friend, Gojo.”
“Is he gonna teach too?” the girl with the ponytail asks, eyeing Satoru like he’s a puzzle piece that might not fit.
Satoru grins, sharp and easy. “Only if you want to break the floor instead of roll on it.”
They erupt into delighted chaos, whispering behind small hands—half awed, half scandalized. Suguru just shakes his head, patient as gravity, shepherding them back into something resembling order.
Satoru stands there with his sunglasses pushed up, watching like it’s theater staged just for him. His throat feels full. Suguru looks good like this. Patient. Bright. The kids orbit him like he’s gravity.
No one ever swarmed Satoru like that. No one dared.
He tells himself it’s fine. He doesn’t need swarming. He’s the shield, the wall, the one you send into the dark so the kids never have to see it.
But watching Suguru crouch to eye level with a child and explain how to land without bruising your knees—watching him belong—it makes something mean in Satoru’s chest quiet for a moment.
They break free eventually, Suguru bribing the kids with a promise to show them “something cool” if they let him walk. Satoru doesn’t ask what that means. He doesn’t want to know what it’s like to be someone who promises tomorrow and gets believed without question.
When the kids finally scatter, pulled away by parents calling from doorways, Satoru lets the grin tilt wider. “Geto-sensei,” he drawls, mock-reverent.
Suguru flushes, swats his shoulder with the back of his hand. “Shut up.”
The laugh comes easy to Satoru’s mouth, but it sounds a little hollow in his own ears. He prays Suguru doesn’t notice.
Two houses down, a woman with gray-streaked hair flags them. She presses a basket of persimmons into Suguru’s hands, scolding him lightly for being out late but smiling the whole time. Suguru bows, thanks her with both hands, and the exchange is so easy it feels rehearsed.
Another neighbor, an old man with a stoop and a laugh like gravel, offers a jar of pickled plums.
“For your mother,” he says, eyes crinkling. Suguru takes it, murmurs gratitude. The man claps his shoulder like he’s proud to know him.
Satoru trails, grinning like he always does, but something cold is threading under it.
Suguru is cared for here. Without missions. Without conditions. The gifts pressed into his hands aren’t payment, they’re habit—like feeding him is simply what you do when you see him. People’s faces open when they greet him, easy, like they’ve rehearsed affection into muscle memory.
He tells himself it doesn’t matter. He’ll still be the one protecting him. He can shield him from whatever waits beyond this quiet street. He can outlast the system. He’s the strongest—hasn’t that always meant he could make up the difference? That he could be enough?
But when Suguru glances back at him, juggling persimmons and plums, smiling faint like the kid he used to be, Satoru has to look away.
The street narrows, bends. A dog barks twice, then quiets like it’s embarrassed. Ahead, lantern light spills from a doorway, steady as a heartbeat. Suguru steps toward it without hesitation. The house itself isn’t grand—wood darkened by rain, roof patched in places—but the garden by the front gate is tidy, carnations nodding like conspirators. The doorframe has the kind of polish you only get from years of being touched every single day.
Suguru pauses on the step, shifts the basket and the jar in his arms, and Satoru realizes he’s holding his breath.
This is Suguru’s place. His real place. Not the dorm, not the sterile training rooms, not the cages they both keep pretending aren’t cages. It’s his home.
Satoru feels something move under his ribs, sharp and heavy at once.
He grins to cover it. “So this is where you’ve been hiding. Should’ve guessed.”
Suguru huffs out a laugh, the sound small but genuine.
“Come on,” he says, and slides the door open without hesitation.
The entryway breathes warm around them. Shoes lined in pairs, neatly; a basket tucked under the bench for umbrellas; a towel draped just so, drying from earlier use. It feels lived in, not curated, the kind of space that wears its people like a favorite shirt.
Satoru stops just past the threshold, sunglasses pushed to the top of his head, because he doesn’t know how to move in a house like this. It feels—alive. Expectant. The kind of place that notices if you’re careless.
“Mom? Dad?” Suguru calls, voice low but certain.
Footsteps pad down the corridor. His mother appears first, wiping her hands on a towel, hair tied back, face brightening the second she sees him. Her exhale sounds like relief carried in a single breath. “You’re back,” she says, as if the house wasn’t sure until she named it.
Then she notices Satoru, tall and awkward just inside the door. Her smile softens but doesn’t dim. “So this is Gojo-kun,” she says, like the name has already lived in this house. “We’ve heard about you. Welcome. Come in, come in.”
There’s no suspicion in her voice, no hesitation—only the simple fact of having been told, and having decided long ago that anyone Suguru chose to bring home would be claimed too.
She sets another pair of slippers by the genkan before he can even think about reaching for his own.
It’s stupid how much that undoes him.
He toes off his shoes, slips his feet into the waiting pair, and it feels like a ritual he was never taught. Attendants in the Gojo estate never bent down to set things in front of him. They hovered, they bowed, they kept their distance. This—this small kindness—is foreign enough to sting.
Suguru’s father arrives next, wiping dirt from his palms with a rag, smelling faintly of soil and green things. He’s broad-shouldered, quiet-eyed, the kind of man who looks like he knows how to build a roof beam with his own hands.
“You made it back before I finished the evening watering,” he says by way of greeting. His gaze lands on Satoru and steadies there. “And you must be Gojo.”
Satoru flashes a grin. “In the flesh. I’m told it’s very impressive flesh, too.”
Suguru groans under his breath. His father just huffs a laugh, the sound unbothered, and claps him once on the shoulder in a way that feel uncalculated. Like the gesture isn’t about hierarchy or debt but simply welcome.
“Come, sit,” his mother urges. She ushers them down the hall, fussing the whole way—are they hungry, are they thirsty, did the train ride jostle too much, do they want something warmer to wear? She keeps brushing Suguru’s arm like she needs proof he’s solid.
The living room is warm and wide, low table already laid with cups and a teapot steaming gently. Satoru lowers himself onto the cushion across from Suguru and has the startling realization that this might be the first time in months Suguru looks settled. His shoulders hang easy, not tight with vigilance. His mouth curves in a way that he hadn’t seen in a long time.
His mother pours tea for all three, the steam fragrant and soft.
“Drink while it’s hot,” she says, pressing the cup into Satoru’s hands as if he were hers, too.
He doesn’t know what to do with it. No one has ever handed him a cup like that before, as though he needed taking care of. He sips because it’s the only answer. It tastes faintly of chamomile and something floral he can’t name. Comfort, maybe.
“You’ve been helping at the dojo,” his father says to Suguru, settling opposite, voice quiet but heavy as bedrock.
Suguru nods, eyes dropping for a second, like he’s embarrassed by being seen. “Just a few classes. Nothing much.”
“More than nothing,” his mother says firmly. “Fukuda-san came by just yesterday. Said her students won’t stop talking about you. You think I don’t notice the way your sleeves come home smelling like wood polish and children’s sweat?”
Suguru flushes, ducking his head, and Satoru catches it—the faint, helpless smile tugging at his mouth. Something ridiculous twists in Satoru’s chest.
The conversation shifts easily, like water poured from one cup to another. His father asks about the train. His mother sets down a plate of small cakes in front of Satoru.
“I heard you have a sweet tooth,” she says, almost conspiratorial. “So I made plenty. Try this first—it’s citrus from our neighbor’s tree.”
Satoru blinks at her, caught off guard. “You heard?”
Suguru smothers a laugh behind his hand. “I might’ve mentioned it.”
Satoru recovers with a grin, flashing teeth. “Well, can’t deny it now, can I?” He picks up a piece, bites in. It’s bright, sharp, sweet. The flavor almost startles him with how kind it tastes.
“Good?” his mother asks, watching too closely.
“Dangerously good,” he admits, and earns her pleased smile.
