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Suguru was not crazy.
He sat at the front of the room with his legs spread comfortably across the tatami, the fall of his robes pooling around his knees and ankles, and before him knelt a congregation of people who had made the conscious and enthusiastic decision to bend their backs and lower their heads to the floor in his presence. A mass of folded spines and bowed crowns and clasped hands, breathing softly through incense-thick air like some collective animal asleep at his feet.
They were crazy. He was not.
Suguru felt this was an important distinction, because every now and then he would look out across the room and wonder whether devotion and madness were separated by any meaningful distance at all, or if they merely wore different clothes and answered to different names.
His gaze drifted lazily across them, following the slow rise and fall of shoulders, the minute tremors that occasionally rippled through tired muscles forced to remain still for too long. Human beings were strange creatures. They spent their lives searching for meaning, and when they found something large enough to contain it, they surrendered themselves completely. Sometimes they found religions. Sometimes they found revolutions. Sometimes they found men. Suguru had never asked these people to worship him. Then again, he had never asked them to stop either.
Still, it was not he who was crazy.
He took a deep breath and held it for a moment too long.
It was calm here, ordinarily, which was why, when the atmosphere suddenly tightened—when the familiar stillness of the room bent inward on itself and the air rippled like disturbed water—Suguru knew immediately what it was. The floor trembled faintly beneath the tatami as cursed energy bled into the hall like a storm pushing through open doors, and somewhere deep within his chest something responded before the rest of him could. Something sleeping opened its eyes.
He took another deep breath, and this time, he let it go as normal.
One of the followers closest to the back lifted her head before she could stop herself, blinking upward at nothing in particular, her brow pinched as though she had sensed the shift but couldn't understand it. Suguru didn't even bother turning his body. He only looked at her, and the glare alone was enough. Don't you dare raise your head.
She flinched like she had been struck and dropped her gaze immediately, forehead returning to the floor with a quiet rustle of fabric.
Slowly, he tipped his head back and let the cursed energy spread through him. It crawled up his spine vertebra by vertebra, a line of tiny shocks that had nothing to do with pain and everything to do with hunger. Cold water against overheated skin. The first crack of thunder after a long, breathless summer day. The rush of a river current against bare ankles after wandering lost through heat-baked earth. He hungered for such sensations the way a drowning man hungered for air, or perhaps the way the sea hungered for the moon. Drawn toward it by forces he understood perfectly and could not resist regardless. He had felt this cursed energy a thousand times before and it still made something deep in his guts stir.
Have I ever learned how to live without it?
"Keep worshipping me," he said mildly when nervousness began creeping through the bowed rows like wind through tall grass, when the pressure saturating the grounds grew so dense that even non-sorcerers could sense something was wrong.
He didn't bother raising his voice by much. Under normal circumstances, a whisper from him would have been enough to command absolute silence, but his lover had never been particularly considerate about the size of his presence. Satoru entered places the same way weather fronts swallowed coastlines. Quietly was simply not a thing he knew how to be. Suguru found that irritating. He found it comforting, too, though he preferred not to examine that particular contradiction any more closely than necessary.
It was only another minute before the fusuma doors slid open with a dry whisper of wood and paper, the panels gliding aside until they rested against the wall and exposed the hall to the corridor beyond. The followers nearest the doorway startled despite themselves, and a ripple moved through the congregation, small and restrained but impossible to miss, as curiosity battled obedience.
Curiosity lost.
Then won.
Then lost again.
Two heads lifted. Another followed. Suguru barely noticed. His attention had already narrowed, tunnelled, the edges of the room softening until incense smoke and prayer and kneeling bodies became little more than scenery arranged around a single fixed point.
There he is.
It was ridiculous, perhaps, that after ten years his mind still recognized Satoru before his eyes properly did, as though the countless meetings between then and now had done nothing to dull the instinct. Ridiculous that cursed energy alone was enough. Ridiculous that he could pick him out from miles away the way wolves found their way home through forests they had never seen before. Then again, there were plenty of ridiculous things about Gojo Satoru. Loving him had always been among them.
His hand rose lazily, two fingers flicking downward in a careless little motion that might have looked almost affectionate if one didn't know him better.
"Eyes down," he murmured.
Cloth shifted immediately. The rustle of robes brushing against tatami spread through the room as every lifted head dropped once more, foreheads bowing until the floor was all they allowed themselves to see.
Across the hall, Satoru made a sharp, disbelieving noise in the back of his throat. "Oh, you've got to be kidding me."
Suguru smiled despite himself.
"Satoru," he greeted warmly, as though greeting a guest who had arrived precisely when expected. "You came."
The expression that crossed Satoru's face suggested he regretted it already.
"Don't start with me."
He stepped into the hall with long, impatient strides, feet striking the wooden threshold before crossing onto the tatami. His shoulders were tight with irritation, the tension running through him like a pulled wire, and Suguru found himself watching the movement with the sort of focus usually reserved for natural disasters. There was something uniquely fascinating about forces powerful enough to reshape landscapes, especially when you knew exactly how they looked while sleeping.
Five steps into the room and Satoru's gaze swept over the scene. His mouth twisted. Then he looked back at Suguru.
"Three grade ones," he said, each word clipped and curt. "You dumped three grade ones on my students."
Suguru tilted his head slightly, the movement slow enough to look thoughtful. "They handled themselves well, didn't they?" he asked conversationally. "You've been teaching them properly."
"That's not the point." Satoru's voice cut through the hall sharply enough that several followers seemed to shrink where they knelt. "If I didn't get there in time—"
"But you did."
"That's not—"
"That's exactly the point," Suguru interrupted gently.
He shifted slightly, resting his elbow against his knee and propping his chin against his knuckles as though they were discussing the weather rather than morality. From that angle he could watch Satoru without obstruction, without distraction, without the rest of the room intruding on the view. It struck him suddenly that Satoru looked older than he had the last time they met.
"And besides," Suguru continued, voice soft with amusement, "you know I wouldn't do anything to hurt your students. I promised you that the last time we met, didn't I? You arrived before anything could escalate, your students survived their encounter with three grade ones, and so everyone learned something useful today."
Satoru stared at him for a long moment. "You've got to be kidding me,” he repeated.
Suguru’s smile barely moved. “Am I wrong?”
“Yes, you’re fucking wrong. You sent them in the first place!”
“And you stopped them.” Suguru lifted one shoulder in a careless shrug. “It worked out rather neatly.”
The hall had grown so quiet that the faint rustle of cloth somewhere near the back carried all the way to the front. Satoru dragged a hand through his hair and turned away, pacing across the tatami with the restless energy of a caged animal. There had always been something fundamentally unfair about the way he occupied space. Even angry, he drew the eye. Even irritated, he seemed larger than everyone around him.
“I can’t believe my life,” he muttered. “I cannot believe my fucking life.”
“You’re very on edge today,” Suguru observed mildly.
That was enough to make Satoru stop.
"Yeah," he shot back, irritation cracking through the word like lightning through a summer sky. "Funny how that happens when someone attacks my students."
"Hm," Suguru hummed quietly, tilting his head. "You don't look particularly worried."
That made Satoru pause. Only briefly, but Suguru saw it all the same. There had always been a delay between Satoru's instincts and the stories he told himself about them, a tiny sliver of space where the truth briefly existed before being dressed up as something else.
"Why would I be?" Satoru folded his arms across his chest, expression sour. "I knew I could handle them."
“Ah.” Suguru’s smile deepened, faintly pleased. “Of course.”
“Tch. Don’t twist it.”
Suguru watched him for a long moment before answering. Somewhere during the exchange he had straightened without realizing it, shoulders easing beneath the weight of his robes, his spine unfolding just enough to better observe the man standing before him. His gaze drifted slowly across Satoru's face, unhurried and thoughtful in the way one might study a familiar landscape after years away. The mountains remained the same. The coastline remained the same. The differences revealed themselves only to those who knew where to look.
"I'm not twisting anything," he said eventually. "You had your little ego boosted. You knew exactly who sent them, exactly how it would end, and you still came here afterwards."
For a fraction of a second, Satoru's fingers tightened against the sleeves of his uniform before relaxing again. There it is. The gesture was small enough that no one else would have noticed. Suguru doubted anyone else even knew it existed. But there had once been a time when he had spent nearly every waking hour beside him, and people did not emerge from that sort of proximity unchanged. You learned things. Tiny things. The sound of someone's footsteps. The cadence of their breathing. The tells they carried into adulthood despite years of trying to outgrow them.
He knew Satoru like the back of his hand. Satoru hated it. Suguru loved it.
"I came to tell you to knock it off," Satoru said.
Suguru laughed quietly. "That's what you're going with?"
"Yeah."
"In front of all these people?" His gaze drifted vaguely toward the bowed congregation before returning to Satoru. Not a single head had risen. Not a single person had spoken. They remained frozen in place around them, faithful satellites orbiting a conversation they would never be permitted to join. "You rushed across the city, stormed into my hall, and started shouting about my behavior… because you're here to scold me?"
“That’s right.”
Suguru studied him for a long moment, blank-faced. Then he smiled again, softer this time, like he’d just confirmed something he already knew.
“You really do spoil me, Satoru.” He spread his legs wider and tapped in the space between them twice with his finger. “Come here.”
Satoru hesitated for the barest moment. A slight tightening of his jaw. A brief stillness. A silent momentary block. Then he stepped forward.
Suguru watched him approach with open interest. The bandages wrapped around Satoru's eyes caught the light filtering through the hall, and for a fleeting second he found himself remembering another pair of eyes entirely. Bright blue beneath summer sunlight. Sixteen years old and looking at him as though the rest of the world existed purely as background scenery.
Some things change. Some things don’t.
“Don’t be coy,” Suguru added. “You’ve been inching closer to me this whole time.”
“I haven’t—”
“Hurry up.”
He leaned back slightly, hands resting on his knees as he watched every measured step. There was something strangely satisfying about it. Not control, exactly. Suguru had long ago learned that Satoru could not truly be controlled. Trying to contain him was like trying to contain a storm front or the tide. Eventually, both would go where they pleased.
So no, it was not control. It was choice.
Satoru always chose.
Again and again and again.
Suguru tapped his finger once more against the tatami between them. The sound was almost laughably small compared to the silence surrounding it, but Satoru's attention snapped toward it all the same.
"Closer."
When Satoru stopped only a short distance away, Suguru smiled.
“On your knees,” he commanded, and the strain in Satoru’s face was evident.
“I’m not one of your stupid followers,” he gritted out, and Suguru smiled wider. He always loved this part of Satoru. He was always so headstrong, so clippy, could push back and snap and bristle like a cornered animal, and still, inevitably, find himself exactly where Suguru had wanted him from the beginning.
“Down, sweetheart.”
