Archive of Our Own

“And I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,

hunting for you, for your hot heart,

like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.”

-Love Sonnet XI, Pablo Neruda.

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Ever dream of me?”

Laughter.

“No, no! Never. I’m not that sentimental. Besides.” He pauses, like the first blue clouds at dawn. “You are more than anything my dreams could have made up...”

His mother suffers through a twelve hour labor on a blistering day, strangely warm for this early in the year, her hair plastered uncomfortably to her scalp, her skin on fire from the heavy stickiness of the air, her limbs almost numb from the agony before they rip him, bloodied and tiny, from the complete darkness of the womb.

February’s child, he is born swallowing the suffocating, heated scent of first pollen and the last of winter’s chill with his first breath.

His eyes are shut tight, like swollen flower buds; hands curled tight. His mouth opens for breath, wail piercing and sharp. His mother is reaching for him with shaking arms and then they’re lowering Suguru into that embrace; the first time in his life that a pair of arms, not his own around himself in the womb, have reached out for him.

Suguru – who’s not Suguru until his mother whispers the name, shaped by heated breath, smelling like blood and salt and skin, into one tiny ear – keeps wailing as he’s held and brought to rest on a shuddering bosom. His mother’s heart beats, quick yet exhausted, against his cheek; then, it’s being fed to him when gentle fingers gently guide his open, angry mouth home. He keeps sniffling, suckling fretfully.

Eyes shut tight.

“Suguru, Suguru, such a beautiful boy...”

His mother coos, lips against his tiny, dark head.

Suguru latches off and promptly resumes wailing, renewed strength in his small, powerful lungs.

He has no siblings. Perhaps this is a blessing, because for the first few months after they bring him home, Suguru refuses to sleep, crying through the night and half the day, running his parents ragged, unable to fathom the shadowy shapes that keep moving wherever his tiny, terrified eyes can follow them.

“Kitty...come here...”

Suguru is four and there’s a large, fluffy-tailed cat on the high wall beside the gate. He lifts little arms towards it and is met with a bored, impassive blink.

“Kitty...kitty...”

The wall is too high for him to reach but Suguru keeps holding his arms out with single-minded intent, his tiny face solemn, lips in a small, straight line. The cat has a scattering of spots as dark as midnight and Suguru watches, fascinated, as they move like clouds across that white middle when the cat stretches itself into a half-hearted slouch. It must be so soft. He wants to press his face into it.

He stands on his tiptoes, trying to make his tongue twist into the shape of the sounds his father makes when he’s calling the neighbourhood strays each afternoon to feed them.

One black-tipped ear perks up.

Suguru tries not to let the eagerness and excitement he feels inside his tummy show on his face. That’s not very hard. Even for a child as young as he is, he barely lets his face reflect the hundred odd, beautiful things going round and round like merry-go-round lights inside his mind at any given moment of the day.

“Kitty, I won’t hurt you.”

He promises, sombre. The cat tilts its face to the side, watching him with eyes like tar pits, diamond chips in them when the sunlight gets trapped inside.

“Come here?”

He asks, arms held out in front of himself.

Suguru comes toddling inside with an armful of cat, almost tripping over the high step in his haste to get indoors. The cat, a boy – Suguru checked, holding him up with little hands under those fuzzy limbs – is purring loudly enough that the sound trebles against his heart, his stomach. For all that he scratched bloody murder on his left forearm when Suguru grabbed him after he jumped down from the wall, the feline seems at home now.

Content to flatten his ears against Suguru’s collarbone, the top of his head nudging his chin. To let him stumble from his weight – he’s heavy, Suguru thinks, holding on for dear life – as he walks down the narrow corridor and comes face to face with another adversary.

The staircase.

Suguru can climb the stairs easily at his age but when he blinks now, all he sees is black and white fuzz. He can only see the top of a furry head. Twitching ears.

Sighing, Suguru tries to shift the cat to one arm, reaching out shakily with the other to steady himself. Immediately, the feline jerks upwards, the top of his head crashing onto Suguru’s chin. Two skinny limbs come up around him at awkward angles. Claws, sharp and stealthy, dig into the thin fabric of his summer shirt.

Suguru tumbles to the ground with a thud, the breath knocked out of him, the large cat perched on his middle and clinging to him, yowling. He’s only a little hurt even if the cat’s claws cutting into his skin sting like fire. He doesn’t even cry, only trying to soothe the agitated feline on his middle.

“Kitty...it’s okay...it’s okay...ouch...you have to let go...”

Gingerly, he tries to pry those paws off but the cat only clings harder. His eyes are panicked, flitting from side to side like dark butterflies. He mewls once. Twice. Looking backwards repeatedly at the top of the staircase where the light from outside makes patterns on the wall. Suguru blinks, inspite of the pain.

He follows those oval, diamond-chip eyes, his hands still gently patting the cat’s head; the swell of his back; his swishing tail.

Soft.

He likes it, Suguru thinks. Likes when his little arms are full of something alive and soft and beautiful. Something to hold. Something to care for. Something to make him feel that strange, quiet, lovely sort of hurt in the centre of his chest, just like the kind that he feels when Mama kisses him good-night or Dad teaches him the name of a new plant.

The feeling of his heart being so full he thinks he could die from it.

It’s just then that his mother comes running in at the sound. The cat takes off as soon she swats at him with the kitchen towel, and suddenly, Suguru is left bereft, arms empty, two new scratches to join the stinging one on his arm, both bleeding afresh.

He has to go to the hospital to receive a tetanus shot. It’s more painful than anything the cat did to him. Wherever his bright, lilac eyes turn, he sees...he sees them. The strange, wobbly shapes on the ceiling that aren’t shapes anymore but arms and legs and eyes that writhe past corridors and slither down the walls.

He watches them with a sort of fascinated horror, unable to take his eyes away. In the waiting room, there’s a pretty lady with tired eyes and a swaddled blanket in her arms. One of the things is hanging over her shoulder, its single, red eye greedily roving over the face peering out from inside the blanket.

