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Suguru feels sick to his stomach.
It comes as no surprise. Missions have been picking up steadily with the start of their second year. Missions mean curses. Curses means exorcizing them, and for Suguru exorcizing means swallowing. The curses are consumed quickly but the taste lingers longer, and soon enough it’s time to do it again. And again.
Yesterday was… busy. He’s been choking back bile ever since.
Suguru still eats at mealtimes. It would be rude not to. That doesn’t mean he has not learned over the years how to fill his plate with as little as politely possible, how to move it around for the illusion of eating to kill enough time, and how to finish quickly at just the right moment when Suguru knows he can deftly excuse himself before there’s any risk of having to refuse seconds.
He eats but he’s already too full, practically bursting. He’s full but he’s starving at the same time.
It ebbs and flows. Some times are better than others— times when the springtime sky is the sweetest shade of blue, and the air is full of laughter, and the natto-rice on his plate tastes like warm comfort, not dirty rags. Times when the scent of Satoru’s sweetened tea and Shoko’s cigarettes mingle in the air, and Shoko rolls her eyes if either of the boys bother to complain. Times when Satoru keeps getting crumbs on the picnic blanket, and takes his share of the dumplings but always from Suguru’s plate, one after another. As if he knows that means Suguru will reach for more, like he wants to see him reach for more… to see him not hold back. So he doesn’t.
Suguru tries to remember that feeling now and can’t.
Yesterday was… demanding. So many curses to consume. A new record, in a sick sort of way; Suguru definitely feels sick with it.
Afterwards he couldn’t sleep. He went through the motions, washed up, laid on his futon for hours. Eventually he got up and went walking for a while before dawn. He had no particular plan, simply letting his feet carry him where they would, until he crept back into the dorms, crawled back into his bed come first light.
It’s still early. It’s a Saturday. No one will find him here, still in bed, if he wants to stare at his ceiling a while longer.
He is, of course, wrong about that. Figures.
Satoru doesn’t actually knock. He sort of jiggles the handle of Suguru’s dorm room door, waits a beat for some protest, some sign of refusal. Presuming that none comes, he proceeds to barge right in. He is wearing pajamas. His hair is a mess, his eyes drooping half-closed, his expression all pouty displeasure in a ‘mornings suck’ sort of way.
Suguru doesn’t quite have it in him to roll his eyes. At least not until Satoru trips over to his bed, drops his knees onto Suguru’s futon, and flops down right on top of him.
“Oaf, get off of me.”
“You like it.”
“I disagree.”
But Satoru is not moved. He is sharp-boned and heavy and… warm. That’s him that he feels, not infinity that he’s touching. Satoru rests his cheek on Suguru’s chest and crinkles his nose like something tickles it, probably Suguru’s hair, and for a moment every sensible thought flies out of Suguru’s head.
This isn’t so bad. Weird, and new, but not bad. The warmth permeates and Suguru finds himself relaxing into it in spite of himself.
Satoru sure seems comfortable, and also in no real hurry to explain himself.
“Don’t you have a bed?”
“Mm. Yours is better.”
“Every futon in this dormitory is identical.”
“You’re missing the point, Suguru,” he drawls, stretching out the vowels of his name like they’re made of chewing gum— like he’s going to blow a bubble, make it pop— and all of it is no help for the nauseous knot tightening in Suguru’s stomach. Satoru goes on to say, “Yours is better because you are in it.”
Suguru huffs. It’s predictably pointless trying to reason with him. Satoru will find a way to talk them around in circles no matter what.
“I didn’t sleep well.”
Satoru nods sagely, humming his agreement. “Yes, wandering campus for hours is not generally good for sleeping.”
The comment needles him, though he knows it’s meant to and for that reason more than any other he can’t let it show that it’s working. He wants to ask why Satoru knows about his late night comings-and-goings when there’s no earthly reason he should— not if he was sleeping at the time— but that’s a mystery he chooses to leave for another time. He’s too tired.
“So what’s eatin’ ya?”
The irony is almost funny. Almost. Suguru swallows roughly, his throat too dry. “It’s more like me eating them, you know.”
“Them. Right.” Still sprawled on his chest, Satoru’s gaze is focused downward on some fixed point— Suguru’s collarbone, maybe, or something else he can’t see. His crystal-blue eyes are partly shaded by the fall of his hair, messy from sleep. Sleepy or not, it’s always messy. He likes to be messy, as if it’s some kind of statement. Some small rebellion.