They keep feeding him. Pickled plums, simmered vegetables, fish with a glaze that’s almost candy. Every dish arrives like it was planned for him, as if Suguru’s mother had been waiting days to set this table.
Between bites, she peppers him with questions: “Do you eat well at school? Are you sleeping enough? Do you keep warm?”
Satoru wants to make a joke, wants to deflect, but the words stick in his throat. She asks like she’ll worry if he doesn’t answer. Like she’s already worrying. He manages, “I eat what’s put in front of me. Sleep’s another story.”
She clicks her tongue. “We’ll send you back with tea. Helps with restless nights.”
He swallows past the lump in his throat. “You don’t have to—”
“Nonsense,” she cuts him off, brisk. “You’re under my roof. That’s reason enough.”
Her warmth feels like standing too close to a fire—comfort and burn in the same breath.
He wonders, briefly and with too much force, if this is what it would’ve been like to have parents instead of attendants. People who fuss, not because they’re paid to, but because they care, not because they need to measure your strength against the family’s pride.
The thought is raw enough to flay. He shoves it down, grins wider, and tips his chin at Suguru. “Careful, if you keep feeding him like this, he’ll forget instant noodles exist.”
His mother laughs, swatting his arm like she’s known him years. “Good. He should forget them. They’re terrible for you.” She adds, warmly, “And you’re welcome to stay as long as you like, Gojo-kun.”
He doesn’t know how to answer that.
So he stays quiet, watching instead—the way Suguru leans to refill his mother’s cup without thinking, the way his father nods along like every word deserves to be remembered, the way laughter spills out of him with no weight dragging it down. Suguru belongs here. Every movement proves it.
And Satoru—he’s just visiting. Welcomed, yes, treated with kindness that feels undeserved in its ease, but still outside the circle. He can’t resent it. It’s too beautiful.
He takes another bite of rice, slow, and tells himself the truth he doesn’t want: if the system couldn’t give Suguru this, then Satoru probably can’t either. What he can do is stand guard at the edge of it, make sure nothing tears it away. That can be his part.
Maybe that has to be enough.
He takes another bite of rice, slow, and tells himself the truth he doesn’t want: if the system couldn’t give Suguru this, then Satoru probably can’t either. What he can do is stand guard at the edge of it, make sure nothing tears it away. That can be his part.
Maybe that has to be enough.
Still—something won’t quiet. Watching Suguru laugh across the table, the sound unforced, he feels it coil tighter in his chest. Pride, sharp as glass. Relief, dizzying. Want, relentless. A hunger that has nothing to do with food.
He’s been carrying these feelings for so long he mistook them for instinct: the way his body always angles toward Suguru first in a fight, the way a joke doesn’t count unless Suguru’s the one to hear it, the way silence between them feels less like absence and more like permission.
Maybe it’s not instinct. Maybe it’s something larger, heavier, with a name he isn’t ready to give it.
So he just swallows it down with the rice, lets it sit in the hollow of his chest, and hopes no one can see how full he feels of it.
The house folds into night the way paper folds into a crane: seamless, practiced, familiar. A window slides shut. A faucet runs and stops. In the garden, water gathers somewhere unseen, cicadas giving up their chorus one by one.
Suguru’s father hauls a futon from the closet with the patience of a man who’s done this ritual a hundred times. The tatami sighs as he spreads it flat, smooths the corners. He places it beside Suguru’s bed with a nod that makes the gesture feel final.
“You’ll sleep here,” he tells Satoru, like it’s the most ordinary thing. “The boards don’t creak much on this side.”
Satoru grins, sharp by reflex. “I don’t creak much either. Perfect match.”
The man just chuckles, shakes his head once, and leaves them to it.
When the door closes, Suguru gestures toward his own bed. “You should take it.”
Satoru sprawls deliberately on the futon, hands behind his head. “Why? Afraid I’ll steal the blanket?”
“You need it more than I do,” Suguru says simply. “You didn’t exactly look steady earlier.”
The words sting because they’re true. He tries to wave them off. “I’m fine.”
Suguru just looks at him. The kind of look that doesn’t need argument because it’s already won.
Ten minutes later, against every instinct to prove him wrong, Satoru finds himself in Suguru’s bed. The mattress is softer than he expected, the sheets faintly smelling of lavender. He lies flat, arms crossed over his chest like he’s preparing for burial. His skin prickles. He can’t settle.
He lasts fifteen minutes.
Then he’s slipping out as quietly as someone his size can manage, pillow tucked under one arm. The futon waits like it knew he’d come back. He drops onto it, close enough to brush Suguru’s sleeve if he reached.
Suguru shifts, eyes still closed, voice low with sleep. “Do you ever stay put?”
“Shut up,” Satoru whispers back, not unkind.
Suguru huffs, the barest laugh, and gropes blindly for the blanket between them. He tugs it just enough that it falls across Satoru’s hip, careless but deliberate. “Figured you’d be down here,” he murmurs, softer now, like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
Satoru swallows. The words shouldn’t hit as hard as they do, but something about the ease of them—Suguru knowing exactly where he’d end up, accepting it without question—makes his chest ache.
For a long moment, he just lies there, pretending the futon itself isn’t holding him in place.
The quiet stretches. Ceiling beams. The hush of crickets outside. Their breathing, staggered at first, then slowly finding a rhythm.
It should be enough to close his eyes. It isn’t. Restlessness crawls under his skin, jittery as static.
Suguru’s fingers stay there, curled in the blanket between them, too close to ignore. Satoru can feel the warmth of them even through the thin cotton, like heat bleeding across a seam.
After a moment, Suguru shifts again, eyes slitting open just enough to find him in the dark. In the soft dark, his face is closer than it has any right to be. His hand slips from the blanket and lifts, slow, unhurried, until his palm rests against Satoru’s cheek. Cool at first, then warm as it settles.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, voice so quiet it almost blends with the crickets outside.
Satoru freezes under the touch, every muscle braced. But the steady weight of Suguru’s hand doesn’t push, doesn’t demand. It just is. Warmth against skin, permission he doesn’t remember knowing he could have.
Without thinking, Satoru closes his own hand over Suguru’s wrist, thumb pressing to the steady pulse there. The heartbeat is calm, deliberate, as if it has nothing to prove. It thrums against his skin like proof of something he can’t name.
For a moment, it’s the only anchor in the room.
He feels the shape of Suguru’s cursed energy lingering faint in the air, heavy and alive. Not sharp, not dangerous—settled. Like the house itself bends around him.
Satoru swallows hard.
This is the truth he’s been dodging: Satoru is jujutsu society. The Gojo clan’s heir, the Six Eyes, Infinity made flesh. He can’t leave it. Won’t leave it. Every breath he takes, every step, is tied to a system that eats people like Suguru alive.
And it will break Suguru. Slowly, surely.
Even if Satoru loves him through it.
The mantra rises, automatic: The Six Eyes is above. Bow to no one. Need no one.
But another thought wedges in, sharp and small: What if I want someone?
His grip tightens around Suguru’s wrist. The steady heartbeat under his palm doesn’t falter. It makes the thought almost unbearable.
He could want this. He could want Suguru, selfishly, want him to stay, to bend, to endure. But he can’t. Not with him. Never with him.
Suguru’s thumb brushes his cheekbone, absent-minded, patient. “You’re too quiet. That’s never a good sign.”
Satoru lets out a laugh that scrapes instead of rings. “Don’t get used to it.”
The quiet folds back in. Cicadas, the faint sigh of the house, Suguru’s breathing so close it feels like a rhythm meant to guide him. It would be easy to let the silence hold, to say nothing, to pretend he’s just tired.
But the words press up sharp in his chest until they cut free.
“You were right,” he says, softer than he means to.
Suguru frowns, searching his face in the dark. “About what?”