When the baby begins to howl, Suguru grips his mother’s calves, trembling, out of his mind with terror that the thing might see him watching it, and almost trips over. He’s crying badly by the time they’re with the doctor, ankle sticky from where one of the other things, tiny and an ugly blackish-grey, had tried to latch its mouth onto the skin.

He can see the bruise beginning to form there. No one else can.

He cries throughout, for his mother, the comfort of his bedroom, for fear of those terrible things and...and...that cat. He really only wanted to take him up to his room to play a little.

Maybe to ask his parents if they couldn’t keep him.

Maybe to...to find a way so that he wouldn’t have to wake up again, seemingly alone, in the middle of the night, only to realize that he wasn’t alone and there really was something shuffling around under his bed as Suguru lay there, stiff as a board, eyes open wide until it was daylight.

“But he liked me!” He sniffles now, into his hands, light-headed from the pain and the injection, on their way back home from the hospital. His mother draws him into her arms, gently carding spice-scented fingers through Suguru’s hair.

“Shush now, angel. We can get you a kitty later if you want one so badly, mm?”

Suguru cries harder, shaking his head. His tiny, child’s heart is broken and he does not know how to explain that.

They don’t understand....

“It won’t be him! He liked me! He...he...” A hiccup swallows her words greedily but Suguru waits for it to pass. “...He hugged me!”

It left him bleeding but Suguru, even at four, knows that there are worse things in this world, things that can hurt him or leave a sucker-shaped bruise on his leg that no one else sees, and that the cat wasn’t one of them.

He had loved it.

Having something warm and alive in his arms. Holding. An embrace. The feeling that he could hold this cat and bathe it and feed it and sleep with it on his bed.

Care for it.

Words he does not know and yet longs for again, bleeding as it’s left him.

“He hugged me and he was mine and you made him run away!”

He cries, his sobs growing more broken. Mama holds him.

Another embrace, her arms full like they were meant to hold all the rage and tears of the world and turn them into silence and sleep and Suguru grows even more agitated, his own restless hands grasping at nothing. Eventually, he falls asleep crying, heartbroken that Mama didn’t understand. Afraid that he’s going to spend another night waking up to those strange, terrible things holding him instead of her.

When he’s older, Suguru will think of this moment and know that an embrace can sometimes be the heaviest thing ever put into one's arms. He will understand this. And even so, he will not stop longing.

Even so, he will stay starving for it.

Pa-tho-lo-gi-cal li-ar

Pathological liar.

Pathological.

Patho–

Suguru, nine, pokes a finger over the word on the file and stares at the dark, shapeless blob in the corner of the room.

“Pathological liar.”

He says, clicking his tongue. The word tastes like ashes. Like soot. Like judgement. He stretches out his arm, skinny, too skinny for his age because he’s supposedly a pathological liar who can’t keep most of his meals down.

The monster quivers, its five limbs shivering as Suguru’s hand turns into a small fist, beckoning. Beckoning.

Pathological liar.

His stomach rumbles.

Suguru swallows the orb, another lie for them to try and decipher.

Suguru is ten when it stops scaring him as badly that he can see things no one else does. That he can eat them, swallow them whole like rotten, nasty candy. That he can let them roam curiously inside him, like a swathe of dark-winged, spherical-bodied moths as he lies writhing on the floor from the agony, rancid bile lodged in his throat.

That they seek him out more often than he does, hungry, endless hordes that come to him half-afraid, half-eager to be able to be consumed into the rot that festers inside him.

Suguru, Suguru, Suguruuu...

Eventually, he stops telling his parents whenever he sees another one, waiting instead for them to go to bed so he can find it, swallow it whole and vomit out his dinner to make room inside himself for it.

He sits quietly in the backyard now, weeding out the flower beds.

One of the few things Suguru loves doing is to care for his flowers. His father has been growing vegetables since Suguru was a toddler but that’s never interested Suguru, who prefers the scents, the colours, the vibrancy of flowers.

He carefully picks out each individual weed, dropping the brown, shrivelled things into a bucket. The flower beds are large for their tiny backyard and Suguru doesn’t work alone. A small, white, cuttlefish-shaped curse hovers beside him, helping him pluck the weeds with its several tiny limbs.

Suguru’s finger guides it and the curse bubbles and gurgles happily, leaving a wake of shimmering, pale, star-like trails behind itself as it follows him over each swathe of flowers.

In spring and summer and autumn and winter, their scents fill the little home and make Suguru momentarily forget the taste of shit and vomit that always clings to his tongue. Their abundant and shockingly bright blankets of colour erase the sight of the dark orbs that Suguru sows like seeds inside the flower bed of his own body.

There are clusters of white, wispy Devilwood. Hibiscus flowers, large and bright, for Suguru’s love of the colour red. A patch of periwinkles. Azaleas in a blue so deep that they’re almost purple. A tiny swathe of rare orchids shaped like bamboo shoots with yellow hearts that Suguru saved up five months’ of pocket money just to be able to buy one sapling of.

Peonies, large, fluffy pink, an playful ode in themselves to each summer that Suguru spends indoors and alone, staring at the bright sun from inside his cramped bedroom. Marigolds, only saplings now, that he takes extra care of.

Dark red chrysanthemums, that always adorn the most expensive vase that they own, a slightly-chipped family heirloom of pale, fading cream on the table beside the front door.

There is an osmanthus tree in the neighbors’ home, its branches leaning leisurely on the roof tiles of Suguru’s home, dropping little golden petals like bits of sunshine onto their garden. Each afternoon, Suguru gathers them by tiny fistfuls and stores them in a little box that he keeps in his drawer.

He had wanted to ask their neighbour for a sapling of his own but…

“Hey, weirdo! Talking to your invisible friends again?”