Another moment passes in silence, then Satoru clears his throat and asks, “What’s it like, swallowing curses?”
Suguru doesn’t answer at first. He doesn’t really want to think about it, but Satoru isn’t that easy to shake.
“Describe it to me.”
“My technique? You’ve seen it.”
“Well, sure, but there’s a lot I can’t see.”
Suguru sighs. When he shakes his head, the whisper-fine tips of Satoru’s hair tickle his jaw. “That’s a landmark confession, coming from you.”
“Is it?” Satoru snorts like a heathen. He’s so unserious. That alone is enough to dredge up a smile, somehow, with no regard for Suguru’s sour mood. He feels toyed with when that happens. Satoru is a little too good at getting what he wants.
“I mean, you know. What is it like for you?”
Suguru hasn’t ever tried to explain it. It’s second-nature, really. But he’s picturing it now, feels it coming up like a bad breakfast, this force he can’t resist. He’s picturing it, so he may as well try and find the words.
“There’s this… pull.”
“Pull?” Satoru shifts his weight, crossing his arms over Suguru’s chest to prop up his chin. His expression is a rare one, sleepy still but curious, open. It’s unsettling in a way, like Suguru could fall right in.
He keeps talking anyway. Whatever comes to him, he lets it spill over.
“When I see a curse, I feel a pull in my chest… like a tide. Sort of. Like I’m the ocean and this is just a wave that broke away to strike the shore.”
Suguru wonders if he’s making any sense, but even if he isn’t, it feels sort of good to say it. Satoru just looks at him, listening as the words trip and tumble out one after another.
“But it doesn’t belong out there, not really. It has to come back to the sea, to be absorbed.” He swallows again. “The pull is like… like they’re part of me, like they always were. Just returning home.”
Satoru looks surprised. “Didn’t think it’d sound so romantic.”
Something in Suguru wants to look away, but Satoru holds his gaze pointedly, a bit like a dare. He answers slowly: “Romantic… I guess. Until you remember what they are. Curses. Manifestations of human suffering. They taste like the worst thing you can imagine, even worse than that.”
Satoru makes a sour face.
“Not so pretty, then.” Suguru hesitates. If he says it out loud, he can’t take it back… but he has to. He can’t keep choking on it. “It’s kind of fucked up when you think about it. Feeling like we’re the same, them and I. Knowing how they taste.”
“They’re not the same as you, though. Not at all.”
“How do you know?” Suguru challenges back. “Wielding curses, I know them, Satoru. I know what they want, I know how they feel— I know if they feel, the ones that even can. I understand them. What makes them hunger, what makes them sick. Maybe I’m sick in the same way.”
“What are you saying?” Satoru’s eyes are a little too wide, and suddenly Suguru doesn’t like this game anymore.
“Nothing earth-shattering,” he grits out. Annoyed, he rolls Satoru off his chest to the side, but he’s obnoxiously strong so that doesn’t go as planned. Far from extricating himself, they just wind up laid out alongside one another, just as tangled up than they were before. Days and weeks of frustration bubble up as he growls, “I swallow curses. I stomach them so the world won’t have to.” It’s all he can taste, the bile, the anger and death, and it’s familiar. It’s always been this way. “If you don’t want to know this, then don’t ask stupid questions.”
“Suguru.”
The hand on his chest stops him. He doesn’t meet Satoru’s stare, keeps his eyes low, but he stops pushing him away. He holds his breath.
“Let me hear it. What, you think I can’t handle it?” There’s a jeer in his tone, a prideful jab, but Suguru knows what he saw in his eyes. Even Satoru doesn’t want to know if he’s a monster deep down. Who would? “I asked because I really want to know.”
Suguru keeps his head bowed. Satoru knocks their heads together, pain in the ass that he is, but then he holds them there— holds Suguru close by the scruff of his neck and it shocks a ragged breath from his lungs.
Their noses almost touch. It’s too much; he can’t watch. Suguru shuts his eyes.
“After you swallow them, what happens?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you have to process them somehow? Or is that it?”
Suguru never thought about it before. “There’s nothing after.”
“Nothing,” Satoru deadpans. Suguru bristles.