“Leaving.” The word tastes bitter. He forces it out anyway, brittle and clean. “You were right to go.”
Suguru stills, thumb pausing against his skin. The look that crosses his face makes Satoru want to take it back immediately. Like he’s been struck. His mouth parts, confusion flickering into hurt—like he thinks Satoru’s pushing him away, calling him a coward.
So Satoru rushes the rest out, gentler, rawer: “Don’t worry about the higher-ups. No one’s gonna touch you while I’m around.”
Suguru blinks, eyes searching his like he’s trying to catch the lie in it. The silence stretches tight. Satoru holds his gaze anyway, thumb pressed harder to his pulse as if to make sure it stays steady.
Then, because it’s true, because it’s the one thing he can give him, Satoru adds: “This is the best I’ve seen you in months. Don’t come back. Not for them. Not for me.”
That lands. He can see it in the way Suguru’s shoulders loosen, the way the hurt eases from his face even as something unreadable takes its place.
Satoru manages a grin, crooked, too sharp to be real but better than silence. “Maybe I can talk Yaga into letting you graduate anyway. This year’s a joke—we’re just being thrown at curses, not learning anything new. You already know more than half the staff.”
That earns him a sound—small, half a laugh, half a scoff. Suguru shakes his head against the pillow. “Always making promises you can’t keep.”
“Try me,” Satoru shoots back, voice rough but lighter for it.
The weight of Suguru’s hand doesn’t leave his face. The weight of his heartbeat doesn’t leave Satoru’s palm. For a moment it feels like the room has been whittled down to just those two points of contact, steady enough to quiet the restless hum under his skin.
Eventually his eyes drift shut, pulled under not by exhaustion but by the unbearable relief of not having to hold himself up alone.
Hours later, he wakes curled against Suguru, nose tucked near the curve of his shoulder, like his body had gone looking for warmth without asking permission. Suguru doesn’t stir. He sleeps like stone, like the world has finally left him alone long enough to rest.
Satoru stays there a moment longer, listening to the even rise and fall of his chest, memorizing it. Then he eases away, careful, like breaking contact too roughly might shatter something he doesn’t have the right to fix.
The room is pale with the first hint of dawn, the kind of light that makes everything look softer than it really is. He finds his bag by the wall, slings it over his shoulder. His hand hovers over the desk chair where one of Suguru’s sweaters hangs, loose from use. The fabric looks soft, worn at the cuffs.
He shouldn’t. It isn’t his.
But his fingers close around it anyway. He folds it once, tucks it into his bag. A theft and a keepsake both. He tells himself Suguru won’t miss it. He tells himself he’ll bring it back. He hopes Suguru will forgive him—for the sweater, or for leaving, or for both.
In the kitchen, he rummages until he finds a notepad with a grocery list in Suguru’s handwriting, neat and slanted: miso, eggs, daikon. He flips a page, tears out a blank sheet.
The note he leaves is short, tidy, the kind that hides everything between its lines:
Thank you for your kindness. Something important came up. I’m feeling better.
He sets it neatly by the kettle, where he knows it will be found.
Then he presses his hands together, tears the air open, and vanishes back toward the life that will always demand him, sweater and all.
Notes:
okay, i promise things will pick up soon!!! this break is just what needed to happen to set the second half up!!
please let me know if you've enjoyed this ride along with me so far <3 as always, i love hearing your thoughts, and thank you so much for reading!!
Chapter 6: how much it takes to keep distance
Notes:
hey, listen, idk what this is either. i feel like i went into a fugue state and came out with 8k words.
edit: sorry! the ao3 editor hates me personally but formatting should be fixed now!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The dorm is wrong.
It’s been wrong for weeks—since the day Suguru’s door stayed closed and didn’t open again—but tonight the wrongness grows teeth. Satoru walks the corridor like a man caught in a painting, everything too still, colors too flat. His footsteps fall against wood that refuses to echo. Infinity hums, restless, against his skin.
He stops across from the door he’s been pretending not to look at. Same as always: number plate dented from that time Suguru threw his keys too hard; the faint mark near the handle from a cursed energy burn Satoru patched clumsily with tape; the exact shade of wood grain he used to knock against, two beats short, when he wanted to be annoying.
The door doesn’t answer.
Satoru tips his sunglasses down, like maybe the Six Eyes will show him something the rest of him already knows isn’t there. All he gets is the truth in relentless high definition: dust where there shouldn’t be, stale air where there should be warmth, silence shaped like absence.
He almost laughs. Almost kicks the frame, just to hear it complain. Instead he leans his shoulder against the wall and grins too wide at nothing.
“What, you’re not gonna jump out and call me an idiot?”
The corridor doesn’t bite.
He pushes himself upright, walks on. The common room is empty, television dark, air gone stale with disuse. He remembers Suguru hunched on the couch once, a book balanced on one knee, rolling his eyes every time Satoru tried to narrate the show they weren’t watching. Shoko had been stretched across the other end, typing on her phone with unparalleled focus. She’d called them both hopeless. Suguru had called her worse.
The memory clings to the furniture like smoke. Satoru doesn’t breathe too deep.
Every corner of the building is infected. The railing where they used to lean, Shoko’s cigarettes burning themselves out between them. The cracked tile at the foot of the stairs Suguru tripped over once—swore he meant to, argued about it until they both nearly fell over laughing. Even the courtyard outside, littered with cicada shells and sun-baked weeds, feels like it’s crouching in wait.
Now the silence rattles its chains.
He thinks about knocking on Shoko’s door, asking if she wants ramen, a drink, anything that isn’t this. He doesn’t. She’d look at him too sharp, see the cracks he doesn’t want seen. He tells himself he’s sparing her. He tells himself he doesn’t care. He tells himself he’s the strongest.
The ceiling doesn’t argue.
His own door opens too easily, like it was relieved to see him. Inside: the bed that feels more like a hospital cot than a place to sleep; the desk covered in missions he hasn’t read because he doesn’t need to; the window that gives him a view of trees pretending to be free when really they’re penned in by walls.
It’s all wrong.
And it’s not Suguru’s fault, not really. The boy had every right to leave. But Satoru’s skin can’t stop remembering him here. His laugh caught in the rafters, his muttered curses in the kitchen, his hand on the railing at midnight. It’s all still here, except it isn’t.
He thinks: If I stay, I’ll see him everywhere until there’s nothing left of me.
He thinks: I can’t do that.
His grin comes out sharp, bouncing off the walls like glass.
“Alright. Guess this place has outlived its entertainment value.”
Tokyo greets him with noise sharp enough to feel like company, but it doesn’t drown the silence out.
Neon spills down glass in candy colors. Billboards shout until his ears buzz. A drunk in a cheap suit stumbles across the crosswalk like it’s his stage. The air tastes like frying oil and exhaust, like the city itself is running on hunger.
Satoru pushes his sunglasses higher and grins at the sky like it asked for him personally. He belongs here more than he ever did in the dorms. More than he ever did in the Gojo estate, even. At least Tokyo doesn’t pretend to love you. It just dares you to keep up.
The clan doesn’t argue when he takes the money. They don’t argue about much anymore. You don’t argue with a pillar—you just brace under it, hope it doesn’t fall on you.
The Gojo clan’s accounts open doors faster than his name does. Realtors fall over themselves to show him floor-to-ceiling glass, brushed steel kitchens, bathrooms bigger than his dorm room. He lets them talk, lets them gesture at imported fixtures and skyline views, until they’re dizzy with their own sales pitch.
Then he flashes teeth and says, “Perfect. I’ve always wanted to look down on everyone properly.”
They laugh, nervous, not sure if it’s a joke.
He buys height. Buys silence wrapped in glass and steel, forty stories up, a space cut off from the part of the city that still smells like wet pavement and too many people pressed together.