For a moment, Suguru almost allowed himself to imagine a different outcome, though it wasn’t really imagination so much as the brief, unstable appearance of a path that had never once been taken; a world where Satoru didn’t give in, where he turned on his heel and walked away, furious and untouchable and brilliant in the way only Gojo Satoru could be, but this time not returning, not looping back into the same shape of encounter they always fell into. A world where he broke the pattern cleanly, where he stayed so stubborn in his anger that it did not soften into longing, where he came not as something familiar or half-forgiven but as something distant and unresolved, there only to say what he meant and leave before meaning could be folded back into something else.
It was, Suguru thought distantly, a kind of mercy to imagine it at all, even if only for a second, even if only as a reminder that it could have been otherwise in theory, because in practice Satoru lowered himself slowly to the floor and the tatami whispered beneath his knees, soft and unremarkable, the sound of inevitability settling back into place like it had never been interrupted at all.
“You always make things so difficult,” Suguru chided, almost fondly, reaching over to palm at his cheek, to thumb under his eye. Satoru leaned into it willingly, inevitably. “But look how pretty you look when you listen to me. So gorgeous on your knees for me, Satoru.”
Satoru’s face changed slowly beneath his hand—first the tension leaving his eyelids beneath the bandages, then the edges of his cheeks softening, then his mouth easing into something less guarded. If there was sadness there, Suguru couldn’t see it. He could only feel the warmth of Satoru’s skin against his palm and hoped that for a moment at least, the man kneeling before him had forgotten everything else in the world.
“Close your eyes for me,” Suguru mumbled, and when he felt the pressure in Satoru’s temples ease, he praised, “good. Keep ‘em closed.”
His thumb traced the line of Satoru’s cheekbone as if it had always been mapped there, as if bone could remember touch the way skin remembers heat. The clench at Satoru’s jaw softened only slightly under the pressure, teeth still held clenched, like something refusing to admit it was being held. Suguru let his hand travel anyway, down along the familiar geography of him, toward the nape where the undercut had been shaved too clean, too recent, the skin there still carrying the faint memory of contact that was not his.
He wondered who had cut it for him. Shoko, maybe. Or—Nanami?
Suguru’s nails dug into the skin on instinct at the thought. Satoru hissed at the sensation and Suguru was not sorry.
“What the fuck?” Satoru cried out, and oh, Suguru almost forgot what he was angry about because he sounded so pretty and helpless when he was in pain. Suguru lightly scratched his nape as a reminder.
“Who shaved your undercut?”
Satoru’s eyebrows lifted. “What are you talking ab—”
“I said keep your eyes closed.”
Satoru obeyed instantly, as he almost always did when the instruction was given cleanly enough, but something in his expression shifted regardless, a faint upward pull at the corner of his mouth that suggested amusement. It deepened gradually, accumulating, accumulating, until it settled into something openly smug, a laugh breaking through in fragments.
“You never change, Suguru.” He leaned forward a fraction, one hand on the floor, leaning his weight on it, back arching just the way Suguru liked it. “Don’t you think it looks nice? Kento’s learned to do it exactly how I like it. Kinda like how you used to, remember?”
Suguru’s thumb paused. The line of muscle beneath his fingers was ingested into his memory, though not exclusively. Some of it had been written over, learned elsewhere, ingrained by hands that were not his. Not his hands, not his memories, not his Satoru. Not anymore, at least.
A blink, a small exhale, and Suguru yanked his head.
“Down,” he strained, forcing the angle of Satoru’s body until his forehead met his knees, held there, locked. Satoru made a sound, a hiss, almost laughter, almost refusal, but nothing followed it.
No restraint.
“Not so cocky now,” Suguru murmured, low, less spoken and more so pressed into air. He moved, moving from his seated position onto his knees, using Satoru’s nape for balance. “Do you let him use you like this too or am I special?”
The answer came back muffled, incomplete, swallowed by fabric and position, and it wasn’t enough. Suguru yanked his head up.
“Use your words.”
Satoru heaved, then laughed properly this time. “You’re not special.”
His head was still held in place from the force of it, chin angled up, blindness hidden behind gauze, tension still threaded through his neck and shoulders where Suguru’s hand remained. And Suguru stayed there too, on his knees.
A small tug at the nape brought Satoru’s head flush against Suguru’s knees, enough to remind him, enough to echo the posture of the others around them, kneeling, bowing, obedient.
“You like to lie,” Suguru murmured. “You’re such an ugly liar, sweetheart. It pains me a little, to tell you the truth.”
“Fuck, you’re so righteous,” Satoru chided, muffled. He leaned forward instead of back, chin sliding along Suguru’s thigh in a slow, unhurried line, and the motion carried him into Suguru rather than away from him, until his mouth found the cord at Suguru’s hip and closed around it. The himo tightened under his teeth. He bit down properly. “You gonna keep harping on about your bullshit, or are you gonna take me back to your room and show me exactly how much I hurt you?”
All Suguru could do was smile, because Satoru, for all his arrogance and all the contradictions he carried, was still easy to read in the end.
“I’m not taking you anywhere, sweetheart. If you truly want me, you will untie my robes with your teeth and stuff your pretty mouth full of my cock until you can’t breathe.”
Satoru paused, the cord dropping from his mouth as he looked out to the room of bowed people, then back up to Suguru. “There are people here.”
Suguru caressed Satoru’s face, finger pulling his bottom lip down, smearing saliva around his mouth. “You’re such a smart thing, truly. Nothing gets by you.”
“You really expect me to—” Satoru huffed disbelievingly, face flushing the most beautiful shade of peach. “—do what? Here? In front of all… them?”
Suguru let a slow smile curve as he hummed. “Right here,” he murmured, confirming, letting his thumb trace the hollow beneath Satoru’s jaw, drawing a twitch, a shiver. “You’ve never seen the world bend to me like this, have you? Now you can be part of it. Consider it a gift.”
Satoru’s mouth opened, then closed again, a quiet, incredulous laugh slipping out of him like steam.
“A gift,” he repeated under his breath, head tipping slightly to one side. “Unbelievable.”
The flush across his face had deepened, creeping up from his collarbones to the tips of his ears, but the corner of his mouth still tugged upward in that insufferably familiar way. Suguru watched it the way one watches weather gather at the edge of the sky, already knowing exactly how it will break.
“Do you get off on making the strongest man in the room kneel?”
Suguru huffed softly through his nose. “You say that as if it isn’t exactly what you walked in here for.”
It was inevitable, after all.
“Please,” Satoru scoffed. “If I walked in here looking for that, I would’ve just waited and knocked on your bedroom door like a normal person.”
“You’ve never done anything with me like a normal person,” Suguru replied mildly.
“God, I fucking hate you,” Satoru muttered. His chin dragged lazily along Suguru’s thigh again, an unhurried movement, until his mouth found the himo once more. This time his teeth caught it without hesitation and Suguru could do nothing but smirk.
Predictability is an interesting thing because people tend to mistake it for simplicity. They assume that if a person can be understood, they must be uncomplicated, but those things are not the same. If a person loses a family member, their grief is predictable. If the clouds go gray and the wind picks up and the birds begin to disappear from the sky, the rain is predictable. If a hand reaches toward a flame often enough, eventually it will get burned. The outcome is predictable. None of them are simple.
Satoru had never been simple.
He was difficult at seventeen. Difficult at twenty-two. Difficult now. He was arrogant. Contradictory. Restless. He swapped the floppy hair of his youth for an undercut. He traded dark glasses for bandages. He grew quieter in some ways and louder in others.
But some things never change.
The cord slid wetly between Satoru’s teeth as he worked it loose, tugging once, twice, the knot loosening under the steady pull of his mouth. The faint rasp of fabric shifting followed a moment later as the fastening gave way. The robe slackened slightly across Suguru’s chest, the tension of the fastening gone. Satoru spat the cord from his mouth. The loosened himo slipped wetly against Suguru’s hip, falling uselessly against the robe it had been holding shut. His hands had drifted higher along Suguru’s thighs during the work of his teeth—long fingers spread there, braced like he needed the balance.
“See?” Suguru murmured softly. “Wasn’t so hard, was it now, baby?”
Satoru’s head tipped upward at the sound of his voice. He looked like he wanted to say something and Suguru couldn’t help but wonder what. Some useless insult to hurt him, or maybe a small mercy thrown his way, something that let him see the Satoru he once knew, something like yeah, not so terrible. But he stayed silent. Suguru didn’t know what was worse, so he decided to get it over with, giving them both an inkling of grace. He moved his robes to the side and freed his hard cock, giving it a few pumps.
Satoru followed the gesture with his eyes and nothing else. “Why are you naked under there?”
“I didn’t want to waste any time when you arrived.”
Satoru scoffed. “You fucking asshole—”
Suguru had spent years listening to Satoru talk. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that some of his better qualities became easier to appreciate when his mouth was occupied. He shoved his cock into it for confirmation.
“Mmph—”
It wasn’t even halfway in but it shut Satoru up as if it was poking out the other end of his head. He made a small, offended sound around it but accepted it anyway, letting his jaw go slack as he took it fully in a single motion.
“Shit, wait a sec,” Suguru groaned, but it fell on deaf ears. Satoru pulled almost entirely off, giving a second to suck on the tip, then dove all the way back in, repeatedly, giving Suguru a run for his money every time his cock hit the back of Satoru’s throat.
It was obscene. Satoru’s blowjobs had always been sloppy and miscalculated, their main goal having been to frustrate Suguru into bending him over and fucking him on the nearest surface. And it was working. Suguru was frustrated. The stretch of Satoru’s mouth was vulgar, moistened lips reddening and stretching to fit Suguru and Suguru alone. He hooked both thumbs into the corners of Satoru’s mouth, pressing deep against the inner lining of his cheeks, right where the flesh turned soft and wet, and forced the shape of him open around his cock. He wanted to see how filthier he could make the scene, merely to watch how the sides of his cock made the insides of Satoru’s cheeks water with every bobbing movement.
Suguru began thrusting minutely with every motion, matching Satoru’s pace, feeling like an absolute dog, feral with affection, ugly with need for it. He was greedy for Satoru’s mouth around him the way strays are greedy for scraps—shameless in eagerness, all open throat and exposed belly. He let his thumbs drip down the sides of Satoru’s chin to bring back some suction, drool dribbling down with them. He smeared it along his cheeks then cupped his jaw, and the fingers pressing into the sides of his throat jostled with every thrust.
He had never forgotten what Satoru felt like in his hands, not in the years they had spent apart, not in the months where silence had stretched too long and too thin between them. Memory had a way of preserving things in perfect detail, of sharpening edges instead of dulling them, of keeping certain sensations locked in place long after everything else had begun to fizzle and fade, fracture and fall.
This was one of them.
