Archive of Our Own

He’s five.

His mother takes him by the hand to the family shrine. There is no idol here. There never has been. Only an empty cushion. Pillars of stone rise up on all sides, glowing like gold in the fading sunlight. The trees press their leaves like the hands of worshippers, against the panels of the doors, their shadows swaying, whispering among themselves.

Two attendants, young girls, walk in, ghost-like in their silence.

“Dress him.” His mother says and they begin to.

They never speak to him and he begins to think they might just be ghosts. They look like humans. He does not. His mother does not. But they do. They must be. They’re not like those hideous, twisted creatures he keeps seeing everywhere.

If he were to put his hand to their face, would it go right through? Would that happen with Mother, too?

Sometimes, he thinks even she might be a ghost.

Like now, as she stands impassively to the side, towering in her presence like a pillar of salt, with her snowy hair, the hard, brilliant crystal eyes that she’s passed on to him. Her mouth is a fine line; her eyes, blank, unreadable.

Maybe if he touched her face, his hand wouldn’t go right through, but hold under cold, smooth skin, as immovable as marble.

He stands quietly as they dress him.

The kimono is too large for his small, thin frame, sleeves spilling out from his arms, fabric pooling around his feet in swirls of soft teal. It’s coloured and patterned to match the diamonds in his wide eyes. Stripes of blue run down the length of it, mixing with the rippling fabric at the end.

The girls pleat and fold it for him, trying the simple white belt around his small waist, fastening a thin band of golden thread over it.

The fabric is handspun, soft to touch. It drapes his small body and drags heavily behind him as his mother holds out her slender fingers. Her hand is cold and he only holds onto her fingertips as he's been taught. He does not struggle to keep up with her. He stumbles, once.

He’s led to the empty cushion. It’s firmer than it looks; it doesn’t sink under his weight when she puts her hand on his shoulder and urges him down. He fidgets, feeling the uncomfortable material against the backs of his thighs. His skin itches from the fabric of his kimono.

“Sit still.”

She says, never sparing him a glance. He obeys, folding his legs up beneath himself, hands on his knees, eyes facing straight ahead before him.

She gestures to the two girls and they go out as silently as they came in.

Like every other evening, as soon as they are gone, a throng of people gather before the shrine. He watches their shadows outside the doors, hunched over, hands folded, pleading benevolence and blessings. His mother watches him.

“Look how they bow to you, Satoru. You are above petty human affections. They think you were born a god. They are right. You are meant to be worshipped.”

And worshipped he is.

They come in hordes, begging and sniveling and pathetic. He cares nothing for them. He' s too young to. He doesn't know them. They used to scare him, the first few times.

They wet his sleeves with tears, leave grime on his clothes and tremble before the vivid colour of his eyes. Now, he scares them. Their incense burns makes his throat burn and his eyes water; the curses clinging to some of them slither off and crawl eagerly to him, snapping their jaws hungrily before one look from him makes them shrink back and dissipate. He accepts the offerings they bring and touches nothing afterwards. His mother won't have it. She always has the servants throw out everything that cannot go into the treasury. 

He exorcises the curses.

He lets them kiss his hands.

He cares nothing for them.

He burns with envy like he's never felt when he watches a young child being carried by his mother one day.

His own mother has never held him like that.

I am a God. I don’t need to be held like that. He tells himself with all the practiced ease of a child repeating a lesson to himself, seething inside.

But it isn’t enough.

Not when he is five and doesn’t get more than four hours of sleep a night because of all the people who have been sent out to slaughter him and claim the massive bounty on his head.

Not when he is fifteen and walks out of the hollow walls of his hollow home. He has Blue, worn and practiced and reliable. Red...that's more complicated. But he's going to learn. He always does.

His feet barely touch the ground.

Satoru is a god among men and now, freed from the altar-prison of his home, he soars like a wild bird, higher and higher.

Untouchable.

Yaga-sensei makes them spar against each other as the other first year, Ieiri Shoko, sits quietly on the dojo floor, legs crossed. Ieiri, like Getō, has zero tolerance for Gojō’s obnoxious behaviour, refusing to accept either his whining or his tantrums, threatening him regularly with murder or dissection.