He doesn’t pack. Not properly. He scoops a few uniforms into a duffel, throws his sunglasses case in after them, leaves the key on the desk like a relic. Tells Yaga about his change in address. The wooden planks don’t complain when the door swings shut behind him.
The elevator ride up is smooth enough to feel unreal. He watches himself multiply in the mirrored walls: sunglasses tilted, grin too wide, duffel hanging off his shoulder like he owns gravity. For a second he sees Suguru standing there too, reflection caught mid-sigh, arms folded. He blinks, and the glass gives him back only himself.
The apartment door opens on perfection. Every angle calculated. Every surface sterile. Nothing soft enough to leave a mark.
The maid service has already been through, polishing every surface like they had auditioning for sainthood.
Satoru drops his duffel on the sparkling floor. The echo rings too long, bounces around like it doesn’t know where to land. He laughs and lets it. “Home sweet home.”
He kicks his shoes off, lets them sprawl crooked. Nobody here to fix them. Nobody here to roll their eyes and tell him to act like he’d been raised indoors. Nobody here at all.
The city sprawls out beneath the window, a galaxy built on concrete. He stares down at it like a king surveying territory, but the crown sits heavy. Somewhere down there, curses are chewing holes through lives too small to matter. Dispatch will find him soon enough. They always do.
Later, he checks the kitchen. Pristine, stocked with knives sharp enough to reflect his grin back at him. The fridge holds nothing but filtered air. He imagines Suguru here for half a second—hands steady over the cutting board, hair falling in his face—and slams the door shut before the thought can finish.
The couch is too big. The bed is worse. He sprawls out across it, limbs loose, sunglasses still perched on his face, and it feels like lying in a coffin lined with silk. He thinks about calling Shoko. He thinks about calling—
He doesn’t.
Instead, he counts cracks in the ceiling that don’t exist and waits for morning to trick him into believing the place might feel less like a mausoleum with sunlight on it.
The next day, missions. He doesn’t read the briefs, doesn’t need to. He folds space, annihilates curses, comes home with blood on his shirt and Infinity buzzing too close. The apartment swallows it all without comment.
The third night, he dreams. Suguru’s laugh in the courtyard. Suguru’s hand on the railing. Suguru’s voice saying his name like it’s an anchor. He wakes with his chest aching and the sheets tangled like ropes.
By the fourth morning, he knows: silence won’t save him. He needs something louder.
The house hums with small, ordinary sounds. Chopsticks against bowls. The faint simmer of broth. Cicadas pressing their endless chorus against the shoji screens, so loud the walls might rattle with it.
Suguru sits at the table, hands folded around a cup of tea he hasn’t touched. Steam curls upward in delicate ribbons, carrying the faint scent of roasted leaves. It’s grounding, in theory. In practice, it feels like the cup is holding him steady, not the other way around.
His mother works at the counter, knife tapping rhythm into burdock root, each slice precise. His father sorts the day’s mail into small, neat piles: gas, water, things to answer, things to toss. The room is alive in that soft, practiced way only homes get to be alive. Not with curses. Not with fear. With habit. With care.
Suguru lets the sound wash over him. He wants to let it be enough.
But the question sits behind his teeth, heavy as a curse he can’t exorcise. He rolls it around in his head as he listens to his mother hum a half-remembered tune, as he watches his father smooth a crease from an envelope with his thumb.
Ask, and the silence will change. Ask, and the air will hold its breath.
He takes a sip of tea that’s gone lukewarm, and before he can think better of it, the words slip free.
“Is Dr. Minamoto still practicing?”
The knife stills mid-slice.
His mother looks up, startled. “Dr. Minamoto?”
Suguru nods, eyes fixed on the rising curl of steam. “The one from when I was a kid. I saw him a few times. After school.” A pause, his mouth dry. “He… helped.”
The silence that follows feels thick, like the broth on the stove has seeped into the air. His father sets down an envelope, mouth pressed thin.
Finally, his father says, voice low: “He’s very old now.” A beat. “But—I think he still takes a few patients. Families he’s known for years.” His eyes flick toward the window, remembering. “I ran into his daughter at the station, months back. She said he still works. Slowly. Carefully. But still.”
Suguru swallows, throat rough. “I was just curious.” The lie tastes sour.
His mother’s gaze lingers too long. He feels it, even without looking. She doesn’t press. She never does. Instead she picks the knife back up, slices through the root with care that’s almost too gentle. His father moves an envelope to the paid pile, but the gesture looks absent, distracted.
The room resumes its hum. Ordinary, but different now. Like a thread has been pulled, leaving the whole fabric looser.
The question doesn’t leave with the dishes.
It hangs in the house like incense, faint but clinging, even when no one names it. Suguru feels it the next morning when his mother fusses over the amount of rice he takes, the next afternoon when his father leaves the garden gloves folded on the bench outside his door.
He wants to believe he imagined it. That the slip in his voice, the way the room paused, didn’t leave a trace. But he sees his mother watching him when she thinks he isn’t looking. He hears the softness in his father’s tone, like they’re both bracing for something they can’t quite name.
So he fills the space with motion.
At the dojo, the kids swarm him before he even steps onto the mat. Half in gi, half in regular clothes, all of them loud enough to shake the walls. One tugs at his sleeve, another shoves a lopsided drawing into his hand—stick figures with wild black hair and a dog that looks more like a cloud.
Suguru crouches, balancing the paper on his knee. “That’s me?” he asks, deadpan.
The girl giggles behind her hand. “It’s your hair.”
He makes a face, mock-serious. “If that’s my hair, I need to fire my barber.”
The room erupts in laughter. A boy nearly sprains his ankle demonstrating a kick; Suguru catches him before the damage is done, and shows him the correct form. Another insists she can roll properly now, throws herself sideways onto the mat with more courage than technique.
He corrects them, gently. He laughs with them, softer. And for a while, the ache in his chest loosens.
But later, walking home, the weight creeps back. The kids’ voices echo in his ears, bright and untroubled. He wonders what he’s teaching them, really. To fall safely? To get up twice? Or to believe their teacher isn’t carrying something that could crush them if it slips?
Shoko calls the next evening, insists it’s a video chat. Her hair is mussed, shirt wrinkled, hospital tired, but she smiles in that soft way she doesn’t realize she’s doing sometimes.
“You look better,” she says, and it’s not a question.
“Better than what?”
She rolls her eyes. “Than the last time I saw you. Which isn’t saying much.”
He huffs out a laugh, not quite humor. She doesn’t press. She never does, not like Satoru. They sit there while cicadas scream themselves hoarse in the background.
After a while she says, “He moved out of the dorms.”
It takes him a second. “Satoru?”
“Yeah. Said he needs a big boy apartment now.” She sighs. “Still won’t give me the address, but he’d be dumber than he looks if he thinks I won’t figure it out.”
Suguru doesn’t bite. Doesn’t ask. Just looks away from the screen, out his window and up at the sky. Shoko doesn’t say anything, but he knows she’s measuring the silence, knows she can tell it’s heavier than it should be.
Later that night, the house is too quiet.
He lies awake staring at the ceiling, phone glowing in his hand. Satoru’s name sits at the top of the screen. He types once—How are you—then deletes it. Types again—Do you hate me—and deletes that too.
He scrolls through contacts, through old messages. Shoko’s sarcasm, classmates he hasn’t spoken to in months, names that don’t matter. His thumb hovers, but he never presses send.
The paper in his father’s careful hand drifts into his thoughts: Minamoto-san. A phone number. His father’s reassuring smile when he pressed the note into his palm.
He tries to imagine the call. Hello, I need help. With what? With wanting to burn the world down. With missing someone so much it makes me cruel. With knowing I could hurt the people I love, and not being sure I wouldn’t.
The words won’t fit in his mouth. He turns the phone face down, lets the dark press against him instead.