The weight of his head. The heat of his mouth. The incessant proof that no matter how far they drifted, no matter how much they changed, there were still parts of Satoru that bent toward him without hesitation. Again and again and again.
Suguru wondered whether Satoru noticed the contradiction in himself, the way he acted as though nothing could hold him and yet kept circling back to the same hands, the same threshold, the same point of return. Whether he understood that repetition was not the same as choice. Or whether he preferred the illusion of it.
That seemed more like him.
Suguru exhaled slowly through his nose and let his thumb trace once along the side of Satoru’s neck—an absent motion, a motion through which he absented himself. In that absence, he thought of pinching Satoru’s neck just to hear him squeak around his cock. He thought of wrapping a veiny hand around his throat to see how difficult it would be to damage the cartilage of his trachea. He had the urge to silence not just his words but everything about him. To stop the sound of him for just a moment and see what remained.
Because Satoru occupied space greedily. He laughed too loudly, spoke too quickly, burst through unopened doors and stretched himself carelessly across every room he entered until there was hardly enough air left for anyone else.
What have you taken from people to be accepted so easily? What have you taken from me?
It would be easy to take something from Satoru. Easy to reduce him down to his fragility. Easy to remember that beneath all the noise and infinity and impossible brightness, Satoru was still made of tendons and cartilage and breath. Just a body. Just another mortal thing pretending otherwise.
The thought sat inside his twitching hand for a moment, then passed as it forewent Satoru’s neck and settled in his hair.
“God, Satoru, fuck, you’ve gotten better,” he moaned. Then, just for fun, added, “have you been practising? Have you been unfaithful to me?”
Satoru spluttered something in response, a saliva-thick gurgle of nonsense that sounded so fucking good when paired with the sight of his mouth stretched beyond comprehension, the corners of his mouth heat-blurred and slack as they accommodated Suguru’s dick. It wasn’t enough though.
Satoru’s breath hitched when Suguru dragged him off his cock, the sound sharp and wet, his lips parting as he sucked in air like he’d been denied it on purpose—which, to be fair, he had. Saliva clung in a thin line from his mouth before it broke, his tongue darting out briefly, messy, instinctive, before he swallowed hard. Satoru’s chest rose once, twice, then steadied, but his mouth stayed open a fraction too long, missing the stick.
Suguru’s gaze dropped there for a second, then back up. “Have you used that pretty mouth of yours to pleasure another man?” He pulled him closer as he said it, forcing the angle. “Yes or no?”
“Yeah,” Satoru said, voice rough but steady, like he hadn’t just been choking on him a second ago. “Couple times.”
Suguru went still. It wasn’t fun when his shitty questions got shitty answers.
“Why?” Satoru added, tilting his chin up a fraction despite the hand in his hair, pushing into it instead of away. “Jealous?”
“Is that what you’re trying to do?”
Satoru shrugged—or tried to. It didn’t quite work with the way he was being held, but the intent was there. “Depends,” he said, breath ghosting warm between them. “Is it working?”
Suguru pulled him forward again, harder this time, less patient, guiding him into the planes of his chest where his robes were slackened, revealing skin. “Careful,” he gritted out. “You shouldn’t lie to me like that.”
Satoru made a muffled sound against him, something between a protest and a laugh, the vibration of it unmistakable. Suguru’s hand tightened.
“Or,” he continued, “if you’re not lying, you’re going to have to do a much better job convincing me.”
“I have a few new tricks I can show you,” Satoru said, bringing a hand up to cup Suguru’s balls, fingers tightening just enough to draw a biting hiss from him. He leaned in and licked along the surface of his chest, sucking where there was more fat than muscle. The pressure was just shy of leaving a mark behind. “Think you can take it?”
“Of course I can.”
Satoru gave one last squeeze before that same hand moved to Suguru’s stomach, pushing lightly. “Lie back.”
Suguru obeyed, lying down and working his robes open fully until they lay slack and sprawled out beneath him. In the meantime, Satoru took it upon himself to undress from the waist down, then crawled his way on top of Suguru, both knees planted on either side of his hips, cocks touching. He leaned over where Suguru waited patiently, shoving two fingers into his mouth, wetting them, spitting around them, dribbly, hot. So fucking hot that Suguru’s cock was hurting, cucked into watching Satoru play around with his fingers.
Satoru dragged his fingers down Suguru’s body, then drew them back up along his own thighs, circling them around his hips until they reached the cleft of his ass. He made a show of it as the first finger went in, back arched and moaning. Suguru knew it was nowhere near as good as his own fingers, let alone his cock, but he played along, because even if it dragged, a show from Satoru was still something worth watching. Suguru couldn’t take his eyes off him.
“You’re so fucking sexy on top of me like this. Playing with yourself, making yourself feel good for me.” Suguru spread his legs as much as he could with Satoru straddling him, pushing open Satoru’s hips so he could really feel it. “Want you like this all the time. My own hardworking doll.”
Satoru cried out as he pushed another finger in. It was an excuse to distract him from Suguru’s words, no doubt.
“Shut up,” he gasped, trembling with every small sklch sound from his hole. “Be—be quiet.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Am I being too distracting, sweetheart?” Suguru drawled, voice soft with false apology and clear intent to needle. He lightly traced the tip of Satoru’s cock with his finger and watched in amusement how it twitched and leaked desperately.
Satoru bucked backward involuntarily, an obscene whine cascading from his lips, a little too loud for the room.
“Stop, fuck,” Satoru croaked, “hands to yourself, monk.”
Suguru bit his lip, hand retracting to his side after giving the base of his cock a squeeze. “So demanding today.”
Satoru shot him a look from behind the bandages. He didn’t need to undress his eyes to know it was one of those strained warnings you send to a child who keeps asking for the same thing in a store aisle. So he relented. Focused all his attention on Satoru’s flushed face, his little whimpers, the way his fingernails dug into Suguru’s chest for support as he fucked himself open for him. He was jealous, in all honesty. Jealous that fingers besides his own were working Satoru open, that someone other than himself was causing the sweet little melodies to fall from his lips.
In the midst of his thoughts, he turned toward the monkeys praying to him, to them, and his anger twisted into fury when he saw one of them unbowed, head raised, eyes locked on the scene in front of them, pupils moving to the tune of Satoru’s body as if unafraid of the consequences.
Filthy fucking monkey. How dare he?
Angry heat surged through him, from the base of his spine to the hollow behind his eyes, head to toe, boiling, boiling, then hissing and screaming like a forgotten kettle over a hot plate.
“I said heads down!”
He snapped his fingers once and summoned a curse that sucked on the man’s face until his skin ripped and blood splattered around the room. Skrchk. There were frazzled inhales and shaky shoulders but the message was sent, clear as day: do not look at what’s mine. It took less than a second. He was not in the mood to play with his food. And anyway, if the man didn’t want to die, he should not have gazed upon his Satoru with such vile, perverted eyes. Only Suguru was allowed to look at Satoru. Only Suguru.
“S’guru, what the fuck?” Satoru moaned from above him, teary eyed.
Suguru was bristled with the impulse to grip him by the throat, to tilt his face down and ask him why he had allowed something so filthy to witness him like this, why he had not noticed, why he had not stopped it before he got angry. But Satoru looked so innocent with his lip between his teeth and crease between his brows. Angelic. How dare he?
Suguru exhaled through his nose and let it go. There were more important things to focus on.
“Don’t look, just focus on me,” Suguru said, snaking his arm around Satoru’s ass, caressing the fingers he was fucking himself with. “God, sweetheart, you’re so bad at this. Need me to help?”
“Don’t need your help,” Satoru breathed, trying to angle his hand better. Suguru could feel how bad he was doing. There was no way he was stretching it right, no chance he was hitting his prostate with that technique.
“You sure?” Suguru taunted, slipping in a finger besides Satoru’s own. Satoru bucked, eyes wide, the motion pressing harder into the hand on Suguru’s chest that was bearing his weight. Suguru slipped in another before Satoru could take another breath. “I don’t think you are. You’re useless without me.”
Satoru pulled his fingers back, yielding space for Suguru’s fingers to slip in deeper. “Fuck you, I’m ready, get your fingers out of my ass.”
Suguru added a third, angling it just right, hitting Satoru’s prostate. “I don’t think you’re ready, ‘Toru, or do you want me to open you up on my cock? Is that what you’re asking for?”
“Just—” Satoru bucked again, bowing his head as a lethal moan left his mouth, as if ashamed of it. Suguru grinned, continuing to hit the spot that made Satoru’s cock jump.
“At a loss for words already? Poor baby hasn’t been getting fucked right.”
“Shut up,” Satoru gasped, impatient, cutting. “You’re wasting my time.”
Suguru knew he had nothing better to do, no one better to fuck, but he was and always would be Satoru’s most loyal servant. With an amused huff, he withdrew his hand and folded both arms beneath his head, lax. He settled back without protest, without argument, surrendering the matter entirely. If Satoru wanted his cock, then he could come and get it himself.
“Go on then,” Suguru nodded toward his hard cock. “If you want it so hastily then fucking do it already.”
Satoru glowered down at him and all the heat in Suguru’s body melted down into his pelvis. Satoru was most provocative when he was angry, and Suguru all but wanted to break his limbs so he would stay furious by his side forever.
Satoru moved slowly despite his apparent busy schedule. Like a siren wading through shallow water, he moved along Suguru’s body until he was hovering above his cock, and gave no warning song when he swiftly sat his pretty ass on it. He moved his hips back and forth, letting the half-dried saliva from the blowjob slicken up his hole. It wasn’t near enough, but Suguru knew he was too proud and egotistical to ask for any lube, so he let him do whatever he wanted.
Satoru played around a little, let the tip catch on his rim again and again and again just to listen to Suguru’s breath stutter before going back to sliding it between his cheeks. He bent forward and hid his roguish smile in the planes of Suguru’s chest, licking upward until he reached the skin by his nipple, suctioning his lips over it. Suguru stopped him.
“No marks,” he demanded, just to piss him off. And it worked.
Satoru gave him the angry look that Suguru loved oh so much before clamping down on the skin with his teeth, hard enough that it would leave a mark for days, maybe weeks. A lifetime, hopefully.
Suguru tongued his cheek at the sight of Satoru indignantly sucking and licking at the mark. He rolled his hips, his cock catching Satoru’s rim again, stifling a delighted groan when it caused Satoru to stutter, to stop and drool on his chest. Suguru’s hands stiffened beneath his head, fingers curling into his hair as he resisted the urge to grab Satoru roughly and slam him down on his leaking cock.
“Have you gotten lazy or are you just trying to bore me?” Suguru jeered, repeating the action. “I don’t have all day either, sweetheart, and I’m sure my servants would agree with me.”