Each day, around this time, the neighborhood children come out to play in the empty field a few yards away from Suguru’s home. Suguru had – if only to keep his mother from looking at him in that worried, sad way all the time – tried to go and play there too, a few years back.

He stopped going within a couple of days and began to stay home, richer with two very important realizations: no other kid saw what he saw and that there was a difference between laughing at someone and laughing with someone.

He ignores the small group, three boys and one girl, now as he had when they had laughed at his bright, amethyst eyes, his long hair, the way he asked them if they couldn’t see the curses dotting that old field like a sea of buzzing, alive, black poppies.

A stray pebble hits him on the shin. Suguru stops what he’s doing, looking up slowly.

The eldest of the boys leans on the handlebars of his bike, his face cut up and fragmented as Suguru’s clever, gentle violet eyes watch him through the bars of the small gate. The boy’s father died last summer. Liver failure.

Suguru still sees him near the old tree by the lake sometimes, staring with wistful eyes whenever his son cycles past.

He says nothing as the boy keeps jeering at him, tearing out another weed.

The peonies really look so beautiful today…

“My mom said your parents are gonna put you in the loony-bin soon. Did you know that?”

The curse, which was happily humming over the azaleas until now, begins to twitch. Suguru can see it growing in size from the corner of his eyes. Its sharp, bird-like beak of a mouth opens and shuts in a growl.

He stares at the children for a moment longer, letting the curse hiss and spit like an angry, protective cat beside him. Then, he goes back to pruning his peonies.

“It’s okay.” He whispers, hands carefully tilling the earth. “They’re not worth it. And the flowers are prettier too, see?”

“What a freak…”

As their voices, laughter and derision and a number of things Suguru’s slowly becoming apathetic to, fade, so does the curse’s agitation. It returns quietly, gently to hovering like a small cloud over the azaleas.

“They’re your favourite, huh?”

The curse chirps at his question, turning over, belly-up, to float over the buds. Happy.

Happy.

“Mine too. I love the colour blue.”

Suguru smiles, small and secret, fingers tracing ruffled petals. To anyone passing by the small, rickety gate of the unassuming house, he’s just Getō-san’s strange, lonely young son.

Kneeling in a flower garden at the afternoon sun’s feet, talking to the wind and the air.

Suguru is fourteen, reading by himself before the screen door, when the man comes and stands, awkward and out of place, at their front gate and asks for him. He is home alone. Well, almost. Mama is at the convenience store and Dad is tending to his vegetables in the backyard. He sets down his book and looks at the man.

“Getō Suguru-kun ?”

Unlike other young teens his age, Suguru does not hesitate before going up to open the gate for this stranger. There are worse things that visit him everyday and besides, this man exudes an odd sort of warmth, the same kind that Suguru feeds to his flowers with sunshine, if a little rough, a little brash.

He steps back to let the man in and bows, low and polite.

“My father is in the backyard. He didn’t say he was expecting a guest. Would you like some tea…uh…”

He takes in the broad frame, blocking out the light. Wide shoulders. Dark, unreadable eyes. And…and...

The swirls of colour spilling out from the lines that make the man’s shape.

“Yaga. My name is Masamichi Yaga. I haven’t come here for your father.” The man says, leaning down ever so slightly, his eyes gauging Suguru like he’s a particularly interesting book. There is fascination in those eyes. Mild awe, even. Suguru doesn’t recognize either because he’s never been looked at in that way before. “I’ve come here for you.”

Tea is a tense, uncomfortable affair. Yaga is brusque and swift even with Suguru’s parents, though with a measured, careful politeness that isn’t cloying. After a brief introduction, he removes his attention entirely from Suguru’s parents and moves it to the young boy sitting at the head of the small table in the neat and tidy kitchen.

Suguru listens with half a ear, charmed by the swirling colours that frame the man’s entire body. He can smell them, like he can smell curses. He wonders if he can touch them and keeps his hands folded in his lap.

“Suguru. I am old enough to be your father and I will address you by name. If you wish, you may call me Sensei.”

“You’re a teacher?”

“I can be, if you are willing.”

“I’m home-schooled.”

“And why is that?”

Suguru bites his lip, staring at his parents. The pain in his father’s eyes. The pity in Mama’s. He knows what they don’t want to hear.

“I…I don’t like going out much.”

Yaga…Sensei, huffs once. He sets down his untouched tea and looks Suguru right in those pale, purple eyes.

“Does it help? Staying indoors? Does it make the curses disappear?”

Mama’s gasp is loud enough that Suguru doesn’t hear the fault line forming over his heart.

After this, Yaga Sensei talks at length to Suguru’s parents. About curses. That are, apparently, as real as Suguru has known them to be since he was five. About sorcerers. That Suguru apparently is, born as he is to very human, very non-magical parents. About a school. For people like Suguru….

“There…there are others like me?”

Suguru has dreamt of many things in these fourteen slightly bittersweet, mostly sorrowful years. Happy things, impossible things, just like a bird in a cage dreams of a perch in the clouds.

“Yes.”

None as wonderful as this.

He tells Mama and Dad that there’s nothing wrong with Suguru. That there never was.

“Your son is not an attention-seeker. He's not sick. He is…gifted. Unbelievably gifted for someone born to such ordinary roots. In time, he can become one of the greatest sorcerers the world has seen…”

Suguru listens as if in a dream. Sensei says it has to be his choice. That he won’t force Suguru into a decision, even if this is the best one. That he can take his time to think.

Suguru has spent his whole childhood thinking. Dreaming. Wishing.

His voice comes from far-off when he says, cutting right into his Mama’s worried question of if they really have to send him away:

“I’ll go. Wherever this school is, I’ll go.”

Yaga Sensei comes to collect Suguru on a bright, sunny day in the middle of larkspur-scented March. Suguru’s few belongings have been carefully packed into two small suitcases. His backpack sits heavy on his shoulders, full of his favourite snacks that Mama spent all of last night packing.

A half-empty pack of cigarettes he stole, from Dad’s drawer, lies in his pocket.