The small daily rituals should comfort him. They do, almost. But under it all hums the truth he doesn’t want to touch: that no amount of ordinary warmth will fix what’s wrong inside him.
That night, lying in bed, he thinks about the way Satoru used to sprawl across his bed like personal space was optional. He thinks about laughter bouncing off rafters, curses drowned in shared silence, the way their lives had twined together without needing to name it.
He turns his face into the pillow and pretends the ache is just exhaustion.
Morning makes the house gentler.
Light slants through the shoji, thin and gold, catching the steam off the miso his mother set by his elbow. His father’s already in the garden, boots crunching soft in the soil, watering can tilting. The air smells like earth and rice and safety.
Suguru wraps his hands around the bowl, feels the heat soak into his palms. The ache in his chest hasn’t gone, but daylight makes it quieter, less like a wound and more like a weight he can carry.
The folded slip of paper sits beside his tea. His mother must’ve left it there on purpose, as if she knew he’d need to see it first thing. Neat handwriting, ink smudged faint at one corner where his thumb pressed too hard last night.
For a long time he just looks at it, steam rising, cicadas already beginning their chorus outside. He imagines the voice on the other end of the line—old, steady, untouched by curses or death. He imagines himself fumbling through half-truths, metaphors, saying sadness when he means hatred, saying friend when he means love.
It won’t be enough. He knows that. But maybe enough isn’t the point. Maybe the point is just saying anything at all.
Suguru picks up his phone. The screen glares bright against the morning. His thumb hovers over the digits, tracing them like prayer. Then, before he can think himself out of it, he dials.
The line rings, once, twice. His breath hitches on the third.
When the voice finally answers, old and warm and surprised to hear his name, Suguru closes his eyes and exhales like the weight has shifted—not gone, but moved, made shareable.
“Hello, Sensei,” he says, voice steady enough to almost believe. “It’s Geto. I was wondering if you had time to see me.”
The city has a way of spitting you out into places it would rather keep hidden.
One turn off the main road, and the light changes. The late-afternoon sun gets eaten by the buildings, shadows stretched long and heavy across cracked pavement. The alley smells like damp plaster and cheap detergent.
Satoru drifts through it like he owns the ground, sunglasses sliding low, Infinity buzzing under his skin. Cats scatter, tails lashing, as if they know better than to get too close. He looks every inch the intruder, white hair catching the stray light like a warning flare.
The apartment block squats at the end, brick stained dark, windows patched with cardboard where glass should be. Laundry sags from a line across the top floor, shirts the size of a child’s frame limp in the thick air. The whole place looks tired of holding itself up.
The kid is walking—marching, like he’s asking the world to try him—ahead of him.
“You’re Fushiguro Megumi, right?”
“Who are you?” The kid turns, glare lethal for someone his size. “And what’s with that weird face?”
Satoru’s adjusts his glasses; schools his expression as memory intrudes for a second. Toji’s face, blade flashing, the weight of death too close on his skin. He clenches his jaw, shakes it off, grins wide enough to feel like armor.
“You look just like him, is all. Forget it. It’s my own issue.” He rocks back on his heels. “So listen. About your dad. He’s from this big shot jujutsu sorcerer family called the Zen’in, but they’re such scumbags, they make even my skin crawl, so that’s why he left them and had you.”
Megumi just stares at him, unimpressed, but his hands curl into loose fists at his sides, like he’s about to throw a punch.
“You’re one of those who can see things, hm? That makes you pretty special there. You’ve noticed power within yourself, yeah? They just love strong powers, and you’re about that age. Great time to sell off a kid.”
Satoru raises his arms wide, like he’s about to unveil a magic trick or drop to one knee with some ridiculous grand proposal, grin flashing sharp enough to make the gesture feel half-mockery, half-invitation.
“So, Megumi, you’re your dad’s biggest trump card against them. Pisses you off, right? So, about that dad of yours. I k—”
“I don’t care,” Megumi interrupts. “I have no interest in where he is or what he’s doing. I haven’t seen him in years so I don’t remember what he looks like. Tsumiki’s mum has been gone for a while too, so I guess that means they’re done with us.”
Satoru blinks, the grin slipping just enough to show the crack—surprise first, then something sharper, a flare of anger that isn’t for the boy but for the kind of adults who walk away and call it living; he knows that life too well, the cold shape of being parentless even when the house is full.
The late sun spills gold across the balcony as Tsumiki steps out, hands braced on the railing. She peers down to find Megumi rooted at the threshold, the tall man in sunglasses crouching in front of him.
“Ah, Megumi’s home!”
Megumi turns, looking up at her. “That means they’re done with us right? They off enjoying themselves somewhere else?”
He kicks at a rock as his hands curl around the straps of his school bag.
“Are you really a first grader?” Satoru mutters, then pushes up from his crouch, unfolding to his looming height. “If you ever want to know about your father, just ask me. It’s a pretty interesting story. But we have something more important to discuss.”
Megumi scowls, waiting.
Satoru slips his hands back into his pockets, posture all easy arrogance, though Infinity hums restless just under his skin. “What do you want to do? Do you want to go to the Zen’ins?”
Megumi’s eyes flick sideways, to where Tsumiki lingers just inside the apartment. Her ribbon catches the late sun, frayed edges trembling in the draft.
“What would happen to Tsumiki? Would she be happy there?” Megumi asks, voice low, flat. “It all depends on that.”
Satoru doesn’t hesitate. “No. Not a chance.”
Something tightens, then unravels in Megumi’s face. The scowl stays, but it’s different now—less anger, more decision. He straightens his small shoulders, looks up like he’s already older than he should be.
“Then we’re not going,” he says. No wavering. Just fact.
For a moment, the only sound is the city’s pulse outside, cars hissing down wet asphalt, cicadas starting up again in the dusk.
Satoru studies him, Six Eyes sharpening every flicker of cursed energy in the boy’s body—fear, steel, exhaustion all tangled together. It shouldn’t feel like relief. But it does.
A slow grin spreads across his face, sharp enough to be mistaken for cruelty. “Good answer. Leave the rest to me then.”
Megumi turns first, muttering under his breath as he shoulders past the door. His scowl is fixed sharp enough to cut, but the set of his jaw makes him look smaller, not bigger. Tsumiki hesitates on the balcony, ribbon trembling, then hurries after him.
Satoru follows, uninvited. His steps are too loud for the narrow stairwell, too bright in a place that feels like it only knows how to shrink.
The apartment inside is worse than he expected. Wallpaper curling at the edges, tatami patched with tape. A single fan turns tired circles in the corner, pushing hot air around. The air smells faintly of instant noodles gone stale.
Tsumiki ducks her head, embarrassed, like the place is her fault. Megumi plants himself between Satoru and the couch, arms folded tight, as if his glare could block him out.
“You don’t have to—” Tsumiki starts, voice quiet.
Satoru cuts her off with a grin sharp as glass. “What, let you two keep living in this dump until the Zen’in knock the door down? Cute idea, but no.”
Megumi’s face darkens, fists curling at his sides. “We can take care of ourselves.”
“Sure,” Satoru says, too easy, too cruel. “Until the money runs out. Until somebody bigger notices you. Then what? You think this place is enough to keep you safe?” He gestures wide, sunglasses glinting. “You’re strong, kid. But you’re not that strong yet.”
The words hang heavy, sharper than he meant them. Tsumiki’s eyes go wet, but she doesn’t speak. Megumi doesn’t flinch, doesn’t break—just clenches his jaw harder, like he’s willing to chew stone before giving Satoru the satisfaction.
Satoru sighs, rubbing the back of his neck. “Look. You don’t have to like it. You don’t even have to like me. But you’re coming with me. You’ll eat better, sleep better, train better. I’ll deal with the Zen’in. That’s what I’m for.”