“They’re tamed. Tucked away.” It’s a stupid question; there is nothing else, nothing more to say. “Then I just… put it out of my mind.”
“Does that work?”
Sullenly, he admits, “Rarely.”
That’s why he goes walking for hours. That’s why he pushes food around his plate, one small Sisyphean task swapped for another.
“Okay. So what if you tried to do something after,” Satoru asks. “Like, a ritual. Purification, cleansing, something like that.”
“To what end? They’re under my control. It’s done. They can’t hurt anyone anymore.”
“Except you.”
The silence that follows is extremely loud.
“They hurt you, even if only in your mind.” Satoru shifts against the crown of his head, his nose brushing Suguru’s cheek. When he whispers, it slips right into his ear, “So cleanse your mind.”
“And what,” Suguru huffs, “you want me to just invent a ritual?”
“Sure!”
He scoffs. “That isn’t how rites work.”
“Oh? Well if you’re so smart, where do they come from, eh? That’s right! Somebody made them up! At some point, our ancestors made them all up, every single one.”
They’re still so close and Satoru’s voice is too loud for the morning mood, too bright and brash. He’s just like that. He’s all big gestures and sweeping generalizations and Suguru can’t work out for the life of him how Satoru of all people wormed his way into the quiet corners of Suguru’s heart.
But he did. He did.
“So, why not make something up?” Satoru continues. “Nothing’s stopping you. Someday, hundreds of years from now, your purification ritual could be a hit all over Japan.”
Suguru scoffs. “With sorcerers, maybe. There aren’t enough of us to make anything a ‘hit,’ and you know it.”
“Nah, just think of how many folk traditions have their true origins in jujutsu, forgotten over centuries. People don’t need to understand,” Satoru concludes. “They just need to have hope.”
“Right.” Hope was the luxury of the weak. Sorcerers can’t afford that kind of thinking; only their strength would keep them alive.
“Or it could be just for you,” Satoru suggests. “Just for your own peace of mind. Processing the sensation, the unsettling feelings. Remembering who you are.”
Suguru bristles again. I know who I am, he wants to say.
Don’t I?
“You mean like a meditation?”
“Sure,” Satoru agrees. He’s still holding on to Suguru, keeping him close. It’s a little too warm sharing his space, his air, but it feels good at the same time. Suguru decides to let it be. “Meditation, with a little something extra.”
“Huh?”
“C’mere.”
Satoru pulls away suddenly. It leaves behind a strange sensation, a sort of lurch like a car engine stalling out, losing momentum. He misses Satoru’s proximity even when he hasn’t gone far, scooting up the mattress to lean on some pillows against his headboard. Then he tugs on Suguru’s shoulder.
“I said come here, Suguru, c’mon,” he complains, making a fist in Suguru’s well-worn tee. Fine. He allows Satoru to wrangle him until he’s seated between Satoru’s spread knees, wedged there with his back turned. Then he’s being tugged again until he submits to laying back against Satoru’s chest.
There’s not an earthly reason why Suguru should put up with all this manhandling. He doesn’t stop him, hardly even resists, and if that’s somehow damning then so be it. Missing Satoru’s warmth surely has something to do with it.
Suguru still sounds huffy when he asks, “Are you quite done?”
“Almost,” Satoru laughs. “Lend me your hand?”
Uncertain what this is about, Suguru complies. Satoru’s right hand closes around his, his skin surprisingly soft, uncalloused. No, that shouldn’t be surprising. With Infinity always at his disposal, it isn’t all that often that he deigns to touch the world, or let it touch him.
But he touches Suguru now.
The thought sticks there, frozen in time from the exact moment Satoru brings their joined hands to his chest, palm settled over his heart. It’s his own hand that he feels, but Satoru’s is there too, lending it weight.
“When you feel the pull, where do you feel it?”
Suguru swallows dry. Too entranced by the strangeness of the situation in which he finds himself, he isn’t prepared to form words and his throat rasps when he tries.
“Just… everywhere, I guess.”
“No one nexus?”
Suguru knows that isn’t quite right. Still, he hesitates. Beneath his hand, he feels his heart kick like a drum.
“Show me,” Satoru says.
Suguru moves his hand before he can question it further, shifting down from his heart to his solar plexus. Then just below that by an inch or two. Not quite to his belly, more over his stomach. That’s the seat of this hunger, the well into which everything flows.