Satoru didn’t even give the bowed idiots a glance as he lunged for Suguru’s throat and enclosed his hand around it. He sank a little bit of his weight into the fist, squeezing enough to give Suguru a little head rush, and it was little, sure, until he felt Satoru’s other hand clamp roughly around the base of his cock, guiding it to his hole.
And it was—fuck, yeah. It was dizzying.
Suguru couldn’t help but roll his eyes back as his cock breached Satoru’s rim. They’d done this countless times, millions if you were to give it some type of numeric value, and still, it felt like the first every single time.
“Your cock’s huge, fuck,” Satoru whined, digging nails into throat as he continued to lower himself.
It was the same thing every time. Suguru sometimes wondered if Satoru intentionally forgot him in installments, scattering pieces of him across the months so he could return and remember them all over again.
Suguru groaned, because it was the only thing he could do. Saliva was starting to droop from the side of his mouth as Satoru kept his tantalizing grip around his throat, but he bore the suffocation in good faith, because one should not yield when religion is something that takes before it ever gives.
Satoru was about three quarters of the way down when he started to babble, something about feeling stretched out and then something about this being the last time. Suguru didn’t really catch onto the first part, but the second part activated a separate part of him, one that he believed was more feral than his usual self.
His hands moved quick, speed-of-light quick, darting out to grab at the crease of fat where Satoru’s hip met his thigh, and smacked him down on his cock, to the hilt.
“I told you to never say that bullshit to me again.”
Satoru wailed, the skin on his thighs growing pink, glistening. Suguru found a sick kind of relief in his pain.
“You can ride me like it’s the last time but it’ll never be the last time. You always come back to me, sweetheart. Always.”
Always. Never ending. Inevitable. Ananke.
Satoru could only pant, could only splay a hand over Suguru’s chest and buck his hips, chasing, chasing, and always finding exactly what he needed when on top of Suguru. And as he found his rhythm, as he became stretched out enough to only feel pleasure while leisurely bouncing up and down Suguru’s cock, he let his ego make a return.
“Last time, S’guru. Last—ha—time, I fuckin’ swear.”
He could barely speak a whole sentence clearly, gone with the wind, but Suguru could understand it clearly. It angered him, truly, the way Satoru could say such baseless lies with his tongue curled against his teeth and his stomach bulging full of dick.
Suguru didn’t dignifty him with a response immediately. Instead, he tightened his grip around his hips and slammed him down, unmerciless, again and again and again, and hoped the slap of skin and the fire of ecstasy would be enough to void the words on Satoru’s viscous tongue.
“If you’re being honest, show them to me.”
Satoru’s legs began to shake but he wouldn’t give Suguru what he wanted. He never would unless forced. He simply flashed his canines and had his hand join the other on Suguru’s chest, bouncing harder.
“Fuck you, nphm. Fuck, ha, you—mphm, yeah, keep—keep slamming me down like that.”
Suguru slammed him down only once and kept him there, then rolled his head back, knocking it against the tatami. He grinned as his fingers delved into Satoru’s nimble hips, keeping him stationed on his cock.
“C’mon,” Satoru drawled, whiny, clawing at Suguru’s chest.
“Show me. Undress yourself.”
Satoru whined again, rocking his hips back and forth. He lifted his hands off Suguru’s chest and slowly brought them behind his head, making a show of it. It was torturously slow; the way he started to undo his bandages. They barely moved a muscle as he worked gingerly, teasingly. Suguru was getting worked up all over again.
He thrust upward the best he could, if anything, just to watch the way Satoru’s muscled thighs jiggled with the movement. One row of bandages undid themselves, and Suguru found himself far too impatient to wait on his lover. He brought three fingers up to Satoru’s face—far too gentle for the meaning of their visit—and slid them underneath the bandages of his right eye, feeling the way Satoru’s eyelashes fluttered at the contact, then lifted the side entirely.
Satoru’s eye shone down at him, blue bleeding through the gaps like light forced through something that was never meant to contain it. It wasn’t just that it was bright, it was that it stayed bright even when it had no right to, even when everything else about him suggested restraint, suggested distance, suggested something easier to misread.
Satoru always looked at him like that, as if he had never once been unsure of him, as if he had never once changed.
Suguru did not know how many years it took to unlearn a person. However many it was, it had not been enough.
“You’re so…”
Beautiful. Perfect. Otherworldly.
Suguru bit his tongue.
Satoru’s eye dulled when the statement ceased to make it past Suguru’s lips.
Instead of letting it fester, or worse, making a deal out of it, Satoru leaned down, hands resting on either side of Suguru’s face. The one unravelled bandage hung loose over his shoulder, cascading over Suguru’s lips and down the front of his neck. They were so close. One misstep and their noses would touch, one step and their lips would only be separated by mere fibres.
And maybe that wasn’t just the mites gnawing in Suguru’s head. Maybe that was obvious, something Satoru would scoff at or feel disgusted by, because before the moment could grow wings or teeth, Satoru rolled his hips and groaned, head tipped back.
“Are you gonna lie there staring at my pretty face,” he began, nose pointed to the ceiling, “or are you going to fuck me, Suguru?”
Suguru lost the twinkle in his eye as he scoffed. Moment over. No missteps. No steps. Hands gripped Satoru’s asscheeks harshly, fingers threatening to dive into his hole where Suguru’s cock was currently suffocating it. He dove his head upwards and nipped at Satoru’s chin lightly at first, then his teeth mawed into the flesh, dragging Satoru’s chin down roughly, his head falling into the junction of Suguru’s neck and shoulder.
“Hold on tight, sweetheart.”
Satoru’s grip became a vice around his shoulders. Suguru answered in kind, hands settling onto Satoru’s lower back, fingers dipping into the dimples at the bottom of his spine. He dug his feet into the tatami and braced his back before beginning his viscous upward thrusts into Satoru’s hole.
Suguru couldn’t help the grin that crept across his face as Satoru fell almost entirely silent and limp-limbed. There was something deeply satisfying about seeing a storm exhaust itself. One moment thunder, the next only the lingering drizzle left behind. The mist was saccharine-sweet in the shell of his ear. Hah-hah-hah. Mmph. Ha, fuck, Suguru. Filthy mutterings disguised as pretty ocean sounds with every ruptured wave poured into him.
Suguru wanted to take it further. Wanted Satoru’s obscenities forever, the feeling of him to never end. Needed the addictive friction of stretching Satoru’s hole to oblivion to be the only thing he ever felt again. He wanted to press his thumb over the slit of his cock before coming just to hear Satoru beg like a whore to be filled. He hungered to edge Satoru, too. To never let him come. To keep him locked away in his home to be nothing but a hole to fill, coming in him repeatedly, summoning his tentacle curse to strong lock over the base of Satoru’s cock, never giving him the satisfaction of reaching his climax so there’d be no reason for him to leave ever again.
Will I ever learn how to live without it?
“Is that all you—ha, got?” Satoru laughed, right before a thrust so daring that half the wind got knocked out of him. Satoru heaved, but he was never a quitter. “You fuck like a—like a virgin.”
Suguru dug his blunt fingernails into Satoru’s hips right under his shirt, casting crescents that turned into full blood moons with every thrust upward. He bit down on the junction of Satoru’s neck, making him wail, ensuring Satoru truly felt him devour every part of him.
“Is that what you think?” Suguru panted. The taste of blood and sweat lingered stubbornly, impossibly mundane and strangely divine all at once. It was the Shinano and Phlegethon alike; river water and underworld blood, something ordinary enough to cup in his hands and something sacred enough to drown in. Satoru had always felt that way to him. Close enough to touch, distant enough to mythologize. “Lying on top of me all brainless and stupid and that’s what you think?”
Satoru raised his head a fraction and lapped at the shell of Suguru’s ear, made sure to nick his teeth on the gauge. “Uh huh. You’re just no good. Like a little bitch.”
And Suguru would laugh if he were a dumber man. Instead, he found himself wondering whether anyone else could hear what Satoru had actually said.
You're just no good. Like a little bitch.
Come closer. Step inside my skin. Fuck me harder. Again and again and again.
Suguru snaked his arms around Satoru’s body and squeezed, python-coiling and boa-constricting until the tables turned along with their bodies and Satoru was now on his back. Suguru’s robes hung as a veil to hide the fact he didn’t pull out to wandering eyes. After killing a man, however, Suguru doubted anyone else would dare lift their head, but then again, only sorcerers could be trusted. Maybe just one.
“You wanted this, right? It’s why you acted out.” Suguru dragged his cock out till the tip threatened to slip, then pushed back all the way in in one foul swoop, puncturing Satoru’s insides and voice alike. Music to the ears. “God, you never fail to get my dick even harder with that mouth of yours. Such pretty sounds coming from someone getting fucked by a useless little bitch.”
Suguru’s forearms met the tatami, Satoru’s head caged between them. Suguru closed his eyes and focused on the slow drag of his cock and the way Satoru clenched and unclenched around him.
“Don’t even need to work for it, you’re dragging me in yourself,” Suguru continued. He chuckled as he opened his eyes, dazed into oblivion by Satoru’s filthy pants. “So fucking thirsty for it, it’s almost putting me off.”
With a punctured thrust, Satoru gasped and threw his head back roughly, mouth agape. His hands shot up to Suguru’s back and started fisting the dense black cotton, pulling him in closer until Suguru’s nose was poking at the edge of his open mouth.
“S’good,” Satoru whined, saliva smearing on Suguru’s upper lip. He flinched when Suguru caught the line of his jaw with his teeth, a small, startled sound escaping him before he could swallow it back down. “Need,” he breathed. “I need—hmph—”
“What d’you need?” Suguru asked into the wetness of his jaw. Satoru was crying, salty need painting an ocean on their cheeks with each jostle forward from Suguru’s hips.
“You,” Satoru answered as his fists released Suguru’s robes and moved to cradle his cheeks, bringing his head right over Satoru’s face. “Need you. Need—need more. More of you. Please?”
Suguru stared at him.
Need you.
The phrase sat awkwardly in his head, like a puzzle piece forced into the wrong box. It didn’t make sense. He pulled him closer absentmindedly.
Yell at me for leaving you. Tell me I never was and never will be anything to you. Tell me you hate me and mean it. Tell me it’s the last time and mean it. Say the things you mean. Mean the things you say.
Be mean. Meaner. It would make this a lot fucking easier.
“Okay,” he said instead of the dam bursting in his brain. “Yeah, okay,” he breathed, one forearm slipping beneath Satoru’s nape and the other braced over his head, keeping him cooped in close. “Okay.” He felt Satoru’s calves hook around his lower back and squeeze, tugging him in, begging for more, needing more. “Okay, fuck.”
Suguru fucked into him with every ounce of need that had been poured through Satoru’s request. He was used to it rough, so he could do it rough. He could give Satoru the need he wanted because he was used to giving him the world.