The silence thickens. Cicadas scream outside.
Finally, Megumi asks, voice sharp as broken glass: “And what do you want from us?”
Satoru crouches just enough to catch his eye. The grin that spreads across his face this time is slower, quieter, but no less dangerous. “I want you to push yourself. Do your best. Get stronger.”
Megumi glares at him, unblinking.
Strong enough to keep up with me, Satoru thinks, but doesn’t say.
Night spreads across Tokyo like ink, all neon veins and glass spires. From forty stories up, the city looks endless—like you could drown in it and never hit bottom.
Satoru kicks the door open with his heel, sunglasses still perched like it’s daylight. “Welcome home,” he declares, and waves the two of them inside with a sweep of his arm.
The kids hesitate in the doorway. Tsumiki’s eyes roam over the gleaming floors, the glass walls spilling citylight, the furniture that looks too sharp to touch. She grips her bag straps tight, voice small: “It’s… really big.”
Megumi scowls, mutters, “Too big.”
Tsumiki lingers, fingers brushing the back of a chair, like she’s afraid she might smudge it.
“It doesn’t feel like a home,” she admits, almost to herself.
Satoru grins, sharper than he means to. “Then make it one. I’m not picky.”
She blinks at him, startled by the irreverence, but something in her shoulders eases.
He waves a hand toward the hall. “Go wild. Pick any room you want. I’ve got space coming out my ears.”
Tsumiki blinks at him. “Any room?”
“Yep. Even the one with the stupid chandelier. Don’t ask, it came with the place.”
She bites back a smile, and nods. Megumi just grumbles and disappears down the hall, bag dragging behind him like a protest.
Later, he orders dinner—too much, because what the hell do kids eat? He taps through menus until the order total makes the delivery guy swear when he shows up at the door. Boxes pile across the counter: noodles, curry, fried chicken, rice balls, three different cakes because Satoru couldn’t decide.
Tsumiki stares at the spread, lips pressed thin. “That must’ve been expensive.”
Satoru waves her off, plopping cross-legged on the floor. “Don’t sweat it. Clan money. They can afford to feed you.”
She sits carefully at the table, unwrapping chopsticks with precise fingers, like she doesn’t want to waste even that. Megumi plants himself on the far side, eating in silence, every movement defensive.
Halfway through the meal, Tsumiki glances at him, wary. “Do you… always eat like this?”
Satoru smirks, ripping into a chicken wing. “Nope. Usually worse.” He leans in, lowering his voice like it’s a secret. “Don’t tell anyone, but I’m terrible at cooking. Fire alarms love me, though.”
Tsumiki hides a smile behind her hand. Not giggling, not quite—just the start of it, reluctant but real.
Megumi bites out something like idiot under his breath. Satoru hears it, grins wider.
Later, bellies full and boxes strewn like casualties, Tsumiki drowsily herds Megumi to wash up then they separate into the rooms they’d chosen, doors side by side.
When the apartment finally quiets, Satoru steps onto the balcony, phone in hand. Up here, it should feel like control. Instead it feels like being the last person awake in the world.
He scrolls until Shoko’s name glows. For a second his thumb hovers, the urge to shove the phone back in his pocket almost winning. Then he hits call.
She picks up on the third ring, voice flat with exhaustion. “Gojo. It’s past midnight.”
“Yeah, yeah. But listen—” He leans against the glass, sunglasses shoved into his hair. “I might’ve… taken in a couple kids.”
There’s silence on the line. He can almost see her expression through it—eyebrows climbing, mouth half open, eyes narrowing like she’s not sure she heard right.
“…You what?”
“Two of ’em. A boy and a girl. Fushiguro’s.” He rocks back on his heels. “Long story, but the short version is: better me than the Zen’ins.”
Her voice comes back, clipped. “Satoru. You can’t just take children like they’re… strays you found on the street.”
“I know,” he says too quickly, defensive. Then softer, as if the words scrape on the way out: “I know. But they don’t have anyone else. And I’m not letting them get swallowed up by that clan.”
The city hums beneath him. He waits for her to laugh, to tell him he’s being ridiculous. Instead, he hears her exhale, long and thin.
“You,” she says finally, “are out of your damn mind.” Another pause. Then, softer: “There’s no way you both made me an aunt this early.”
The words hit deeper than he expects. He laughs once, quick, almost ragged. “Guess congratulations are in order, huh?”
“You think this is funny?” Her voice sharpens for a second. “Do you even know what you’re doing? Kids aren’t like missions, Satoru. You can’t just… grin your way through this one.”
Something tugs at him then, low and aching. He tilts his head back, watching the sky swallow what few stars Tokyo has left. His voice, when it comes, is thin around the edges. “Maybe not. But if I didn’t, no one would. And I’m not about to let them learn the world’s as cruel as it wants to be, not yet.”
The line is quiet for a long time. Then she sighs again, softer this time, weariness folding into concern. “You’re unbelievable.”
“Yeah, but I’m brilliant, also.”
“You’re exhausting is what you are.” Another pause. “We’ll talk more tomorrow. Get some sleep.”
The line clicks dead before he can answer.
He stands there a while longer, phone loose in his hand. Inside, the apartment is too big, too clean, too quiet. But two rooms down, he can feel the faint pulse of cursed energy, small and steady, curled together.
The Six Eyes told him Megumi had gone to his own room earlier. But when he slides the door open later, both kids are tucked into the same bed, dwarfed by its size—Tsumiki’s arm looped around her brother, Megumi curled close despite his sulking.
For a moment, Satoru just stands there, sunglasses dangling from his hand, grin stripped away. The sight punches something sharp and quiet into his chest.
He closes the door soft, Infinity humming steady, and tells himself it’s fine. They’ll be safe here. That has to be enough.
The office smells faintly of old paper and green tea. Not sterile, not clinical—lived in, worn soft by decades of listening. A clock ticks in the corner, steady as a pulse.
Suguru sits in the same chair he always does, back straight, hands folded loosely in his lap. The ritual has become familiar: the quiet greeting, the tea poured and left untouched, the weight of Dr. Minamoto’s gaze—steady, never prying, but impossible to ignore.
They’ve been doing this a while now. A month, maybe more. Long enough that the strangeness has dulled into routine. He doesn’t flinch as much when silence stretches between them; doesn’t fumble for the right shape of a lie when the truth presses too sharp. Minamoto has a way of letting silence do the work, like time itself is a scalpel.
Outside, winter has already crept in. The mornings bite at his lungs, evenings fall too early, the air smells of smoke from neighborhood stoves. December came and went almost without him noticing.
Almost.
His gaze drifts to the window as he speaks, voice low, measured. “We didn’t celebrate his birthday this year.”
Minamoto doesn’t ask who. He doesn’t have to.
Suguru exhales slowly. “Usually it’s—stupid. Cake, drinks, Shoko pretending she isn’t humoring us. He insists on something ridiculous, and I tell him he’s an idiot, and it’s fine. It’s… us.” His mouth twists, humorless. “This year we spoke on the phone. Short. He said he had to go. That was it.”
The clock ticks. A car passes outside, muffled.
“He doesn’t come out with us anymore, either,” Suguru continues. “Shoko and I—we still meet. Dinner, drinks. Nothing complicated. But him? Always busy. Always a mission. Or he just doesn’t answer.” His voice dips. “It’s like he’s… somewhere else now.”
Minamoto folds his hands, waiting.
Suguru’s jaw tightens. He tips his head back against the chair, eyes shut. “The truth is… I feel it even when he calls. He’s there, but not. Like he’s keeping something out of reach on purpose. And I don’t know if I should be angry or if I should be—” His throat closes around the word. Lonely.
