Chapter Text
“Amanai Riko was a …”
Suguru doesn’t hear much of what the priest was saying. She was a beautiful young girl, a blessing, something about her age. He can’t find it in himself to pay attention, instead staring at the portrait hung so solemnly of his dead friend. His eyes catch on Kuroi, one of the only who were actually in attendance for the ceremony. Guess it’s hard to have a proper ceremony for a girl who died with basically no one left.
God, he can remember everything. The crumpled up car, the bent streetlight. He remembers the flaring pain in his ribs as his body crashed into the sides of the car. He remembers that man. He remembers the face that took her away.
In excruciating detail, he remembers being in and out of consciousness. He remembers yelling her name, fumbling with the seatbelt in his flipped car, inhaling the smoke, desperately trying to claw his way out of the destroyed vehicle.
He remembers, right? Everything felt so foggy. He can remember how his head felt, he can remember the glare of the bright hospital lights. He remembers the doctor asking if he knew his name. He remembers the time of death, 8:24 PM. He remembers the doctor telling him that he’d done everything he could.
But nothing brought her back. She was gone, and now he stands in one of the front rows, watching some guy who never knew her and never will know her, talk about what a kind person she was. He doesn’t even know the half of it, Suguru thinks. He’ll never know her warm smile personally, never will get to see it outside of the pictures Suguru had picked out to show himself.
Suguru would never see it again, either. He’ll never hear her obnoxious laugh, she won’t ever pester him about crepes. She won’t ever know how much Suguru misses her.
And Suguru won’t ever forgive himself. He won’t forgive her, he won’t forgive the shitty priest who knows nothing about the girl he’s memorializing, he won’t ever forgive the doctors who failed to bring her back, he won’t ever forgive the asshole who crashed into them, and he especially won’t forgive the people absent today, never to mourn one of the brightest souls he’s ever known.
It should’ve been me.
It should’ve been that man.
Anybody but her.
The casket was open. Her beaten face gleamed with a lost beauty, on her body wears a dress she would have never picked out for herself. Her arms crossed over her stomach, the garment hid the worst of the injuries.
She had been all dolled up, you could almost forget the horrific scars that paint her body. Suguru can’t forget though. He can’t forget the awful degree at which her neck was turned. The blood that spat out of her mouth. He can’t forget seeing her limp body, the smoke, the broken glass. It will all be permanently etched into his brain forever. A reminder of what he could’ve prevented.
Seeing her like that will forever go down as one of the worst moments of Suguru’s life.
He’s brought back by the sight of Kuroi. She’s kneeled over the casket, and the sound of her ugly wails fill the room over the music playing during the viewing. There’s two vases of lilies on each side of her casket, their overpowering smell drowning out the familiar musk of death.
Suguru didn’t pay too much attention to the other few attendees. Some people he recognized from Riko’s photos, some faces surely just acquaintances from school that felt obligated to say goodbye one last time to a person they now would never get to know.
One face was rather familiar. Bright white hair lingered viewing the casket, a glance that took too long to be one of passive grief.
It doesn’t hit him that he’s being addressed until he’s already been too out of it to pay attention.
“You were.. with her, right?”
He’s addressed with blinding blue eyes, and the most beautiful white hair he’d ever seen.
Seriously?
The way he stares at him must give away his thoughts.
“Oh, ah, sorry, let’s restart. Gojo. Gojo Satoru.” He starts. His posture changes, he itches the hand hidden by a sleeve.
“..Right.”
They stare at each other for an unnecessary, prolonged amount of time. Suguru never thought that a funeral was really a time to introduce yourself to someone, especially not by asking them if they had been involved in the incident that caused them to be at the funeral in the first place.
It’s awkward, but Gojo has this smile, this easiness in those eyes of his, that make it seem so very intentional.
Suguru doesn’t understand it.
It’s troubling, the silence they share, before Suguru finally decides he’d better say something.
“Geto Suguru. My name.”
Gojo whistles, weight shifting back and forth from the heel of his foot to his toes, hands in his pocket. “We have the same initials in English, did you know?”
“Really.”
He flashes that smile again, and Suguru almost can’t believe it. They’re at a funeral, of all places.
“You realize we’ve met before, yeah?” Suguru starts. “It’s not like this is the first time we’ve said hello to each other, we’ve met.”
Gojo’s eyes widened. His gaze darts to the door, then to the attendees around him.
Suguru notices it then, the faint signs of tears. He hadn’t realized the handkerchief messily tucked away into his pocket, nor the red irritation around his beautiful blue eyes. It’s not like he was alone, many others, including Suguru himself, found companionship with a box of tissues since the ceremony had started.
“Ah, it’s um,” he coughs, “No big deal. It’s nice to see you again, Gojo.” He bows, before looking back up to a still, quite bewildered, Satoru Gojo.
For some reason, the thought of Gojo’s tears brings a pit of anxiety to Suguru’s stomach.
♡
It’d been about 2 weeks since the funeral. Fourteen days since he’d watch her casket get lowered into the ground, nothing yet has happened to the man who’d crashed into him. Kuroi had tears in her eyes as she explained how the dickhead had basically no remorse.
It filled Suguru with such rage. Riko, his Riko. The Riko who he called his sister, the Riko who was the brightest flower he’d ever met.