“Fuck, Suguru—” Satoru gasped as Suguru picked up the pace, sweat forming, dripping, drying, then forming again.
“Feels good?” Suguru asked, giving back a trickle of need in an open hand, palm up. He wanted to be told he was good. “Tell me how good I make you feel.”
Satoru dug his heels into Suguru’s back, meeting every thrust like a champion. The strongest in every regard. “S’fucking good. The best. You know it, cocky fucker.”
“Mm, I fuck you best. You need my dick, it’s why you—fuck, it’s why you keep coming back, isn’t it?”
You need me.
“S’guru, ah, ‘m—”
You fucking need me.
“You close?”
Satoru whined, bringing his hand in between their bodies, aiming for his cock. “Uh huh—“
“No,” Suguru grunted, ripping Satoru’s hand away and bringing it to the tatami, squeezing. “You know how this goes. You come on my cock or you don’t come at all. Fucked you so stupid you’ve forgotten yourself, hm?”
Satoru could do nothing but babble, nothing but nod and whimper and whine against Suguru’s neck. Nothing but drool along his jaw and moan into the shell of his ear.
Around them, the congregation remained bowed. Suguru could see the shape of them in his periphery. Folded backs. Lowered heads. Sleeves spread carefully over tatami.
Everything was beautiful.
Not simply Satoru, though he always was. The whole thing. The sick devotion of it all. The sight of people folding themselves obediently toward the floor while Satoru—loud, restless, impossible Satoru—failed over and over again to keep quiet in the center of their worship.
Suguru smiled faintly against Satoru’s temple, then turned his head.
“Begin prayer,” he commanded, voice louder and clearer than it had sounded since Satoru walked in. He could feel Satoru’s eyebrows knit against his jawbone.
“Huh?”
Suguru smiled when it began.
“Love to the strong. Love to the strong. Love to the strong.”
Again and again and again. Over and over and over.
Low and unified, the words spread through the room, blurred slightly by bowed mouths and pressed sleeves. Nobody hesitated. Nobody questioned. The phrase rose from them immediately, as instinctive as breathing.
“Love to the strong. Love to the strong. Love to the strong.”
Again and again and again.
“S’guru what the f—”
The chant swallowed him whole.
“Love to the strong. Love to the strong. Love to the strong.”
Over and over and over.
A breathy huff escaped Suguru, followed by a mirthful laugh, and then he was all but fiery bliss, smacking his hips forward in a brazen pace, hard enough to leave Satoru short-winded, a mess of a man who, before entering the shoji doors of Suguru’s hall, was nothing less than Gojo Satoru, the strongest sorcerer of today. Now, however, he was Satoru, and only Satoru. Suguru’s strongest love.
“Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop,” Satoru sobbed into the crook of Suguru’s neck, tears staining both their faces from the jostle of their bodies as Suguru refused to stop pounding into him. Satoru’s hand gripped tightly in Suguru’s hair, almost pulling the roots out as if in desperation to plant new ones. “Fuck, please. Inside—come inside, please—I love—“
Suguru short-circuited, vision flashing white, then black, then white again, Satoru there and gone and there again. The current rolled right over him, water extinguishing the burning in his stomach and reinventing itself as some sort of holy pleasure. Satoru came with him, unshy about painting their stomachs white while filled to the brim all the same.
It was a celestial experience, both in the moment and in its aftermath. He held the angel who had offered him holy communion, and the angel held him back all the same, sweat and tired bone pressed into the shape of an embrace, as though even exhaustion had been sanctified. Somewhere beyond them, the muses of a distant choir seemed to sing in a hushed whisper, like heaven itself had lowered its voice to listen.
“Love to the strong. Love to the strong. Love to the strong.”
Again and again and again.
—
Suguru was not crazy.
Shoko had come close to saying otherwise the last time they saw each other—not outright, not in so many words, but Shoko had always preferred implication over accusation, little half-smiles and sideways glances that said just enough without ever committing to it—and Suguru, being Suguru, had understood her perfectly. It had not offended him. It had not even surprised him. Shoko was the sort of person who believed in clean lines, in diagnoses that could be written down and circled and filed away neatly, and Suguru had, by that point, become something decidedly unfileable. Something inconvenient. Something that did not sit still long enough to be understood, let alone forgiven.
But she had been wrong.
There was a difference between being deluded, or fractured, or even unsound, and being crazy. People liked to blur the lines between those things, liked to pretend that madness was a single, monolithic state, something easy to point at and condemn, but Suguru had never been fond of easy answers. To be crazy was to lack sense, to be divorced from logic, to operate outside the realm of reason, and when he thought back to a time where he had been so hopelessly, irrevocably, crazy in love with Gojo Satoru, he could not, in good faith, call it senseless.
It made perfect sense, actually.
It made sense and had been beautiful sense, too—embarrassingly so, in hindsight—the kind of beauty that felt engineered rather than accidental, like something designed to fit rather than something stumbled upon by chance. There had been something suspiciously easy about it, though he had not known enough then to be suspicious. It had settled into him easily, without friction, without resistance, as if there had always been a vacancy for it somewhere deep in his chest, waiting to be occupied. There had been nothing jagged about it, nothing that warned him to stop or turn back or reconsider. No fissures. No fault lines.
Certain people had pretty names for it, of course. A poisoned chalice, if they were feeling dramatic. A primrose path, if they were feeling literary. Suguru had entertained both, at one point or another. Had rolled the phrases around in his mind like loose change, listening to the sound they made when they struck against one another, searching for cracks in the alloy.
Neither had ever quite fit because poison implied deception, and there had been none. Because a path implied choice, and there had been even less of that.
It had taken him years to arrive at something that did.
Ananke.
Suguru had told himself, for a long time, that he had made his choices freely, that every step he had taken had been deliberate, considered, his own—but that was the sort of lie that only held up from a distance. Up close, under any real scrutiny, it began to fracture. So when that familiar Ananke-rich cursed energy brushed against his senses while he stood in front of the kitchenette in his bedroom waiting for the kettle to boil, he recognized it immediately.
The kettle rattled softly atop the burner. The water began to boil. Pressure accumulated where it always had.
There had always been cracks in him. Tiny things. Hairline things. Imperfections hidden beneath paint and plaster, invisible until the foundation rattled beneath them.
The kettle started to whistle.
The cracks widened.
“I didn’t send any curses to your students,” Suguru stated plainly, back turned to Satoru.
The tea bag dipped beneath the surface and emerged again. Beneath the surface and emerged again. The water darkened around it in slow, spreading clouds.
Satoru, surprisingly, didn’t pull the hikido door off its hinges in a fury, nor did he yell or pick a fight like he usually did as an excuse to enter Suguru’s home unprompted. Suguru threw a look over his shoulder, curious.
“Don’t fucking look at me,” Satoru grumbled, but it lacked its usual bite. Suguru turned his attention back to his tea, yet listened in on Satoru’s heavy footsteps approaching him. “Make me one, will you?”
What Suguru wanted to bark was I thought you swore it was the last time, but what came instead was, “You don’t like tea.”
“Which is why you keep those little sugar cubes for me in that ugly ceramic. Three cubes minimum, you know I like it sweet.”
Suguru sighed, doing just that. He could feel Satoru’s presence behind him, and if he closed his eyes, he could even feel his warm breath against the back of his ear and the eyes that followed every move he made.
Once the sugar cubes dissolved, Satoru reached around him and dropped something into the cup. Suguru’s eyebrows knit.
“That’s not sugar.”
“Wow, you grow smarter with age.”
He picked up the cup and wandered toward one of the zabuton cushions thrown haphazardly beside the futon Suguru had laid out earlier. Suguru followed with a tray.
“What are you doing here?” he asked as he settled opposite him. There were more questions that plagued his mind, but that one was the easiest by far, or maybe the safest.
Satoru scoffed. “Am I only allowed over as a hole to fill? Can’t two old friends catch up over some shitty tea?”
Suguru’s eye twitched. There had been a time when Suguru might have called Satoru many things. Best friend. Partner. Soulmate. Home. Friend had always existed somewhere on that list but it had never existed by itself. It was like calling the ocean a puddle. Technically water. Technically correct. Missing something essential all the same.
The fracture widened.
They both knew where to strike. They always had. They knew which bones were load-bearing and which wounds never healed correctly, and maybe Suguru was having a particularly fragile day because he felt the impact immediately, felt it settle in his gut and spread, dark and slow as crude oil through groundwater.
“What?” Satoru laughed, taking a sip of his shitty tea. “Didn’t like that one?”
“Why are you here?” Suguru repeated.
Satoru set the cup down. “I have a proposition.”
If Suguru could calculate each and every idea Satoru propositioned that didn’t turn to shit, he probably wouldn’t have had the mental capacity to even think about defecting from Jujutsu Tech, but alas, the number is incalculable, and in turn, he did leave.
“Spit it out.”
Satoru picked up his tea again. This time he didn’t take his time blowing on it for show or sipping it politely. He simply tipped the cup back and swallowed the entire thing in one gulp. The line of his throat worked once. Twice. Gone. A stray ribbon of tea escaped the corner of his mouth and slid down his chin. Satoru caught it with the pad of his finger before it could fall any farther and sucked it clean.
“Okay, so,” he began, once he harshly smacked the tea cup back down on the tray, “the proposition is actually in effect right now.”
Suguru stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Exactly the question you should be asking. Now, how would you feel about fucking me while I’m asleep? Like, I’m already gonna be conked out sometime in the next hour, so either way you’re gonna have to deal with me, so may as well do something productive in the meantime, right?”
There weren’t enough words in the dictionary to explain the look on Suguru’s face. There were Satoru’s stupid propositions in the past when they were young and dumb, and then there was whatever this was. For a moment, Suguru wasn't entirely sure he had heard him correctly. The words entered one ear and left through the other without stopping anywhere useful in between, his brain rejecting them on principle. Fucking him while he sleeps. What the—
“What the fuck are you talking about—” Suguru lunged across the space between them so quickly the tray rattled and the cushions scattered beneath them. His hand caught his forehead, the other on Satoru's jaw before the idiot could protest, thumb digging into one cheek as he forced his mouth open. “—throw the fuck up now. Throw that shit up. What the fuck were you thinking?”
Satoru made a gargled sound but made no effort to throw up during their tussle. Suguru pushed him back far enough so his back hit the ground and his weight was pinned down, two fingers shoved down his throat. His bandages unravelled. His eyes watered.
“Stop,” Satoru garbled, but it was no use. When Suguru was hell bent on something, he wouldn’t stop for nothing. That is, unless something else got in the way.
“You put your infinity up against me?” he scoffed, stilling his movements and falling back on his shins now that he was miles away from Satoru for the first time in his life.