In his arms, he has a single, ceramic pot of a small batch of azaleas. The only thing he really needs from this strange, haunted place called home.

Sensei waits outside the gate, giving Suguru the time to say goodbyes he doesn’t really have. He accepts the stiff hand of his father on his shoulder for the apology it is and tries to lean into Mama’s warm, thin arms around himself.

“You be careful, Suguru. Alright?”

Suguru clutches his flowers close and fidgets.

“I will. Will you look after my flowers for me?”

Mama’s hands are light as the wind on his cheeks. Is she crying from the pain or the relief or both?

“Of course, I will. My darling boy.” She  cradles his face. “Don’t forget your Mama, Suguru.”

I never did.

Suguru steps out of the gate, latching it behind himself.

“Ready?”

Suguru nods, not turning back even when the wind blows into his face and carries to him the smell of his little patch of colours and scents like a hand tugging him backwards, like voices calling out his name.

Like his parents by the gate, turning to twin shadows under the sunshine, watching Suguru walk away.

Suguru presses his nose to the azaleas and breathes and breathes and breathes.

“You said there are others like me.”

The train turns the flattened landscape of stubble fields and low hills outside into a blur of green and dusky grey-blue under the hot sun. It’s cooler inside the air-conditioned compartments and Suguru feels a little dwarfed. He’s never been farther out than the crooked maple marking the outskirts of the town.

“There are. There’s a girl and another boy. Both your age.”

Suguru presses his forehead to the cool glass, watching a flock of herons fishing in the shallow water pools of the paddy fields.

“Do they eat curses too?”

Sensei is patient, gentle when he shakes his head. He’s smiling a little, gruff as ever, but it doesn’t feel cruel.

“You don’t eat curses, Suguru. You absorb them and then…use them. Their abilities. It’s called Cursed Spirit Manipulation. That’s your Cursed Technique.”

It’s big enough a name that Suguru, while fascinated by how fancy and cool it sounds, decides to forget it for now. He’s spent a long time despising this ability to be able to be won over so easily.

“Cursed Technique? Like…a superpower?”

Sensei’s eyes twinkle.

“In a way, yes. A superpower.”

“Is everyone’s different?”

“Yes and no. Some sorcerers have the same techniques but different executions. Yours is…one of a kind, though.” His voice turns thoughtful, almost like he’s forgotten Suguru’s right here. “I’ve never seen such a young child capable of such effortless manipulation of cursed spirits–”

“Um, Sensei?”

“– and that too…oh. Yes?”

“What can…the others do? My…” Suguru stops, considering it. Classmates? Peers? Friends…? “The other kids, I mean. Like me.”

“The girl is capable of Reversed Cursed Technique.” Seeing the confusion on Suguru’s face, he adds, “Regeneration, Suguru. Healing, of herself and others.”

Wow. Healing.

Suguru’s scuffed sneakers brush back and forth over the floor. Healing. What a great gift. To be able to cure all wounds, all hurts. Every pain.

If he had healing as his gift…

“Sounds cool. Healing.”

Not like mine. Scary. Weird. Abnormal.

Cursed, he thinks briefly, genuinely.

“And the boy?”

Now, Sensei’s face grows confused. He looks, for one moment, truly baffled and lost, before schooling his face into something neutral and more…well, elderly.

“Satoru? Oh, I don’t think anyone knows all that Satoru can actually do.”

Satoru?

Sa-to-ru

It sounds just like coins dropping to the floor. Sharp. Short. Sweet. Like a distant dream.

Sa-to-ru

One. Two. Three.

Just like his.

Su-gu-ru

Four. Five. Six.

The herons take flight, staying beside the train as long as Suguru’s eyes stay transfixed on the changing colours of the sky. He doesn’t remember falling asleep. Just that it happens as he’s being swayed back and forth gently by the motion of the train, that Sensei somehow manages to get his head under a pillow.

There are no dreams that night. No curses either. Just Sensei’s cursed energy, already familiar. Just the tinkling sound of coins falling to the ground. Precious. Brief. Like dreams would be.

One. Two. Three.

Sa-to-ru...

“…crying over the dead won’t bring your friend back. What’s the use of saving a corpse if you can’t even save your own lives?”

“Hey! You really shouldn’t be talking to them like that. They just lost their friend.”

“Huh? You talkin’ to me?”

“Unfortunately. Or are you as dumb as you’re tactless?”

“Do you even know who I am?”

“Am I supposed to?”

“…”

The ensuing silence is deafening.

Then:

“Whatever. I wasn’t even talking to you so I don’t see how it’s your problem, weird bangs.”

“…what did you call me?”

“Are you as deaf as you’re dumb, weird bangs?”

Suguru feels something inside him snap.

“Y’know what? Let’s take this outside.”

December.

Suguru, sixteen, freshly in love and deeply, disturbingly aware of it, alights on that old platform in the town in Osaka and sees that nothing has changed. He sighs, trying to keep his lungs from freezing over. It’s still the same place, old and lonely and slow and dusty and quie–

There’s a clanging of heavy boots stomping down the steps of the train, followed by the sound of struggling and finally, a resounding thud.

“Ow, fuck! You fucking stupid piece of shit– Suguru! Suguruuu! Help!”

Oh well, not quiet.

Suguru turns around to see the mess that is a half-open suitcase on the platform, clothes worth more than this entire town spilling out of it like it’s a magician’s hat.

“This is why I told you to let me do your packing.”

“Shut up and help me!”

And that’s his first memory of Satoru in Osaka.

The strongest sorcerer the world has seen, stuck between the narrow door of the train and the frankly enormous suitcase he’s trying to push out and onto the platform. His scarf’s come half off, shades askew on his nose as he tries and fails, miserably, to shove the suitcase out of the way, his tall, gangly frame bent over in the small space.