It feels good, Satoru thinks. Not that he would ever admit it out loud but it feels good to be treated without the reverence and falsified indulgences of his childhood. He doesn’t have to be a god. At least, not always. Not here.

However, losing to Getō’ - Suguru? Suguru. "Getō" is too formal - in martial arts is another matter entirely.

To be fair, Satoru is distracted by how Suguru’s hair is coming loose, falling out of its knot but then again, how dare Suguru divert his attention like this?

It’s all Suguru’s fault.

For the fifth time today, Suguru effortlessly breaches past his defenses, fingers closing in a perfect circle around Satoru’s wrist. He gives Satoru just enough time to dreamily wonder about how well his wrist fits in Suguru’s grip before he’s being flipped over.

He lands on his back with a crash and Suguru holds him in place with the blunt end of the Cursed Tool against his throat, blade gleaming in the light.

Sweat glistens in the hollow at the base of his throat. His breath smells like cigarettes and mints, face as serene as ever, except for the flush on his cheeks, the twinkle in his eyes.

“That’s four to one. I win.”

Satoru breathes carefully, feeling his throat expand under the edge of the weapon. Trapped between the sheathed katana and Suguru’s weight on him, Satoru bares his teeth, grinning from ear to ear.

“Again.” He declares.

Suguru looks down at him, considering this.

Then he grins and it is a feral, beautiful thing.

He hauls Satoru to his feet and they go again, blades clanging and Satoru’s heart beats and beats and beats, human and yearning and eager.

It’s a beautiful feeling and Satoru is terrified of it.

Harajuku is a pulsating cacophony of lights, bodies and sounds. It hurts Satoru’s sensitive eyes and he winces, overwhelmed by the sensations, but when he looks sideways, Suguru is staring up at the glittering skyscape, quiet wonder in his equally glittering eyes.

Satoru has always liked this shade of purple. He can't tell if that was before Suguru or after. They had a bed of violets in his childhood home.

The curse, newly devoured, must be wrecking havoc inside him but Suguru looks more and more relaxed, his hand brushing against Satoru’s fingers as he watches the multi-coloured shop-lights reflecting on the streets.

Any thought of returning to the school dies on Satoru’s lips. Suguru just looks so…happy.

“Can we go there?” Suguru asks, suddenly, pointing ahead.

Satoru’s eyes follow him, becoming slightly more and more attuned to the surroundings, follow his finger to a fancy-looking shop at one corner of the intersection. He reads the sign.

“Crepes?” he asks, staring.

Suguru nods.

When Satoru doesn’t answer, only cocking his head curiously to the side, he frowns.

“You don’t like crepes?”

“I-”

Satoru trails off, cheeks heating up.

People walk past, the lights burn as bright as a thousand stars on the concrete and the sounds of the city fill the heavy, warm air. The silence stretches between them, becoming something that has Suguru looking away and Satoru fidgeting uncomfortably on his feet.

“You’ve…never had one before?”

Maybe Satoru is only imagining the tenderness in Suguru’s voice. Maybe not. Either way, it doesn't make him snappish like it would if this was anyone else.

“No.”

And then, Suguru is reaching for his hand. Fingers, that still smell of the remnants of the curse he swallowed, wrap around Satoru’s own, pulling him towards the intersection.

Five minutes later, Satoru finds himself in a shop with a musical little bell over its door, pastel pinks and yellows on the walls, and the bewitching scent of this strange, wonderful, magical thing called a “crepe” which, Suguru informs him, comes in not one, but several types!

“Which one would you like?” Suguru asks.

Satoru, bent over the glass case, looking like a child – a rather absurdly tall one – in a candy store, turns his wide, gorgeous eyes helplessly to Suguru’s face. 

Suguru sighs, hiding a smile.

“Let me choose for you.”

Satoru goes over to him obediently, bouncing on his feet as Suguru orders him a chocolate crepe.

“With extra chocolate syrup, whipped cream and strawberries, please!”

Satoru chimes in, delighted by how horrified Suguru looks.

“That’s too much sugar!”

“There’s no too much to anything, Suguru! Especially not for sugar!”