Toji Fushiguro. That was his name. The only time he’s seen his face, he was slumped over the wheel, passed out, as he watched Riko, the Riko that man just killed, bleed out.
The anger consumed Suguru. He thought about how much life left she had. He wasn’t mad about his broken right arm, or his concussion. He doesn’t care that bright lights now hurt his head in ways he hadn’t thought possible, he doesn’t care that his car is crumpled and destroyed. None of that mattered, because Suguru doesn’t feel like he should have any of that in the first place.
He shouldn’t be here. He would’ve given anything so that he had been the one to die instead of her. But that can’t happen, he can’t go back in time. He can’t change how the car was hit, can’t change who lived and who died.
Nothing, no words, no warnings, could ever have prepared him for the guilt he has just for existing.
Just two weeks ago. He’d think, just two weeks ago she was alive. She was laughing, listening to some stupid song on the radio in Suguru’s car, singing obnoxiously to a very embarrassed Suguru.
He was familiar with death, it plagued the animals he grew up with, the people he grew up with, and now it plagued Riko.
♡
The next time Suguru Geto met Satoru Gojo, it had been a cold day. Since their first meeting, Suguru had taken his time, going through every text message, every memory he had with Riko, trying to figure out where Satoru Gojo fit into her story. Maybe also looking him up on Instagram, sue him. The point was, despite their rather boring interaction with each other, Suguru found himself captivated. Maybe it kept him busy, stopped him from thinking about how his best friend was dead and how he kept blaming himself, but what worked worked.
It was at a park. Of all places. Suguru held the cigar between his fingers, he’d dazed off, stuck in his own head again. He was leant against some tree, the back of his shirt will surely be a pain to wash. It didn’t matter. As long as none of it felt real.
As long as none of it felt rea–
“Put that shit out, it smells gross.”
Suguru coughs, realizing icy blue eyes stare back at him for the first time in 3 weeks, eyes he’d almost forgotten about.
“Gojo?” Suguru peered. Blinking once or twice, the hand at his side tapping his jeans twice to make sure he was fully aware.
“Hey there.” Gojo’s hands were in his pocket, his face was scrunched up in some sort of faux distaste. Why was this guy here again? Suguru barely knew him. “You know,” he stretches out his words, “Smoking in the corner of some kid’s park makes you look like a serious creep!”
Suguru flicked the ash off the cigarette, before bringing it up to his mouth again.
“That stuff, it uh, really fucked up one of my relatives or something.” I don’t care. “You should probably stop, you know.” Yes, I’ve been told a million times.
“Do you always come off this strongly to people you don’t know?”
Gojo pauses.
“You said it yourself, we aren’t exactly strangers, are we?” Not necessarily what Suguru said, at all, actually.
“I said you didn’t have to introduce yourself. I knew who you were.” Suguru is glaring, he knows he is.
Gojo kept pushing.
“I didn’t really know what to say to you. I just didn’t want you to keep looking so alone.”
Suguru didn’t mind.
“You looked rather sad, yourself, I noticed.” He wasn’t smoking anymore.
Suguru can’t describe it, how he feels, well, he probably could. He feels like a mess. Gojo looks at him, yet now his permanent smile is faltering. He doesn’t understand why they’re together right now, or why or how Gojo found him.
“Riko talked to me about you. A lot, actually.”
Suguru looked at him, his sour expression transformed into something new, something raw, at the mention of her name.
His words almost get caught in his throat.
Instead he says nothing.
Suguru looks down. His hands tremble, he shouldn’t be reacting like this, it’s embarrassing, almost. No, no, it is embarrassing.
Gojo talked, and Suguru listened. He doesn’t understand why Gojo is here, why he came up to him, or why he’s allowing him to stay. But he knew Riko, and he had stories to tell about her. Ones Suguru hadn’t heard before.
So he listens. He listens to Gojo talk about their ridiculous stories. Their trips, how they met, sometimes Suguru will chime in with his own story, or to recognize stories Riko had told him.
Time passes in that park, time that Riko no longer had. More seconds, minutes, hours, that Suguru has lived that Riko never got to experience. He wonders how she would feel, what she’d say seeing the two of them interacting, because of her. Yet it wasn’t in Riko’s home, it wasn’t at some silly place she’d taken the two of them. It was her absence that was bringing them together.
Suguru doesn’t know if he’ll ever get over that absence. Doesn’t know if he’ll ever learn to not look for her in crowded rooms. And he doesn’t know if this loneliness, this guilt, will ever go away.
By the end of the day, he’ll be alone in the park again. With a new number registered into his contacts, a contact that he had swiftly renamed from the “Satoru ☆” typed into his phone, to just plain “Gojo.”
That’s how he’d always end up, though, right? Alone. Riko would’ve wanted him to live. That’s what everyone says, or will say. Riko would’ve wanted this for his life, Riko would’ve wanted that. He doesn’t know what Riko would’ve wanted. He doesn’t know if this is just some disastrous illusion in his head, if he’s finally gone crazy.
It could be the concussion, he copes. It’s not like it’s been 3 weeks. He can ignore that he’s no longer concussed, he’ll ignore everything, really. Some friendship forming from the depths of God knows where isn’t what he needs, it’s not what Riko would’ve wanted, because Riko can’t want anything anymore.