There’s a grumbling old woman right behind him and Suguru watches in mortification and horror as Satoru turns around, pale cheeks rosy red from the exertion, hair a mess, glares at her like a rabid greyhound and snaps:

“Lady, shut the fuck up or use one of the hundred other doors on this stupid train!”

Suguru slaps a hand over his own mouth, horrified to find that he’s very close to having an aneurysm if he has to stifle his laughter any longer.

“Satoru!” He tries to look past Satoru’s absurdly tall head of fluffy, snowy hair to turn his most apologetic expression towards the lady. She looks like she’s been smacked and it’s so funny that Suguru almost chokes. “I am so sorry! He didn’t mean…”

“Will you stop apologizing to the hag and help me?”

“You are a very rude young man!” The woman bristles now, her narrow, angry eyes turning to Satoru’s face. “Your mother didn’t raise you right!”

Satoru rolls his eyes.

“My mother didn’t raise me at all. Now do you mind?”

Suguru can’t help it. He starts laughing then, loud, raucous peals of it that are wrenched right out of his belly, filling his lungs with the frosty air till they ache, till he’s bent double from it and slapping his knees to stop because…

Oh God, it’s fucking painful.

His stomach literally feels like it’s going to spilt open and immediately, because Satoru, the fool, had once asked him if the curses are like, stacked inside him like he’s a closet, Suguru gets the wild image of his stomach actually bursting open while he’s still laughing, kinda like in Alien, and then all these…round, little baubles just tumbling out and rolling down the length of the platform.

It’s enough to set him off again and Suguru collapses now, right beside Satoru’s half-open suitcase, and God, he can’t look at the thing without risking death by laughter so he squeezes his eyes shut and leans against the hard plastic, wheezing as he clutches his side.

Tears form in his eyes.

Who the fuck knew laughing hurt this bad?

Suguru stays like that, head turned up, tears leaking out of the corner of his eyes, Satoru’s grumbling like music in the background.

They’re the only two people left on the platform and Suguru’s first memory of Satoru in his hometown is clothes spilling out of a badly-packed suitcase and the ache of laughter like he’s never, ever felt in this cold, lonely place before this.

Suguru, freshly, deeply in love, laughs and laughs from this ache. He laughs right up until he’s crying.

By the time Suguru’s over his laughing fit, the station is completely empty and silent, save for his faint hiccups. Satoru blinks and turns his face away when Suguru finally looks at him, his bright blue eyes hidden  behind his shades, cheeks an odd shade of red.

Huh. He doesn’t look mad. Suguru thinks, tilting his head. Satoru closes his mouth and clears his throat.

“Y-you gonna lie there all day or are you actually gonna help me?”

“Yeah, yeah, princess, I’ll help you. Next time, don’t pack enough for a month. We’ll stay only a week, y’know.”

He snickers, already beginning to shove Satoru’s woollens back into the suitcase as Satoru resumes the weary struggle of forcing the other one out of the narrow door of the train.

The walk from the station to Suguru’s home is around half an hour and it’s already starting to get dark when the two of them come out of the station. Satoru alone has brought enough clothes for three people, stuffed inside two enormous suitcases and Suguru helpfully informs him that they’ll have to give the guest room to Satoru’s luggage instead.

“You can sleep on the roof, ‘Toru.”

“You’re mean. So mean. I can’t believe you laughed at me….ugh, God, why do you keep smoking that thing, Suguru, it stinks…”

Satoru makes a face but does nothing more to extricate himself from where he’s half-hanging off Suguru’s arm, cold cheek pressed to Suguru’s shoulder as Suguru lights up the last of his cigarettes.

“Move away if it bothers you, asshole.”

“And freeze to death? No thank you. I’ll risk my chances with lung cancer this one time.”

He links their arms together so he’s sticking to Suguru’s side like a clam, white hair tickling Suguru’s neck, and oh, Suguru can feel how he’s actually shivering a little, how his breath comes in jerks, frosting over when it leaves his lips.

He’s like a sunflower, the poor thing. Can’t stand the cold at all. Suguru thinks frowning, pulling off his own scarf so he can wrap it around Satoru’s neck. This time, it’s not even followed by the emphatic, distraught ‘What the fuck’s that used to characterize the first few times Suguru got…well, thoughts like these about his best friend.

He’s over that now. Suguru’s no liar. He’s just spectacularly good at hiding things; especially things like, being in love with Satoru. Especially from Satoru, who sniffs out secrets faster than a dog can steal crumbs from a plate.

He ties off the end of his scarf over Satoru’s and the latter hums happily, settling down more comfortably against Suguru’s side.

“Thanks, S'guru.”

Suguru just nods, focusing on the bare tops of the trees, the barren landscape ahead, the pale, white sky. All of which is exactly the same as he remembers leaving them. Just… with more white. Anything, everything, so he doesn’t do something extremely stupid right here, right now. Like y’know, kiss Satoru.

Satoru, who is his best friend.

Satoru, who is effortless in how he is the sun in Suguru’s universe; warm, bright, beautiful, perfect.

Inescapable.

“Oh! You must be Satoru-kun!”

Satoru leans into the doorway, restless and energetic and just a little bashful, grinning from ear to ear as he nods.

“The one and only! At your service. And just Satoru is fine!”

He even bows, a little, performative thing that makes Mama’s eyes shine and God, Suguru’s not her son for nothing, given how he’s charmed by the stupid gesture despite knowing what a heathen Satoru actually is–

“Suguru speaks about you all the time when he calls home.”

Beside him, he feels Satoru freeze.

Fuck.

There’s no way Suguru is surviving this without being bullied well into next year.

“Uh, Mom…let’s just…”

But the teasing he expects never comes. Beside him, in the softest, wariest voice Suguru has never heard him use, Satoru asks, half to Suguru, half to his mother:

“He does?”

Satoru has never eaten roasted sweet potatoes. As they sit crossed-legged before the open screen doors, Suguru watches him staring at the thing in his hands with the same, childlike curiosity with which he had stared at his first ice-cream cone, lips pursed, eyes narrowed.