There, under the cheerful lights, surrounded by candy-floss coloured wallpaper and the sweet, tart smell of fresh summer fruits, Suguru buys him his first crepe and Satoru, watching him bite into his own almond-flavoured one, sighing as the taste of the crepe washes away the bitter foulness of the curse, comes to two slightly alarming realizations:

One, he might not like being a lonely, all-powerful God anymore and two, and most importantly, he might just be in love with Suguru Getō.

He spears a strawberry, cheeks aflame, and says nothing, swallowing down the giddy wave of unexpected happiness that bubbles up in his chest at the thought.

Suguru asks him how he likes it and all Satoru can think is ‘I like you. I like you s o much’.

Outwardly, he mutters a “it’s amazing” and stuffs his mouth to avoid further conversation, while he suffers an existential crisis over his suddenly existent love life, with his crush – and oh god, is Suguru his crush? – in a crepe shop in Harajuku.

“Hey Satoru?”

Satoru stares determinedly at a blob of whipped cream.

“Mm?”

Suguru’s hand finds his forearm.

“Thanks.”

He whispers.

Satoru whips his head around, eyes going impossibly wide.

“Wha-?”

“Thank you. For coming here with me. I was feeling like shit. So. Thanks. I’ll risk inflating your massive ego this once to tell you that you’re a good friend. My best friend.”

Satoru stares at him. His mouth might be hanging open. It’s totally uncool. He totally doesn’t care.

“Suguru! You do care!” He squeals, and Suguru groans as Satoru flings all six feet of himself into his arms, leaving whipped cream-covered finger stains on his cheeks.

“Ugh. I take it back! I didn’t mean it.”

Suguru says, sounding only mildly annoyed, letting Satoru rub his cheeks against his, one arm around his waist.

“Suguru!”

Suguru laughs, then and Satoru stares up at him, feeling the sound vibrate against his own chest. He hides the memory of it away between his own ribs.

Oh no.

I love you, he thinks. I love you. I love you. I love you.

And he wonders, looking at the violets in those eyes, if Suguru can swallow all those curses, can he someday, maybe, love Satoru back too?

He goes back home, once. Alone.

It’s no worse than he remembers. No better, either. Just the same. Hulking and ornate. Garrish. Quiet.

His mother is the same as well. Frigid lines and threatening beauty. They don’t embrace. Satoru never tried after that one time when he was a toddler of three. He doesn’t even know what to say to her. Conversations with her were eerily a lot like talking to his own reflection. He won’t be able to look at the mirror in his dorm for a few days after this.

Somehow, she takes one look at him and knows. It rankles Satoru intensely. He’s not used to being seen. Not by his mother. She’s never done it when he was smaller, so he doesn’t see why she would start, now. But maybe it’s something she cannot help. Like his Six Eyes, that tell him everything. Even when he doesn’t want to know. He will always be hers and she will always know.

“Is this why you left home? For stupidity like this?”

She does not raise her voice.

Satoru feels each word like a slap. The rice falls apart between his chopsticks when his grip turns hard.

But he’s not her son for nothing.

“Home? Oh, you mean this place? Didn’t know that’s what it was.”

She does not dignify that with any response, which is somehow worse than if she had. Satoru gets through his meal, tasting nothing. His father, he thinks, was always heard of so much more than he was seen that he might as well have been a folk tale or rumour. His mother is different. She’s in every mirror Satoru looks into. In every flash of white he glimpses when he turns a corner. Within the eyes of every person who stares at him with that indescribable awe, he sees her proved right.

Satoru leaves without saying goodbye. Leaving the elaborately made-up prison of his childhood is simple. He has no attachment to the stones. No childish drawings on the walls to pull at his sleeves. No nooks where he hid toys.

Satoru did not grow up with toys.

Never, he thinks. I’m never coming back here again.

But his mother once housed him within herself, letting him go only when she deemed fit. He was made of her and sometimes, it shows. Sometimes, he’ll reach inside himself and his fingers will encounter some sharp object, word or glance, that she left there for him to find. Sometimes, he catches her inflections in the way he speaks, just like the old crayon drawings children make on walls, unmarred by time.

And Satoru does not know how break open prisons made of flesh and memory that are not his own.

Suguru’s there when he gets back.