He swallows hard, opens his eyes, finds the steady lines of the room again. “It shouldn’t bother me. He’s always been… too much. Too loud, too bright. But he was always there. For me.” His fingers curl into his sleeve. “Now it feels like the closer I reach, the further away he is.”
The silence sits with him. Not judging, not demanding. Just there, like a hand steady at his back.
Suguru lets out a laugh, thin and tired. “There are so many things I want to say to him. But messages feel… wrong. Impersonal. And I don’t know if I could face him, not when I don’t even know what he’d see when he looked back.”
He glances at Minamoto then, half-expecting reproach, half-expecting pity. What he finds instead is quiet thought.
Finally, the doctor speaks, voice as even as the tick of the clock. “Sometimes, words come easier when you don’t aim them directly. Have you considered writing a letter?”
Suguru blinks, startled.
“A letter,” Minamoto repeats, calm. “Not to send, necessarily. But to write. To give shape to what you carry. The postal service still works, if you ever decide it deserves to reach him. But for now—perhaps you need the words more than he does.”
Suguru sits back, the thought heavy in his chest. A letter. Simple, ridiculous, almost old-fashioned. But something in it stirs—an image of ink soaking into paper, of words existing somewhere outside the cage of his skull.
He exhales, slow. “Maybe,” he says. The word tastes strange, like an admission he wasn’t ready for.
Minamoto nods once, and the silence returns, steady as the clock.
Suguru thinks that’s the end of it, that the session has folded into quiet the way it usually does. But the old man leans forward slightly, voice calm, careful.
“You’ve spoken of the distance,” he says. “Of the ache it leaves. But tell me—when you’re not thinking of your friends, or your family, or responsibility… what’s left? What fills the space?”
Suguru’s throat tightens. He looks down at his hands, folded too neatly in his lap, like the shape alone will hold him together.
“Nothing,” he says finally. The word drops heavy between them, more raw than he means it to be. “Just… quiet. Like I’m waiting for something I can’t name. And when it doesn’t come, all I can think is—maybe this is it. Maybe this is all there is left.”
January has a way of making the cold even crueler than December does. The holidays are over; the streets have lost their noise. It’s just cold now, cold and hungry, as if Tokyo itself decided to turn away from its people for a while.
Satoru’s apartment wears the season well. Too tall, too clean, too empty—glass swallowing what little light there is, polished steel reflecting nothing back. The kind of place winter doesn’t leave, even when the heat’s keeps it warm.
He sleeps badly here. He’s slept badly everywhere since.
Tonight’s no different. He startles awake in the dark, breath ragged, sweat already cooling against his skin. For a moment he doesn’t know if it was a nightmare or a memory. They blur together now. The flash of steel, the weight of blood in his mouth, Toji’s face close enough to burn itself into the back of his eyes. The way the Six Eyes had forced him to see every detail—how the blade split the air, how the muscles in Toji’s arms bunched, how his own body was too slow. The exact second he understood he was about to die.
He sits up hard, back pressed against the headboard, ribs aching with each breath. Infinity hums under his skin, restless, like it doesn’t trust him to keep breathing on his own. He drags both hands through his hair, gripping tight, as if that alone could keep him anchored here and not in the dirt of that mission.
The thought gnaws through him, the same one that’s been circling since that day: If it happened once, it can happen again.
He squeezes his eyes shut. Behind the lids: red, white, the crunch of his own body breaking. His throat spasms around something like a laugh, sharp and cracked. He can’t live like this. Can’t keep flinching awake, half-convinced the world has found another Toji to send after him.
The Six Eyes opens full, merciless. It pours the world into him whether he wants it or not—the buzzing of the city outside, Megumi’s shoes scattered in the genkan, molecules shivering in the glass, cursed energy leaking from every corner, Tsumiki’s pink bag in her room. Too much. Always too much. He hates it. He needs it.
And then—sudden, clean, as if the math had been waiting for him all along—he sees it. The circuit. The loop. The way to thread cursed energy through himself endlessly, refine it as it flows, recharge what it spends. A hum that won’t falter. A barrier that won’t drop.
His lips part on a shaky sound. “Of course. Right.”
He sits forward, bare feet on the cold floor, and tests it. Infinity slams into place—jagged at first, biting, then smoothing as he forces the pattern tighter. The hum grows constant, low and merciless, pressing against his skin from the inside out.
The pain is immediate. His skull feels split open, light scorching through every nerve. Blood slicks his upper lip, hot and sharp, trickling faster the longer he holds the loop. His ears ring with static, his jaw aches from clenching. His body fights it, brain cells burning like fuse wire.
He doesn’t stop.
Reverse cursed technique claws forward like instinct sharpened into desperation. He drags it through himself, tearing raw energy into healing patterns, patching what the loop is frying. His head jerks with the effort, neck muscles straining, breath hissing through his teeth. Every cycle is brutal, violent—but he forces his body to adapt, refuses to let the system collapse.
Minutes stretch, endless. His body trembles, a marionette pulled by too many strings. Blood smears down his chin, onto his collar, hot against the chill. His vision flickers white at the edges, but the hum keeps steadying, steadying, until it feels less like a fight and more like inevitability.
And then—it holds.
Infinity hums smooth, endless. Not a weapon now, but a constant. A skin, a cage, a heartbeat under his own. The noise in his chest eases. For the first time since that day, the thought of someone breaking through doesn’t make his body recoil.
His laugh comes out hoarse, more rasp than sound. “Untouchable,” he whispers into the dark.
The word tastes bitter. It feels like a vow.
He slumps back against the headboard, chest heaving, blood drying on his skin. The city glows faint through the glass, a smear of light against the black. Infinity buzzes around him, soft and merciless, the lullaby of a prison he built himself.
For the first time in weeks, sleep drags him under without a fight.
And the barrier stays up.
The bar is warm, too warm, all lacquered wood and cheap neon signs humming like gnats. It smells of smoke and fried food, clatter of glasses rising up from the tables pressed shoulder to shoulder. A place where students and salarymen both come to forget the shape of their days.
Suguru arrives first, because Shoko told him not to be late. She’s already at the booth, hair pinned up in the messy way it gets when she doesn’t care anymore, drink sweating in her hand. She lifts an eyebrow at him when he slides in.
“Happy birthday,” she says, flat but not unkind.
He smiles faintly. “Thanks.”
The twins had made him cards that morning. His parents had fussed over dinner, as though he were still small. It should be enough. It almost is. But there’s still the empty space in the booth beside him, the one Shoko deliberately hasn’t filled with anyone else.
“Is he coming this time?” Suguru asks.
“Of course he will. It’s your birthday.” She sips. “Don’t worry. He’ll show. He always shows, eventually.”
Suguru hums low in his throat. He doesn’t ask if she believes it, or if she’s just saying it for him.
When Satoru does come, it’s loud. The door slams back, his laugh too bright for the space, sunglasses glinting even under neon. He looks like he’s here for a party the rest of the world forgot to throw.
Suguru’s chest tightens. He hasn’t seen him in months.
The grin is the same, the voice pitched deliberately too high, the swagger practiced. But Suguru doesn’t need Six Eyes to know it’s an act. He can see the exhaustion in the corners of Satoru’s mouth, the way Infinity hums too steady around him, like it’s working harder than it should.
“Look at you,” Satoru crows, sliding into the booth with enough force to jostle the table. “Birthday boy. Old man Geto. Nineteen never looked so depressing.”
Shoko snorts, unimpressed. “Sit down, Gojo. Don’t scare the staff.”
But Suguru doesn’t laugh. He watches him, quiet, and feels the ache sharpen—months of distance collapsing into this one moment, where Satoru is both too close and still out of reach.
Eventually, he forces a huff. “You’re older than me.”
“Oh, so you finally admit I’m your senior,” Satoru grins, poking his cheek.