The steam rises up like a tiny, curling dragon before his face.

“Careful, it’s hot–”

But Satoru’s already broken the thing in half and is now hissing, feline and irritated, fingertips singed a bright red; the kind that lines the edges of peonies. Suguru clicks his tongue and reaches for his hand. It’s one of those little things, like closing the door behind himself, turning the lights off when he leaves the room, watering the flowers each afternoon, or just…his mother reaching for his hand after Suguru’s first paper cut at age four, a brighter line of red running down his tiny thumb.

He does it without thinking, eyes half on the snow falling outside, mind mostly on the blue of Satoru’s eyes.

One, two, three.

Satoru’s hand is cold in his, fingertips warm and heated against his lips as Suguru brings his mouth, colder, to the angry, reddened skin like he’s had his parents do for him over and over and ove–

There’s a soft fwumph as Satoru drops the sweet potato, paper wrapping and all, onto the floor. Suguru looks up from where he’s still blowing gently over Satoru’s fingertips, that hand cradled in his like it’s a piece of glass being shaped into something lovelier than it is.

He wants, Suguru knows, to kiss each of Satoru’s fingertips, each single line that forms invisible latitudes on their faces, the little bones like tiny door-hinges that make each slender finger move and bend and spill magic and colour and power, each furrow on his palm, the winding, snake-like lifeline – almost endless – and the love-line that almost makes Suguru believe, wish, for such things to be real, the inside of his wrist, the skin that covers him, the fine scattering of strange, snowy hair like dandelion fluff–

Suguru gently places Satoru’s hand back in his own lap. His tongue is heavy with the taste of skin, of the salt and starch of sweet potato, of Satoru still staring at him, colour in his cheeks, ten thousand seasons in his glass-bauble eyes.

“Here.” He says, taking the sweet potato from his own plate. “You can have mine.”

He breaks it carefully, evenly into little pieces for Satoru this time around, laying them onto that open palm one piece – of what feels like his own warm, scorching heart – at a time.

Mama snatches Satoru’s empty bowl up before the latter can get up from the low table and make a run for the sink.

“You eat too little for a growing boy.”

She complains, ladling more rice into it. Satoru turns to look at Suguru, face screaming ‘Help!’ but this is a fight that Suguru has been losing since the first time he tried to turn his face away from the spoon against his lips.

He only laughs, shrugging, and begins to take apart another piece of fried mackerel with his chopsticks. Satoru always has trouble with the bones.

Satoru grumbles half-heartedly under his breath, adorably out of place in the small, domestic setting of the dining room, legs tucked inside the blanket, cheeks red from the heat of the food.

His knees press against Suguru’s under the blanket when he mumbles that this is his first time eating this way; at a kotatsu, surrounded by a family that doesn't have separate dinner times for each member. He looks flustered, almost nervous, by the warmth and chatter and commonality of what was every childhood meal for Suguru and...

And ever so often, when he thinks Suguru isn’t looking, he's been picking out cubes of tofu from the steaming vessel of stew and dropping them into Suguru’s bowl.

Suguru is. Looking, that is.

Even if he does his best not to, quietly passing the plate with the fish to Satoru and stealthily praying for their hands to touch. They do, and Satoru’s lingers on his long enough to make Suguru just begin to feel it and then, slowly, draws away.

It’s moments like these that Suguru cannot read. When the easy, effortless thing that is their friendship sways dangerously like a minnow in a storm Suguru does not yet know how to navigate.

It’s a lot like water; this thing that they have between them. As playfully young as the waves at the mouth of the sea. As still as a pond with bright fish and smooth pebbles at its bed. As unpredictable as the ocean with all its turbulence. As sharp and sudden as rain, full of life and earth and a hundred different scents.

As endless as the horizon that Suguru could spend the rest of his life staring at when Satoru, brows furrowed in concentration, breaks a sweet bun in half and holds one half out to him.

Suguru’s heart rumbles, opens its mouth. He is starved without end, always waiting and hungry, for food or curses or…or love. It is something he feels at all times, relentlessly, endlessly, in everything.

The taste of curses, of course, is bearable now. Somewhat. A little.

He takes the offered bun.

But sweet things are better.

“You grew all of these?”

Satoru peers at the flowers in the backyard, carefully and wholly swaddled under netting like blankets to keep out the snow. Most of Suguru’s flowers are indoors, away from the snow and cold, and these are just the ones that are sturdy enough to survive the worst of winter outside.

Satoru still looks fascinated, staring curiously as Suguru crouches and gingerly lifts one end of the netting to let him take a closer look at inside. The little saplings are close to budding, most of their small faces covered with their leafy green hands.

Satoru stares without much expression at the first of the daffodils, pale white bosoms and yellow-tipped hands. At the camellia, red and lush. At…

“What’re those?”

Suguru follows his finger.

“Snowdrops.”

“I’ve never seen one before…”

“They’ll be the first to bloom when spring comes.”

Satoru gets to his feet, snowflakes on his eyelashes. He tilts his head, watching the winding, thriving hands sneaking down the old outer walls; little dots of colour in the white and grey and slate.

Suguru gets to his feet, coming to stand beside him. Satoru nods towards the wall.

“They’re violets, right?”

“Yeah.”

“How come you don’t grow them in your garden?”

Suguru considers this.

“Never thought of it. They always grows all over the place anyway.” He smiles, nudging Satoru with his shoulder. “Do you like violets?”

Satoru turns to him.

Sincere. Tentative.

“I don’t know if I like flowers. Or know much about them. We had…have a garden at the estate. Marble fountains, trees I can’t name, ponds, gardeners to take care of shit. The works. I don’t even remember if I spent a lot of time there.” He says, half laugh, waving his hands like he’s trying to swat a particularly irritating fly. “I just remember that we’d get violets growing at the oddest of places. On the walls. Around the fountains. Along the wood of the window in my room. Even…even a few under a large rock this one time.”