Suguru’s stomach churns a bit. He’s not sure he likes this. He’s not sure why he’s doing this, why he’s going along with it, but Satoru acts so sure, so confident, that he tows him along easily.
That’s a half truth. Satoru couldn’t actually drag this out of him, not if he didn’t want it known. There’s a part of Suguru that aches to be known, a part that knowingly flirts with disaster.
“Right here?”
“There.” It’s embarrassing how his voice breaks over the word. Tears sting his eyes and he resists it; he never cries. Embarrassing, embarrassing…
“Breathe with me, Suguru.”
Oh, no, no. His stuttered inhale gives him away, but it’s not so bad as he feared. Satoru’s breath is even, calming, steadying him. Buoying him along so that even in this storm he won’t drown.
Inhale. Exhale.
Suguru follows the rise and fall of Satoru’s breath. He feels it against the back of his ribs and lets Satoru set the rhythm between them, as he so often has before. Maybe he’s a coward for that. Maybe he just doesn’t trust himself to know what’s right. What’s okay, what’s too much.
He breathes and finds his limbs growing heavy. He’s so tired. Satoru is speaking again, but the words reach him almost as if in a dream.
“When curses become a part of you, that changes them. I’m sure of it.”
“Hm?”
Satoru moves their hands in slow circles over his stomach, slow and steady with the rise and fall of their breath. Just when Suguru is drifting again, he answers.
“It’s not you turning into them. Nothing like that. It’s them taking on a bit of you. I would know,” Satoru’s voice lilts playfully and it sounds like the ringing of a bell. It’s such an absurd thought that Suguru knows he must be dreaming. “I wish you could see what I see.”
Suguru’s tongue feels heavy. He wonders aloud, “What do you see?”
“Your curses, their aura, it changes over time. Like Rainbow Dragon, and sting-ray, even that one hookworm guy.” Satoru rattles off half a dozen more, almost babbling, and this is a bit like meditation now. The words drift past Suguru like errant thoughts but they don’t cling, don’t settle.
Just his breath. Just the weight of their hands.
“You say nothing happens when you digest them, but I’ve seen it, remember? They’re hardly even curses anymore, after a while. You must taste the difference.”
Suguru makes a non-committal sound. He doesn’t think much about how the old, familiar ones taste. There’s always more.
“Soon they’re more you than anything else. Changed. It’s… beautiful, actually.”
“It is?”
“I know it gets to you. I’m not arguing that, except…” Satoru sighs with his nose in Suguru’s hair, raising gooseflesh all over his body. “I just wish you could see it, that’s all. The effect you have.”
Satoru’s other arm folds across his chest, holding him, and Suguru is too stunned by it all to say anything back. His body is on fire, but his mind is slipping, just on the edge of sleep.
“You change them from the inside out. Sometimes I think you do that for me.”
His words don’t make any sense. Suguru doesn’t… he hasn’t… Satoru is always helping him, molding him, changing him— not the other way around. But the words slam through him anyway, crumbling his defenses.
Inhale. Exhale. It’s ragged but it gets the job done.
“You’re okay. You’re alright,” Satoru coos, and that’s when he knows he’s been found out.
“Fuck.” Crying, really? It’s too embarrassing to be borne.
“Don’t be strong right now. Be… just be.” Satoru holds him to his chest, nice and steady. He probably couldn’t get away if he tried. Any attempt he makes would only be half-hearted, and he’s so tired. “Borrow my strength.”
God. “Easy for you to say.”
Satoru makes a little, questioning hum. “You’d do the same for me.”
Oh. Suguru swallows roughly, willing his voice to come out even. “Yeah, I would.”
If I could. If you needed me.
He feels a little bit tricked, if he’s honest. Because he does feel lighter, his mind clearer. At what cost, he doesn’t yet know. Facing Satoru after… whatever this is, that’s Future Suguru’s problem.
Sometime between when the tears dry up and his heart stops stampeding in his chest, Suguru slips into sleep. He’s still treading along the edge of a dream, he thinks, as he’s shuffled onto his side with Satoru’s warm weight blanketing his back.
When he wakes an hour or so later, he’s alone, but there is a tray of cold breakfast waiting for him on his nightstand.
For the first time in a week, he eats it all.