“Did you eat?” He asks. “Come, let’s eat.”

And Satoru thinks, ‘Are you what home should be?’

He wouldn’t know. He has no point of reference. But Suguru might be a good place to start.

Suguru might be the best.

They’re young and reckless and Satoru never ever allows Suguru to lock the door. There’s an irresistible, irresponsible charm in making out in the hallway where anyone could see. An innate novelty in getting on his knees for Suguru behind the oak in the school courtyard.  There’s also that one time when they have sex in the ruins left behind after exorcising a Semi-Grade One.

It's morbid. Hilarious. Suguru blushes beautifully. 

Satoru is not a fool. He’s beginning to realize that each of these times he has hoped, wished even, that someone see them, in a desperate, callous need to prove a point.

Look. See? Do you love? I do! And I’m loved back.

Not worship. He’s sickened by worship.

And Suguru only laughs whenever someone says Satoru is a god. Moreso when Satoru tries to say it himself.

For the longest time, it’s a way of proving everyone, from his mother to the elders to his own stupid, irritating cousins, wrong. Of proving that he isn’t alone anymore. It is his way of spitting on the face of this godforsaken world. Mostly, to rid himself of the confidence he had seen in his mother’s eyes.

Childish, she might have said. Immature.

Faint disgust in her lovely, eternal eyes.

Her surety, that this, like all good things, will end for him. It terrifies Satoru, keeps him awake.

How do you disbelieve the person you believed before knowing what belief meant? How do you unlearn a lifetime? How do you forget what shaped your flesh? How do you shut out the voice that was the only thing keeping you company in the dark womb?

Even there, Satoru did not have lullabies.

Just his mother’s pride, flowing from her blood to his like a first meal.

When Satoru prays for the first time, he’s sixteen years and five months old. He prays for the first time in his life without knowing whom to address, trying to imitate, from memory, all the people he had prostrating before him all those years ago. He prays desperately to whoever may be listening – and he hopes that someone is – that he’s allowed to have this, promising to cherish it.

I’ll keep it safe. I’ll keep him safe.

Please, please, please. Let me keep him.

At least Suguru doesn’t believe he’s a god. His mother, his family, they can go to hell. Everyone who has ever bowed before him can rot.

Suguru sees him. As long as he sees him, Satoru can help him. Right? Right.

That’s enough.

At least Suguru won’t ever–

“Is it impossible for you? No. Then tell me, Satoru, if its not impossible for you, how can you say it’s impossible for me?”

Oh.

Turns out, there’s no one up there listening to him, huh?

And then, for a while, Satoru is neither a god, nor loved. The world shrinks down to the inevitability he had seen in his mother’s eyes.

When has she ever been wrong?

The whole time Suguru’s speaking, Satoru only stares.

Suguru says a lot of things.

“Can’t save those monkeys.” “Found two little girls.” “A new world.”

He says a whole lot of things. Big words. Even bigger plans.

Satoru doesn’t quite hear any of them.

He only stares in numb horror as each word takes Suguru farther and farther away from him.

Suguru says, “I can’t do this anymore, Satoru. I don’t want to help non-sorcerers.”

Satoru hears, ‘I’m leaving Jujutsu Tech. I’m leaving you.’

Suguru says, “I want to create a world without any non-sorcerers.”

Satoru hears, ‘I’m giving up on us for this madness.’

Suguru says, “They’re orphans, Satoru. Orphans. They need me.”

Satoru thinks, ‘So am I. So do I.’

"Let go, Satoru. Such behavior is improper of you", she says and now he's seven again, her beautiful hand prying his smaller one off the sleeve of her kimono. His fingers grip and bunch in the expensive, heavy silk, stubborn refusal in each digit. She extricates him from herself nonetheless. Another birthing. It’s nothing to her, no matter how hard he clings.

She’s always been the stronger of them both, anyway.

He looks at Suguru and thinks, This man will be my death one day. Or I, his.

Let go, Satoru. Let go. His mother’s hand, then. Prying him off. Let go. 

He lets Suguru walk away.

Fights are rare, in their family.

People need to talk, to build up to a fight. People need some love, to shore up their pain against. People need to care, and Satoru? He doesn’t care for these people. To him, family has always been a place to run from. 