Suguru swats his hand away, scowl weak at the edges. The banter should feel familiar. It doesn’t. Too much space has built between them; the words clang like coins dropped into an empty jar.
Satoru leans back, sunglasses sliding low. From the outside he looks effortless—laughter ready, shoulders loose, voice pitched for a crowd. Inside, every nerve is strung taut. He catalogs everything the Six Eyes throws at him: the careful slope of Suguru’s shoulders, the pulse steady at his throat, the faint dip at the corner of his mouth that wasn’t there before. It’s unbearable. So he grins wider, lets the act sharpen.
He waves down the waitress, orders half the menu without asking what anyone wants. Drinks come first. He slams one back too fast, lets the burn anchor him. Another follows. He hates the taste. That’s the point.
Suguru watches. The mask is too easy to see through when you’ve grown up beside it. Satoru is all noise and motion, but the space between his laughs is too sharp, his hands restless against the glass. Infinity hums steady around him, thick enough to feel across the table. A wall disguised as carelessness.
Suguru lets him. But each dodge lands heavier than it should, like proof. For a moment, the ache swells sharp, unbearable. Then the waitress sets down another round, and Satoru seizes the distraction like it’s a lifeline.
“Finally,” he crows, reaching too fast, nearly knocking over Shoko’s glass.
“Careful, you idiot,” Shoko snaps, steadying it with two fingers.
Satoru grins like nothing happened, already halfway through his own. The liquor bites hard, stomach protesting, but he rides the burn with a laugh sharp enough to pass for real.
“You’re a lightweight,” Suguru says, dry as dust. “You always have been.”
“Correction—” Satoru wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, flashing teeth. “I’m just efficient. One drink, twice the fun.”
“Twice the headache, more like,” Shoko mutters. She waves down the waitress for water. “You’re not puking on my shoes again. I’m not your babysitter.”
Suguru huffs, the sound almost a laugh. “He’s hopeless.”
And for a flicker of a moment, it feels like it used to—Satoru loud, Shoko exasperated, Suguru watching with the kind of fondness he doesn’t say out loud. The neon hums above them, the clatter of dishes filling the gaps. For once, the silence doesn’t hurt.
Satoru leans back in the booth, arms sprawled across the top like he’s claiming it. “See? This is great. Birthday boy, best friends, unlimited drinks. It’s like we never missed a beat.”
But his words slur faint at the edges, Infinity humming steady and relentless around him, and Suguru knows: they’ve missed plenty.
Shoko pushes the water into his hand, firm. “Drink.”
He makes a face but takes it, gulping down half if only to prove he can. Then he sets the glass down with a clatter, grin too wide. “Ta-da! Perfectly fine.”
Suguru shakes his head, lips twitching. For the first time in months, the weight in his chest eases—just a little, just for now.
The food comes in waves—skewers slick with sauce, plates of fried chicken, bowls of noodles that steam against the neon. Satoru eats like he hasn’t seen a meal in weeks, chopsticks flashing, talking around mouthfuls with that same reckless bravado. Shoko calls him disgusting; he only grins wider, orders more.
Suguru eats slower, steady, watching the rhythm of it all. For a while, it almost feels like before—three corners of a table, laughter biting against the static hum of the bar, voices overlapping. Almost.
Then comes the cake. Shoko produces it like she’s performing a trick, tiny candles guttering in the smoke-thick air. She sings one line of the birthday song, flat and off-key, and Satoru howls the rest loud enough to turn heads. Suguru shakes his head, embarrassed, but something warm threads through his chest when they shove the fork into his hand and demand he try it first.
“You’re nineteen,” Shoko says, leaning on her elbow, a rare smile softening her mouth. “Don’t screw it up.”
“Nineteen’s not old enough to screw up less,” Satoru adds, dropping a small, sloppily wrapped package into his lap. “Here. Don’t say I never got you anything.”
Shoko’s gift follows—a neat little box, though she waves it off like it’s nothing.
Suguru thanks them both, voice quiet but sure. For a fleeting second, the ache in his chest loosens. This is what they used to be. This is what he misses.
But then the plates empty, the candles burn low, and the night insists on moving forward.
When they step out into the street, the air is cold enough to sting. Neon gives way to shadow, and the hum of the bar fades into the restless city night. Shoko peels off first, waving a lazy hand. “Don’t let him wander into traffic,” she calls to Suguru, nodding at Satoru, whose grin has gone sharp-edged with drink.
“Hey, I’m perfectly stable,” Satoru protests, immediately tripping over the curb.
Suguru catches his elbow before he can stumble into the gutter. “Hopeless,” he mutters again, but his grip lingers longer than it needs to.
For a few blocks, they walk in silence, the air between them heavy with all the things they haven’t said. Satoru’s laugh is quieter now, words slurred at the edges, Infinity humming close enough to make the space between them thrum. Suguru wants to cut through it, to force him to drop the mask, but the words won’t come clean.
Finally, at a crosswalk, he tries anyway. “Satoru.”
Satoru turns, grin still plastered on, too sharp under the streetlight. “Yeah?”
The words scrape Suguru’s throat raw. “You don’t have to do this. Not with me.”
For a heartbeat, the grin falters. Infinity flickers. Then it locks back into place, too bright. “Do what?”
Suguru exhales hard, frustrated. He wants to say act like you’re fine. Pretend the distance doesn’t hurt. Pretend you don’t miss me too. Instead he only reaches out, fingers brushing against the invisible wall humming steady between them.
Satoru stops, just enough of a stumble that Suguru steadies him by the arm. For half a second, he almost lets the barrier drop. Almost. But then he pulls back, shaking his head with a laugh that cuts sharp.
“Careful, Suguru. You’ll make me think you actually care.”
Suguru’s hand falls. The ache in his chest swells until it feels like it might split him open. He swallows it down—but not all of it. His voice comes rough, bare.
“Of course I care.”
The words land heavier than he means them to. No joke, no mask, just truth. Too much truth, maybe.
Satoru freezes. The grin slips, crooked now, barely hanging on. Infinity hums hard under his skin, restless, almost frantic. His chest feels hollow and full at once, like the air’s been knocked out of him.
For a moment, he wants to hear it again. Wants Suguru to say it until the ache in his ribs finally eases, until the empty stretch of the last few months closes. Wants to believe he isn’t so untouchable that no one can reach him.
But the wanting is worse than the silence. It opens something in him that he can’t afford to show.
The Six eyes is above.
“Please,” he says, the word raw, breaking free before he can smother it. His hand comes up, not to touch, just to stop. “Don’t. Don’t say anything else.”
Suguru blinks at him, confusion and hurt flashing sharp across his face. But he doesn’t push. He never does, not when it matters most.
The quiet gnaws at Satoru, louder than the whole city. He can’t meet Suguru’s eyes. He tips his head back instead, stares up at the blurred streetlight glow. Thinks about how to love him is to suffer him—his noise, his arrogance, his walls that never lower. Thinks about how being the strongest was never the real loneliness. The real ache is this: the people who leave, the ones who can’t stay, the reminder that even if they care, it won’t be enough to keep them here.
Infinity thrums steady between them, the only thing he knows how to hold onto.
Finally, he forces a grin, sharp and false. “You’ll ruin my reputation if you keep talking like that.”
It’s a lie. Suguru can see it. But Satoru doesn’t give him room to argue. He fumbles with the keys when they get to his building’s lobby, shoulders tense, and pushes the glass doors open with a laugh that’s all teeth.
“Go home, Suguru,” he says, not looking back. “Get some sleep.”
And then the door swings shut, neat and final, leaving Suguru on the street with nothing but the echo of words Satoru begged him not to say.
Notes:
i need you all to pretend with me the drinking age in japan is actually 19 and not 20. wooo fictional world. i made the realisation too late oops! hold onto the happy ending tag? yeah? yeah!
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