“Because you’re not listening to me!” Satoru croaked out, wiping his mouth with his forearm as he sat up. “Jeez, you’re lucky your fingers are all—” he gestured vaguely, “—sugary.”
“I’m not playing around here. We’re going to go to the bathroom, I’m going to watch you throw up whatever you slipped into that tea, and then you’re going to be on your way. Deal?”
“No deal,” Satoru said instantly. “Counter offer: we chill on the futon, I close my eyes, and when I’m asleep, you’re gonna play out all your filthy fantasies on me. Deal?”
Suguru pinched the bridge of his nose. “Why are you doing this, ‘Toru? Where did you even get those? You don’t even know how they’re going to affect your technique. You can’t even have a drink without everything going haywire and you expect me to—what, exactly? Lie there and drive my cock into you while something wrong could be happening? No thanks.”
“You’re not understanding—”
“I’ve understood enough,” Suguru cut him off, one palm braced on the floor ready to get up. “Leave before—”
“Please,” Satoru begged as he grabbed onto Suguru’s forearm to keep him seated. “Please just—just… understand me more.”
Suguru froze. Understand me more.
It was a cerulean blue ocean pleading the sunset to meet him at the horizon. It was dusk trying to hold the day in his hands as it slipped into night. It was Satoru asking Suguru to be there for him one more time.
Understand me more. It was all Suguru begged silently during their school days, back when Riko died and Haibara died and Satoru died then came back, though he never said it like that, never let it sit fully formed in his mouth where it might become something vulnerable to being refused. It was more like something ambient, something he moved around in, the way one tolerates weather that has always been there. Understand me more, but I won’t let you understand me. Where Suguru was restrained, Satoru was open. Please just understand me more. Could it always have been that simple? Would refusing to understand Satoru now pay the same price as when he failed to let Satoru understand him all those years ago?
“Get on the futon,” he mumbled, and felt Satoru's hand slip from his forearm as he obeyed, climbing atop the covers and settling onto his back without argument. Suguru hadn't allowed outside clothes on the futon in years. The rule had emerged sometime after his defection and calcified slowly the moment Satoru asked him to understand him. “Tell me what’s going on.”
Although Satoru forewent his bandages in the scuffle, he still needed them, seeing as he laid there with his palm covering his eyes. Suguru wondered if there was a different reason; if he, for some reason, couldn’t look him in the eyes while he spoke.
“The pills won’t mess with my technique because they’ve been tried and tested vigorously by Shoko. They’re prescribed.”
Suguru nodded before realizing Satoru couldn't see him. It stung a little. There had once been a period of their lives where being witnessed by one another had felt as natural as breathing. A glance across a classroom. A kick beneath a desk. A smirk exchanged after a joke that earned them a lecture from Yaga. Observation was a kind of intimacy, wasn't it? Astronomers learned everything they knew about distant galaxies through observation alone. Entire worlds could be understood from light-years away if one looked carefully enough. Suguru used to think he knew Satoru that way. He used to think there was nothing hidden between them.
Acting before he could think better of it, he lowered himself onto the futon beside him and guided Satoru's head onto his chest, replacing the hand over his eyes with one of his own. Satoru used to like it when he did that. Suguru hoped it gave him the courage to continue.
“Sleeping pills or sedatives or whatever word you wanna use—that’s what they are.” There was a pause and neither of them moved, breathed. “I haven’t been sleeping, and that’s like, not one of my usual over-exaggerations. It’s like after the Toji thing but worse. It’s like… it’s like after the you thing but worse.”
Suguru swallowed the rancid guilt because it was not the time to feel guilty. It was the time to understand but all he could comprehend was how close they were. How domestic it felt. How easy. There should have been something awkward about it after all this time. There should have been friction. There should have been distance. Instead there was only the opposite, a constant beneath his hand. Extinction, Suguru thought, was rarely an event, a process. Numbers dwindled gradually and habitats shrank until one became none. He had spent almost a decade believing this part of them had gone extinct, yet here it was, alive enough to place its head on his chest and speak to him beneath eyelids in the dark. Alive enough that Suguru found himself wondering whether Satoru felt it too.
“I haven’t been taking them,” Satoru admitted with a shaky breath. “It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that I can’t.”
“And why is that?”
Suguru felt Satoru's eyebrows pinch together beneath his palm. He lowered his other hand over the first, effectively caging the gesture between them, covering Satoru's eyes entirely and darkening his world a little further, locking him into the shelter of Suguru's chest and the uneven rhythm beneath it.
“I don’t want to go to sleep without you, Suguru. I can’t trust anyone but you to keep me safe.”
Suguru’s heart stumbled further.
“Sweetheart,” he sighed mournfully, because what was an insane man supposed to say in response to that? It was beyond anything he could’ve imagined to come out of Satoru’s mouth—before their scuffle, before the tea, even before Satoru entered calmly into his home. It was blasphemy, it was Ananke, it was the inevitability they were always fated to be. “I don’t need to touch you to have your company be welcomed.” Is that what Satoru thought? Is that what Suguru had made him feel? “Sleep it off here and go back in the morning.”
“But I want you to touch me. I need it, Suguru, I—“ His eyebrows furrowed again beneath Suguru's hand and his mouth pulled into something small and miserable. He was clutching weakly at Suguru's shirt now, fingers gathering fabric against his chest. “I need to feel you with me when my brain stops so my body knows I’m okay.”
Suguru tightened his hands and allowed the words to wash over him completely. He wasn't sure he had ever heard faith articulated so plainly. Not from Satoru. Not from anyone. There had always been devotion between them, but it had existed primarily in negative space; in unfinished sentences, in torturous silences, in half-brazen finger pointing and full-bodied arguments. It lived in the things they assumed rather than the things they said, in the certainty that neither of them would leave until one of them finally did. There had been love in every fight. Love in every reunion. Love in every goodbye they had never managed to say properly. Destructive love. Crazy love. The sort of love that survived conditions under which it reasonably should not have.
And as they laid together on the futon beside the abandoned tea tray in a home that was not theirs but merely Suguru’s, that space seemed to vanish. The distance between feeling and language collapsed. For once, there was no interpretation or guessing or reaching required. Satoru had placed his trust into Suguru's hands and called it by its name.
“Okay,” Suguru whispered.
Satoru moved so quickly it startled him. A hand pressed against Suguru's chest as he pushed himself upright and out from beneath his palms.
“Really?”
His eyes shone. There were certain things in nature that people never grew tired of looking at. The moon. The ocean. Fire. Objects that revealed something different each time they were observed. Satoru's eyes belonged in that category. Suguru had spent almost half his life looking into them and still occasionally found himself surprised by what he saw there.
“We can do this every night if you join my cult,” he threw out lightly, if not to take a shot in the dark, then to break the spell. To drag them both back down to earth.
Satoru immediately collapsed back against him. “Pfft,” he scoffed. “You're fucking crazy.”
Crazy love, Suguru thought, feeling Satoru settle comfortably back against him. I seem to contain quite a lot of it.
“Mhm. You feeling sleepy?”
“Not really.”
“Okay.”
They remained there in silence, neither of them moving, time behaving strangely around them. It could've been ten minutes. Twenty. Fifty. Suguru couldn't tell the difference. He had exorcised a curse earlier that day, one swipe of his hand and it was gone. This felt kind of like that. The minutes vanished as soon as he tried to count them. It felt long, too. Long in the way memory was long. He found himself thinking about their earliest memories together and they felt far away like that too.
Satoru mumbled something beneath his breath, light as a feather, light as the feeling rolling through him with Satoru in his arms. Suguru didn't catch the words. He wasn't sure he wanted to. Some things lost their meaning when brought fully into the light. Some things were only beautiful because they remained half-understood. The ocean was deeper than anyone could explore. Most of the universe remained unobserved. Human beings spent their entire lives misunderstanding one another and still somehow managed to fall in love. Suguru thought there might be comfort in that. He thought there might be comfort in not knowing everything.
“What was that?” he asked anyway.
“Only you,” Satoru mumbled, drool sliding out from the corner of his mouth. “There’s only been you. There will only ever be you.”
Suguru's breath caught.
Only you.
People said things they didn't mean all the time. They said forever when they meant right now. They said nothing when they meant everything. They said goodbye and expected to return. Language was imperfect. People were imperfect. Satoru was imperfect.
Only you.
“What?”
There's only been you.
“Satoru?”
There will only ever be you.
The future was a ridiculous thing to promise. Nobody knew the future. Meteorologists couldn't accurately predict the weather two weeks in advance while economists failed to predict recessions. There was a reason hindsight existed; foresight had always been harder, and yet, people kept making promises anyway.
See you tomorrow. I'll never leave. Forever. Always.
Most of them were wrong.
See you tomorrow. Satoru had not expected Suguru to defect. I'll never leave. He had not expected himself to, either. Forever. He had not expected ten years to pass. Always. He had not expected to spend those ten years thinking about him anyway.
Maybe that was the problem with the future: it never looked inevitable until it became the past.
“Satoru,” he repeated, then lifted himself from the futon only for Satoru's head to roll from his chest and settle heavily against the bedding. His mouth had fallen open slightly. The crease between his brows was gone. Even his breathing had changed.
The bastard was asleep.
Suguru stared at him.
“You can't just—”
He stopped. Because apparently Satoru could.
“Unbelievable,” he muttered, fingers slipping carefully through Satoru's hair.
You can't spend ten years running from a fire and then act surprised to discover the smoke followed you.
“There has only ever been you, too.”
Satoru didn't hear him.
Still, Suguru found himself waiting for some kind of response. A shift in expression. A twitch of his mouth. Anything. He waited until he felt ridiculous, until he realized he was wearing the same shoes Satoru had stood in all those years ago in Shinjuku.
Only you.
Suguru loomed over him, drinking in his unconscious body; the way his nose twitched in his sleep, the slow incline and decline of his chest with every breath, the calm expression he never had during waking moments anymore. Suguru drank it all in, held it in his mouth, drowned in it when it got a little too painful.
He knelt beside him and lifted the hem of his shirt, revealing the toned plains of his stomach. There were a few scars there, unhealed despite Satoru’s skilled hand at RCT. It made Suguru feel a little sick. He’s not healing himself. Why? He dragged his knuckles over the wounds nonetheless, feeling how deep they went into the skin, how poorly they scabbed over, all while acknowledging how they didn’t dim his beauty at all, not even by a fraction.
Satoru had always been beautiful. It was as obvious as it was true. Fire was hot. Ice was freezing. Satoru was beautiful. Yet as Suguru traced the latticework of scars written across his skin, a voice in the back of his mind stirred for the first time, accusatory.
Look what you've done to him. He hurts himself. He hurts himself waiting for you to come back to him.
Again and again and again.
Suguru’s hand splayed over Satoru’s abdomen. Have I truly made him ugly? Am I punishing him by touching him so gently? The hand moved upwards, riding his t-shirt up higher to reveal more marks. Have I given him so little that pain is all he has left to keep?