So when it happens, he’s not been paying much attention to what actually causes it. On most days, for most things, he doesn’t. Not since…not sinc–

“This is not a joke to us, Satoru. It’s a cause the clan, the family, is committed to.”

“Committed? Since when do you care about commitments?”

“I have always believed in giving my everything to whatever I committed to. Unlike you. Dishonouring the gift you were given. Throwing away the powers you received. Everything is a joke to you. I gave everything to the clan. Our family. Our legacy. Your father...”

“Yeah, all except the one, right –”

“I raised you as you were meant to be raised–”

“And what family? This isn’t a family.”

His mother’s eyes flash, deadly. She’s not angry. Satoru has never seen her angry. She’d have to actually feel something for him in order to be angry enough at his insolence. And Satoru tried for a long, long time.

He can see in the cold line of her mouth that she’s chosen to be the storm that batters the shoreline and flattens the trees with its force. That’s another thing he’s inherited from her, he thinks.

The apathy. That infuriating manner of speaking. 

“And who is? Your family? Do you need anymore reminders, Satoru? How many more people walking away will it take you to come to your senses?”

None. None at all. The one time was enough. The one time was all that Satoru had banked on. His last chance bled out in a dark alleyway on the twenty-fourth day of last December. He’s survived a whole spring, a whole summer since. It’s things like these that...they make Satoru feel like a god. Otherwise how is he still alive? How can he be? What mortal can survive without a heart?

He’s outgrown his mother’s reflection like old clothes. Everything he owns smells like Suguru’s blood and sunflowers, now. All the sharp objects are the fights they never got to have. The memories are like the peels from the batch of boiled potatoes he and Suguru had skinned on one distant evening of a winter past, sitting in the kitchen of Suguru’s childhood home. He’d kept washing his hands, only to find bits still sticking to his hands.

Satoru had looked at the walls there, pressed his cheek to them and thought, 'He learnt to walk holding their hands'. He had held Suguru’s childhood clothes in his hands, the smell of them like time and dust, and thought, 'They held him as he grew'. He had slept in the guest room and thought, 'Where was he conceived? Where was he born? Where does a life begin?'

Suguru had snuck in after midnight, when his parents were asleep, and Satoru had thought, 'Is this a home? Can I have one too, please?'

It won’t matter how many times he washes his hands or laughs out loud in the company of others. Prisons made of flesh and memory are impossible to break. 

All of Satoru was gone a long, long time back, replaced with everything that was Suguru’s. He’d done so happily and then, he’d been the happiest he ever was. He doesn’t remember a time, before Suguru, that he was happy.

They were happy.

Then, Satoru had gone and died at the hands of a very mortal man. Except, he hadn’t stayed dead.

Sometimes he thinks maybe that’s where things went wrong. Maybe that's where Suguru’s conviction that Satoru wasn't a god, had faltered. Sometimes, he thinks, ‘If I’d stayed dead, would Suguru have still believed me a god? And if he hadn't believed me a god, would he still be alive now?’

The voice in his head sounds like her too. Bored. Icy. Perpetually disappointed.

Satoru gets to his feet. His blindfold is slipping off. He adjusts it.

“When will you see that closing your eyes does not blind others to what you truly are, Satoru?”

His mother stares at him, impassive and unimpressed, as he turns his back on her and strolls out, hands turning into bloody fists inside his pockets, smile on his lips. Tone another echo of hers, different wavelengths. He tries not to look back.

But that's never been Satoru’s strength. 

“Good talk. As always.”

She goes back to her sewing, shaking her head. Her eyelashes, pure snow, flutter like cabbage butterflies trapped in a garden which never grows old. Where the circle of life never happens.

“This sentiment will get you killed one day. And to think I believed you a divinity.”

It’s the closest he has ever heard her to laughter.

“He is a mortal,” she says. “And mortals die.”

“I am a mortal!” he screams. “What good is godhead, if it cannot do this? What good are you?”

“I know you are mortal,” she says. She places each cold word as a tile in a mosaic. “I know it better than anyone. I left you too long on Pelion. It has ruined you.”

- Madeline Miller.