Suguru hums.

“They don’t live long, y’know. Violets.”

Satoru is warm as a brush fire at his side.

“But they’re perennial, Suguru. That means they’ll always come back.”

June.

He’s still on his knees, heaving and retching, stomach spasming from the pain because there’s nothing left inside him, not even water, anymore.

The tiles are cold and disgusting when he leans back against them, trying to remember how to breathe again. With a shaky hand, he reaches out to flush the sickening black bile and sludge that poured out of his throat like a barrage of dead butterflies and weeds.

Somewhere in all that mess is last night’s soba. Soba that Satoru spent last summer learning how to make from his Mama and then made him yesterday, right before Suguru got called for this mission.

He's light-headed and mostly numb when he flushes the toilet. The cursed spirit is clawing at his ribs.

Let me out let me out let me–

Sometimes, he wonders how someone who’s human can live like he does. Once, on TV, when Suguru was younger, they’d been broadcasting on the news about an oil spill in the ocean. Suguru had watched the oil, black and iridescent, tainting the blue, killing everything that touched it.

He had seen and thought, Is that what I look like from the inside now?

How is he still alive then?

Why–

“Ew. This is gross. You shouldn’t be sitting there.”

Satoru comes and stands before him, shadow like a storm cloud. Suguru hadn’t even heard the door opening.

“Fuck off, Satoru.”

Satoru, who thinks ‘Fuck off’ and ‘Please stay and annoy me some more’ are synonymous, very much does not fuck off and instead drops to his haunches before Suguru.

“Here.”

He shucks something, some things, at Suguru’s chest. Suguru stares down blankly at his lap.

“Thought you hated it when I smoked.”

When he looks up, Satoru is looking back at him, something indescribably complicated in his eyes. He lifts one shoulder in a shrug, looking away, cheeks slightly pink.

“They help, right? And besides, that’s not all I got you.”

Suguru stares at the bar of chocolate, half of which Satoru, the demon, has already eaten, and then sees it’s the plain, 100% dark variety that’s mostly bitter, with only a hint of sweet. His eyes burn.

“Satoru. You don’t even like this kind.”

Satoru stays stubbornly silent.

“Did you…did you get this for me…?”

And then eat half so you could pretend it was an accidental thing that you had it with you and not  something you got me on purpose?

He doesn’t say this. Suguru does value his life, somewhat.

Satoru scoffs, or thinks he scoffs – because it sounds more like a cat trying to hack up a hairball – and shrugs again.

“Please. I got this ‘cuz your breath already stinks and once you smoke one of those cancer sticks, it’ll be unbearable. I don’t wanna die so young.”

And finally, finally, Suguru realizes he’s smiling. He’s emptied, hungry, in a considerable amount of pain, and even with all of that, even in this cramped, reeking and foul bathroom, Satoru made him smile.

Satoru found him and bought him the same cigarettes that he keeps saying make his eyes water whenever Suguru smokes and chocolate of the only kind that Suguru likes and...and…is now looking at the small, tentative curve upwards on Suguru’s ashen lips like it’s the only thing he’s ever wanted to see with those all-seeing eyes of his.

Satoru, who says, "This is absolutely gross", in a tone that is fretful rather than disgusted, while using a handkerchief, that Suguru knows he almost never has on his person, to wipe the sticky grime from the corner of Suguru’s mouth.

Satoru, who came here to try and make him smile. Satoru who made him smile. Satoru, who’s the blue that is the only thing in this world capable of surviving the iridescence spilling out of Suguru like a calamity. Satoru, who’s willing to give up the sky for the measly space, bloody and beating and rotten, between Suguru’s ribs.

Satoru who…

Flicks Suguru on the forehead. Hard.

“What the fuck!”

"Don't zone out on me, asshole."

When they spar next, Suguru is going to put him in a headlock till the fucker passes out. Not now, because he’s still full of a lot of…feelings, warm and alive and mostly good feelings, but later. Definitely later.

He pockets the cigarettes and unwraps the chocolate the rest of the way, staring at the space where Satoru’s mouth, his lips, his teeth have bitten into the bar.

It makes him smile some more.

“Not that this setting isn’t super aesthetic, great choice on that by the way, Suguru–”

“Yeah, like my choice in best friends–”

“Uh, fuck you very much, I’m absolutely perfect–”

“A perfect nightmare is what you are.”

Satoru’s grin grows, wider with every single lift of Suguru’s lips, with every retort he gets back in return for his snark. They stay like that a while, sharing sight and breath and silence, and then, Satoru’s getting to his feet, holding out his hand.

“Wanna get out of here?”

Pulling Suguru up and out of the oil spill and out into the blue where he can breathe again.

September.

He gets his first tattoo and Satoru – who was adamant that Suguru take him along – holds his hand so tight Suguru thinks he’s broken it. He alternates  between glaring like a feral cat at the woman tattooing Suguru forearm and looking very close to crying, his wide blue eyes shining, a little terrified and just a little fascinated.

“This is horrible. Why do people do this to themselves?”

He whispers, grumpy and sullen, and Suguru only laughs, watching as the sketch of the cuttlefish cursed spirit gets filled with ink and colour, little trail of stars and all, feeling Satoru’s hand crushing his to dust.

With Satoru touching him, the pricking pain of the needle breaking his skin is only like an afterthought, barely felt.

May.

Suguru is two months into seventeen, still in love a little more with each passing day, and there’s no moon in the sky but the dark indigo of it is awash with a hundred thousand stars.

He can watch the shape of Satoru’s silhouette on the beach, like a marionette that raises his arms and beckons to him like a lighthouse in the night.

He kicks off his own shoes.

The sand is cold beneath his feet, grass stalks tickle his ankles and he can smell the briny air as the music from the car’s stereo fades to white noise. The lumpy dunes at the edge of the beach, toffee-coloured during the day, tower high and imposing in the background, with swaying tufts of sparse grass lined across their misshapen tops.