Suguru counted all his ribs, moved to the valley of his chest, up and down, up and down, then palmed over his pec, feeling his heart beat beneath it. The room was quiet and the thump was loud. Suguru kept his hand there longer than necessary, feeling the relentless rhythm beneath bone and skin and scar tissue alike. Alive. Satoru was alive. The realization should not have felt so astonishing after all these years, and yet it did every single time.
His thumb pressed unconsciously against the space over his heart, as though trying to quiet it.
“You’re so beautiful.”
He should have said it during their last meeting. He almost did. His life thus far was riddled with so many almosts and could’ve beens that it was laughable in its absurdity.
His hand drifted up, fingertips brushed lightly against Satoru’s throat, feeling the steady pulse there. Human. Fragile despite all that impossible power. Suguru remembered being sixteen and stupid enough to think of Satoru as invincible. He remembered believing strength could exempt a person from suffering if only they possessed enough of it.
What a childish thing to believe.
His eyes burned suddenly.
“You look tired,” he whispered. “I don’t think I’ve ever forgiven myself for that.”
The hand that lightly clutched his throat forewent the pulse there, drifting back down, palm flattening against the scars again. He dipped his head down to Satoru’s sternum, nosing at the skin of his abdomen as he continued his journey.
“Infinity still won’t go up against me while you sleep, huh?” Suguru murmured against the planes of Satoru’s skin, letting lips and teeth alike graze over the most sensitive parts of his body, dragging, dragging, dragging. His hand followed suit, warming up the coldest parts of him till they reached the band of his pants.
This is what he wanted, right? He wanted me to—
Suguru sucked in a breath and snapped the band back once, unconsciously looking to Satoru for some kind of reaction. When none came, his hand drifted lower, palming at the semi-hard cock Satoru was sporting beneath the layers.
Every part of Satoru seemed crafted solely to torment him. Suguru learned that for the first time at seventeen—all nervous hands and awkward smiles—and he relearned it every time after that, even in his dreams when he slept alone and tortured with the lack of proximity. He was learning it all over again now, too, with intimate hands all over Satoru’s unconscious body.
He nipped at the skin of Satoru’s waist, then moved his hand from crotch to thigh, remembering the first time Satoru allowed him to rest his hand there. It was summer and it was sweltering, and shameless Satoru was clad in only his boxers because it’s your room, no one’s gonna see me. You’re such a prude, dude. Satoru had dropped his leg over Suguru’s lap where Suguru sat stiffly on the bed, heart racing a mile a minute, lungs suffocated not by the humidity but by the sheer force of Gojo Satoru—the same Gojo Satoru that had taken his hand and placed it on the top of his bare thigh, the same place it rested now.
You’re overthinking it, Satoru had said, half-laughing, already post-mission tired, already half-asleep. I like it when you touch me. Only you.
Suguru bit the inside of his cheek. Memory was a terrible thing.
He remembered a lot and forgot nothing despite living in a haze for most of his life. He could never neglect his time with Satoru, no matter how hard he tried. Wouldn’t. He remembered trips to the beach and dates to the aquarium and movie nights in bed, skin-on-skin. He remembered the first I love you and the millions of others that followed. He remembered arguments and making-ups and blind trust. He remembered loosening pants and ‘summer fatigue’ and turning his back to leave.
He remembered crying a lot, too, just as he was now.
Full-bellied tears rained onto Satoru’s stomach, tracking down the curve of his body and disappearing into his navel, damning his body.
“Fuck,” Suguru cursed, fingers curling into Satoru’s thigh. “Fuck, I had to do it. I’m sorry.”
There was no one to hear him. No one to answer. Only his own selfish guilt remained, filling the silence where Satoru should have been, refusing to be pacified. It was rising in his throat, that same bile from all those years ago. He could feel the pressure building in his hand. He could feel himself looking at Satoru. He could feel himself wanting soft touches in summer. He could feel himself thinking about Shinjuku. About Riko. About Haibara. About love. About loss. Somewhere in the back of his head, he could already hear himself speaking. He could hear his own voice saying things it had no business saying aloud. He could—
“I had to do it,” he said again, smaller this time. “I had to. Riko, Haibara… you.” His voice cracked embarrassingly around the last word. “You know that, right? You have to know that.”
Because if Satoru didn't know, then what was left?
All at once, Suguru could feel the bile climbing higher. He could feel himself thinking about that day, and then the day before it, and then every day that followed. He could see Riko smiling, Haibara grinning. Clapping and rain. He could see blood on pavement and curses in alleyways and Satoru standing there young, looking invincible enough to challenge God Himself. Somewhere in the middle of it all he could see himself walking away. He could see Shinjuku. He could see the years disappearing into nothing. He could see the girls. He could see every justification he'd ever built for himself lining up neatly beside every regret. They blurred together, smudged-lens blurred, tear-blurred, a thorough blur that left him unable to tell where one ended and the other began.
His hand trembled against Satoru’s thigh before withdrawing entirely, fingers clenched into his own clothing instead, no longer trusting himself with the softness of his lover.
“I couldn’t survive watching them take things from you forever. I couldn’t stand there and watch the world hollow you out piece by piece until there was nothing left but the strongest.” He swallowed hard. “You should never have been burdened with becoming a weapon. Why did it have to be you, my Satoru?”
Why couldn't it have been me? Why was it always you? Why, why, why, why—
He frowned, resisting the impulse to touch him again. There was something grotesque in the thought of a man like him handling anything gently. Still, his pinky stretched out, tracing the seams in Satoru’s pants while fighting the urge to condemn himself for breaking his own restraint.
“I lie awake at night thinking about what would’ve happened if I stayed,” he continued. “Sometimes I scare the girls because they find me standing at the window for hours just staring outside like there’s something waiting for me there.” A horrible little laugh escaped him. “Maybe there is.”
For ten years, Suguru wanted to believe that something was Satoru, but belief is a desperate man’s most enduring delusion, especially when reality offers him nothing kinder to survive on. There was nothing more desperate than loving someone you had already chosen to lose.
“You know what else goes through my mind at that window?” His eyes squeezed shut, but it did nothing to stop the memory of Toji's voice from splitting through him. “I think about what would've happened if you got away from me again. And I think—” He laughed once, miserable and angry. “I think I would've destroyed everything. Everyone. Anyone who happened to be standing nearby. Dead. Gone. I'd want the whole world to suffer for it. I'd want them to hurt the way you hurt. I'd want them to understand what they've done to you. What it means to be born useful before you're allowed to be human.”
His shoulders trembled. “Isn't that awful? Isn't there something deeply fucking wrong with me that my love for you became this?” His gaze dropped to where Satoru slept, peaceful and oblivious and still here. “I think I’d kill myself not a second after because there’s no version of me that survives you leaving me twice.”
There had been a time when his love for Satoru felt holy to him. Not in the sanctimonious way of temples and sutras and the rigid architecture of religion, but in the simple, devastating way sunlight through stained glass felt holy, the way oceans were holy, natural disasters. Things so enormous and inevitable that humans could only stand before them and decide whether they wished to call the experience terror or God's will.
There was something frightening about loving another person like that. Something frightening about discovering that a human heart could contain more feeling than it seemed designed to survive. He wondered, sometimes, whether that was how curses were born. Not from hatred, but from excess. From emotions that outgrew their vessel but demanded to be felt.
Because what else could this possibly be? What else could explain the rot of it, the sick shape his devotion had twisted into over the years? Suguru loved Satoru enough to want him alive, enough to want him safe, enough to exile himself from the center of his own life to preserve what little softness still remained in him. And yet beneath that love lived something rabid and unspeakably selfish, something possessive enough to wish suffering upon the entire world simply for having touched him first.
It made him feel monstrous in ways murder never had.
“I hate myself,” Suguru admitted. “I hate what I became after losing you. I hate myself and I hate this world but I love you. God, I love you so much. I’m so fucking in love with you.”
He bent forward, forehead pressed shakily against Satoru’s chest. Fuck restraint. He was already an unrestrained, guilty man.
“You love me back, right? You’ve got to love me or else—“
Or else what am I doing this for?
“We were just kids,” he choked out. “Do you remember that? We were kids and they put blood on our hands before we even knew who we were supposed to become.” A sob tore out of him. “Sometimes I think we died back then and didn’t notice.”
A long silence passed before he spoke again.
“I can’t believe we both have kids.” He laughed through tears, aching and small. “I used to think we’d have that together someday.” His thumb brushed weakly across Satoru’s cheekbone. “Something ordinary. A home. A family. You complaining about the alarms going off, me snoozing them for another ten minutes so I can hold you close for a little longer.” His voice broke beyond repair. “We were supposed to grow old together.”
Another sob overtook him. “We could’ve,” he whispered helplessly. “We really could’ve.”
He cupped Satoru’s face with both hands. His nose brushed softly against Satoru’s cheek.
“We haven’t kissed in so many years,” he murmured. The apology that followed barely existed as sound. “I’m sorry.”
His lips met Satoru’s forehead first, trembling so badly the kiss barely landed properly. Then his cheek. The corner of his mouth. Each one slow and devastated, interrupted constantly by the sound of weeping.
“I wanna kiss you forever,” Suguru whispered against his skin. “I wanna love you forever.” His mouth ghosted over Satoru’s. “I don’t know how to stop loving you. I think if I did, there’d be nothing left of me at all.”
He tilted his head and closed his eyes, letting their noses knock together softly before their lips met. Suguru tried not to think too hard about how familiar Satoru still felt beneath him. Familiar in the devastating way old homes were familiar, or old injuries. A cross scar on the chest or a stab wound in the stomach. The body remembered even when the mind begged it not to. Muscle memory. Neural pathways. Some biological phenomenon Satoru would have happily explained to him in exhausting detail if given the opportunity.
There was always a scientific justification for everything with Satoru. Heat transfer. Vasodilation. Elevated heart rates in cold weather. Suguru remembered one winter mission in Hokkaido when the snow came down so heavily they could barely see the road back to the inn, thick wet flakes collecting in Satoru’s hair and lashes until he looked less like a person and more like something sculpted out of the storm itself. They’d stumbled inside half-frozen and soaked through to the skin, and Satoru, naturally, had spent the next ten minutes rambling about body heat and survival rates while trying unsuccessfully to peel off his gloves with numb fingers.
There’s actual physics behind this, he had insisted, following Suguru around the tiny room while their coats dripped melted snow onto the floorboards. If two people maintain close enough proximity—
Kiss me, Suguru had interrupted, grabbing him by the front of his uniform. Tell me about it later. Just shut up and kiss me.
The memory surfaced with the peculiar cruelty unique to happy things recalled too late.
Do you still have the button from my uniform that I left behind for you? When the winter snow is Hokkaido-cold, do you warm it between your hands and put it to your lips to shut you up? In the summer heat, do you hide it somewhere cool to preserve what's left of us?
Do you still carry us with you, or have you already thawed? Have you already become spring while I remain frozen somewhere years behind you?
A broken sound escaped Suguru before he could stop it. His mouth twisted painfully against Satoru’s as he refused to pull away, like separating even for a moment would force him back into the reality of the room around them. Tears slipped down his face unchecked, warm where they landed against Satoru’s skin. One disappeared into the corner of his mouth. Suguru tasted salt and remembered, all at once, that no amount of time had ever managed to estrange Satoru from him completely.
Reluctantly, eventually, he pulled back. Their cheeks brushed together, Suguru's breath trembling between them. Satoru didn't stir. Didn't wake. Didn't know. Yet somehow he was still the one wiping away Suguru's tears, simply by remaining close enough for them to fall somewhere other than the futon.
He stayed there quietly, cheek pressed against Satoru’s, thinking about snowstorms and adolescent cowardice and the way they used to disguise wanting as necessity. In Hokkaido, they had kissed each other to stay warm. Now Suguru pulled away from him with the same reluctance as stepping back out into winter after finally thawing his hands.
“I tried very hard to become someone capable of living without you. Did you know that?” His eyes hyper focused on Satoru’s sleeping face, tracing exhaustion into memory. “I built an entire life around your absence. I kept moving and speaking and pretending there was conviction in any of it because if I stopped for even a second, I would’ve had to acknowledge something deeply humiliating.”
His laugh arrived thin and joyless.
“That nothing ever felt as good as being loved by you.”
Outside, somewhere far beyond the compound, tires hissed softly against wet pavement. Water moved through pipes in the walls. Tokyo continued moving, bustling. Convenience stores remained lit through the night for insomniacs and drunk businessmen and lonely university students buying instant noodles at two in the morning. Trains still cut through the city. Vending machines still glowed blue-white in alleyways. Somewhere, someone was probably laughing loudly enough to disturb their neighbors.
The world continued despite them. Suguru found that cruel. Ironic, as he was cruel himself.
“I know I hurt you.” Suguru’s fingers moved instinctively into Satoru’s hair, smoothing through white strands that still felt impossibly soft after all these years. “I know this is cruel. These meetings. Whatever it is we keep doing to each other.” His mouth pulled sideways, bitter. “I know I should stop opening the door every time you come back.”
But you keep coming back.
He blamed Satoru for that sometimes. He blamed himself more often. On particularly pathetic nights, he blamed Ananke itself, as though fate were a tangible thing he could wrap both hands around and throttle for what it had done to them.
“And you idiot,” Suguru whispered, smiling despite himself, “you still have the terrible habit of mistaking me for the boy I used to be.”
The smile hurt to maintain.
“I’m not,” he said softly. “I haven’t been for a very long time.”
When they were younger, they used to speak about the future with the embarrassing certainty unique to people who had not yet learned that loving something did not guarantee permission to keep it. They would lie tangled together beneath the sheets in Suguru’s dorm room—because it was almost always Suguru’s dorm room, given that Satoru practically lived there anyway—and speak carelessly about the decades ahead of them like time itself had already agreed to cooperate.
Satoru always assumed they would remain side by side forever. Missions. Aging. Retirement. Death, probably. He treated the future like a guarantee rather than a privilege.
Suguru used to resent it, even as he agreed, even as he let it happen between them like it was harmless. He didn’t resent the hope itself so much as the ease with which Satoru could afford it. But resentment wasted time. It kept him in his head, picking at Satoru’s hope instead of simply being there, instead of letting it exist the way it always had between them. And now he would trade anything to return to those cramped dorm beds and threadbare cotton sheets and just shut up and agree with me kisses from Satoru just to avoid admitting he was wrong.
Just shut up and kiss me kisses had always belonged to Suguru. Just shut up and agree with me kisses belonged to Satoru.
But now there was nothing left in the shape of that kind of life. Giving it up now would not be a return to anything—it would be an interruption, a rupture large enough to be felt beyond them, something that would not stop at the room or even at the city. It would travel and escalate. It would become consequence.
Giving it up now would cause war.
But Suguru understood, distantly, that he had never been particularly good at choosing peace over anything that resembled desire. He had only ever been good at postponing collapse.
Suguru was selfish. He was aware of it in the same way he was aware of his own breathing—something automatic, ongoing, difficult to control when engulfed with cursed energy he knew like the back of his hand. He had been selfish in the way he stayed alive. Selfish in the way he left. Selfish in the way he stayed in Tokyo anyway, never attempting to become anything Satoru could not reach.
He was selfish. He was so selfish that—
“If you asked me to stay right now, I would.”
He looked to Satoru’s dreaming eyelids and hope sparked once in his chest before dying out.
“I would stay and let the whole world despise me for it. I would stay and let you despise me too, if it meant waking up beside you again. I know you’d find a way to protect me from the higher ups even if it killed you.”
We could kill them together, some ugly, ruined part of him thought suddenly. Why can’t we kill them together and be happy?
The thought made him nauseous.
“Do you understand how disgusting that is? After everything I’ve done, after everyone I’ve killed, the thing I still want most is something as small and ordinary as waking up next to you.” He bowed his head. “I think that’s how I know I was never meant to survive this.”
Fresh tears slid from his jaw onto the sheets beneath Satoru’s shoulder, darkening the fabric in uneven circles. Suguru watched them spread for a moment without moving. Satoru would’ve filled the silence years ago with some explanation about how liquid travelled through cloth, talking in circles until the night grew older but no less tired.
“I wanted more time.” I want more time. More you. I miss you. I miss my mother. I miss my father. I— “That’s all,” he corrected, before the thoughts could spiral further. “Just a little more time with you. I’d take whatever I could get. Ten years ago, five minutes ago, now—” His breath caught. “I would still take it.”
His hand curled tightly in the sheets.
“And if you kill me one day—when you kill me…” He swallowed hard. “I’ll let you. I think some part of me has been waiting for it from the moment I left. At least then you could stop hurting because of me.”
Another broken inhale.
“But Satoru,” he whispered, voice almost unheard, “if there was any other way—if there was any life where I could’ve stayed yours without destroying you—I would’ve chosen it. I swear to you, I would’ve chosen it.”
I would have chosen you.
Dressing out of his night attire and into his robes, Suguru paused. His feet drifted back to the tea cups and tray, where he picked everything up, tidied, and placed them on the counter of the kitchenette. They sat there, orderly and untouched, before he opened one of the drawers instead. A knife, ordinary enough in his hand.
He turned to where Satoru laid and smiled softly. He was a weak man.
The blade caught the tip of his forefinger when he tested its edge against his thumb, puncturing the skin just enough to bead red across the pad. He watched it gather there for a second before walking back toward the futon.
Kneeling beside Satoru again, Suguru lifted the outer layers of his robes and located the underside of the kesa near the seam. The blade dragged poorly through the fabric. Too dull. He had to work it back and forth carefully to keep the cut straight, the weave resisting before finally loosening with a soft tearing sound near the end. A two-inch strip came free in his hands, soft where years of wear had thinned it, edges slightly uneven where the knife had snagged.
Suguru held it between both hands for a moment, knife abandoned, staring at the severed piece as though it had been taken from somewhere far deeper than cloth alone. He pressed his thumb over the bead of blood at the tip of his finger and watched it disappear into the weave.
An offering, he thought distantly. Or maybe an apology.
Satoru shifted slightly in his sleep, brows pulling together for half a second before smoothing again. Even unconscious, he looked exhausted. Bone-deep exhaustion suffocating the soul rather than beneath the eyes. Suguru wondered, not for the first time, how much of that exhaustion wore his name.
Carefully, he folded the strip lengthwise.
Pale hair slipped like water through his fingers as he gathered it back from Satoru’s face, exposing those impossible eyes even behind eyelids, too bright, too knowing, too capable of seeing straight through whatever remained of him. The white bandages Satoru wore were always lousy. Suguru hoped he could find solace with this gift.
Suguru hesitated only once before tying the fabric securely over them, knot resting at the back of his head. It looked strangely natural there, as though the black cloth had always belonged to him. As though some part of Suguru had always been destined to.
Suguru took a deep breath.
He did not know when he would see Satoru again after this. There was always that gap between them, that merciless uncertainty that refused to resolve into anything so clean as closure. It took too long for Suguru to realize it, but in the end there was no bargaining with time, no real negotiation with the fixedness of an ending. Still, he found himself hoping—almost against his better judgement—that the cycle would finally fracture here, that Satoru might continue forward without him unburdened by whatever he had become, even if it meant that whatever remained of him ended here instead. Even if it meant being the thing Satoru no longer had to shoulder.
If this truly was Ananke, then it had been neither mercy or cruelty, only something set to happen, set in stone, set long before they ever learned to want it. He could accept that, or he was learning to. He could accept, too, that he was not something Satoru was meant to hold onto indefinitely—that perhaps the kindest thing left in him was the thought that Satoru should be the one to end it, if it came to that. To spare him the slow violence of continuing their Ananke, to spare himself the rougher evil of loving something he could not have and keep completely.
Still, all of it—every ‘last time’, every absence, every year spent pretending he had chosen this freely—had not erased the fact that it had been, in its way, a happy life with Satoru. Not a stable one. Not a lasting one. But a life all the same. A life of cramped dorm rooms and stolen afternoons and arguments neither of them meant and promised futures spoken aloud. A life bright enough to burn, to leave a mark. Bright enough that even now, after everything, he could not bring himself to wish it away.
The room creaked softly as he stepped away from the futon. His sandals waited by the genkan at the front where he had left them hours earlier, impossibly ordinary against the pain that breathed with them in the room. One hand rested briefly against the wooden frame as he looked back a final time.
He didn’t stay till Satoru woke up. He wasn’t crazy, and he figured it would be too painful for himself and too inviting for Satoru. Satoru knew his way out and had a big enough ego to make himself scarce by morning.
But maybe if Suguru had stayed he would’ve heard Satoru calling out for him not long after, awoken by the paralysis of not having Suguru near him. Maybe he would’ve seen him reach blindly across the futon first, still half-asleep, searching for warmth that wasn't there. Maybe he would’ve seen confusion arrive before panic. Maybe he would’ve seen Satoru sit upright too fast, the blindfold catching around his throat as trembling hands tore it free.
Maybe he would’ve heard Satoru apologizing to himself, wondering, too, why it had to be him. Maybe he would’ve heard him repeating words that had only ever existed inside Suguru's confession. I love you. I miss you. Stay. More time. More time.
Maybe things would’ve changed. Maybe they would’ve stayed the same.
Again and again and again.
Ananke.