Satoru holds out his hand.

Suguru meets him halfway, like the shore waits patiently to catch the waves in their arms each time.

They sit shoulder to shoulder on the strip of quiet sandbar the next day, watching the sun slowly tiptoe down into the horizon in a wash of red and gold.

Satoru is looking down at where his toes disappear into the sands; perhaps, bits of hidden shells press into his skin. There’s a crab at the edge of the water. As Suguru’s eyes fall on it, a wave sends it tumbling over, but it simply picks up itself on its tiny claws and then resumes a journey through the shimmering, frothing lips of the water.

Satoru shifts, shuffles closer to him, elbows Suguru in the side.

“Make room.”

He lays down with his head across Suguru’s thighs, arm thrown over his eyes, face to the sea. Leaning back on his arms, Suguru watches the sunset play out across the pale lines of Satoru’s face.

Somewhere in the distance, a dog barks. So mundane. Breaking through the haze of the evening and...

That’s when Suguru realizes:

Without him beside me, nowhere in this world is home anymore. With him? Anywhere could be.

And the world, oblivious, just keeps on spinning.

Suguru is seventeen years and six months old, sitting on his bed, back to the wall, sketching the first outlines of a face into his notebook when Satoru comes back to the school after a long, long fortnight away at the Gojō estate for training and clan meetings. 

He says nothing about the fact that the whole room is shrouded in smoke from Suguru’s cigarette or about the loud music thrumming from the speaker beside the bed, even as Suguru reaches out to turn the volume lower, almost down to nothing but a background hum, as soon as he looks up and sees Satoru.

He doesn’t whine or complain, ask Suguru if he missed him – he always does – or if he was lonely – without Satoru, he always is – or even let Suguru get up and go to open the windows to air out the room. He just stands there, hand around Suguru’s wrist, eyes dull and the skin beneath them swollen a pale red.

Suguru says nothing, either.

He sets down the sketch pad and gently pulls on Satoru’s hand. Satoru comes, as easily as a leaf with the wind, falling forwards until his head is in Suguru’s lap.

“Does it hurt too much?”

Satoru shakes his head, No.

Yes, then.

“I hate it when you go back there. Back to them.”

I hate what it does to you.

Strange as he is, Satoru relaxes from his anger like a plant sunning itself after a long, long night of rain, from the way Suguru’s face reflects what he feels inside his heart, curling up on the small bed, his tall frame barely fitting as he draws his knees up to his chest.

Before this, he’s never had anyone to be angry on his behalf but himself, just as Suguru’s never felt anger on anyone’s behalf other than his own. He takes one of Suguru’s hands, folding the palm inside his own.

It’s a habit they’ve got into ever since the first time three months ago, after a particularly harsh mission.

It is noon outside, with the air stiflingly hot and the smell of cigarette smoke heavy in the small room and the loud chirps of crickets in tree barks when Satoru takes Suguru’s hand and lays it upon his own head like a child would.

I adore your anger, Suguru hears, as Satoru gently uses his hand to make Suguru stroke the top of his head, but I need this more.

Nothing lasts forever. Regret is as useless as gratitude in a world like theirs. Satoru and Suguru are violets on the wall. Here today. Gone tomorrow. Knives in a world full of grasping hands. Transience is the only certainty.

He knows this. He knows.

He’s always known, since he was six and realized that the thing in his parents’ eyes was fear; ten when he realized that the same look in the eyes of children his age was disgust; twelve when he knew that flowers had no eyes with which to look at him and hence, felt neither fear nor disgust for him. 

Fifteen, when he saw a blue that could smile and talk and laugh, with him.

Sixteen–

He’s known. He knows.

And it has still never stopped Suguru – not him, exactly, but some stupid, thick-skulled part of himself – from sometimes, often, testing out his fate to see if it can’t be otherwise. To see if...if for once, just once, he can hold out his hands and get, instead of having to give. Or worse, take. Fear. Pity. Curses.

Not that he expects it to be so. Oh, no. No. Never in a thousand lifetimes. Maybe if he was born into the lap of ignorance, then sure, why not? But not otherwise.

It would be nice though, he thinks.

The hand running through Satoru’s hair is gentle, slow. He traces the shape of that beloved head, round as one half of the sun. Satoru turns his face into a warm thigh, into clothes that must smell like the dryer and detergent and cigarette smoke.

Yes, that would be really nice. Suguru thinks, again. That would be a lot like heaven, really.

Transience is certainty.

So is...

He watches as the other boy closes his eyes, hands folded on Suguru’s knee. Watches as Satoru lets go, one weary, worn-out limb at a time, content to be broken down by his strength as long as Suguru’s willing to put him back together.

Suguru is seventeen when Satoru draws his knees up like a child in the womb again.

Transience is one certainty. Love is the other. He tends. He waters. He prunes. He waits.

Not for spring.

This is a garden and every season promises blooming.

He doesn’t say “I love you, Satoru ”. He only touches hair as soft as snow with his calloused hands, fingers stained black from the charcoal pencils, and asks:

“Are you hungry?”

From beside the bed, the song on the speaker keeps playing, faint and dreamlike in all the smoke and haze.

Love

Only love

Can bring down the wall someday

I will be there

I will be there~

August.

They’re up on the roof of the school, laughter eaten up by the gusting winds. Satoru stretches his leg and knocks over an empty beer-can, before leaning back on his arms.

His glasses are gone, blue eyes glazed over from the liquor, the late hour.

Suguru is six months away from turning eighteen, seriously considering getting that tongue piercing he’s wanted for the last year and he...

And he really shouldn’t have had that extra drink because there are disco lights in the dark, dark sky now and...

Are the stars spinning or is it just my head?

That’s his last lucid thought before he leans in and kisses Satoru right on his stupid, beautiful mouth, somehow managing to get his aim right even if the whole world feels like it’s tilting on its axis right now.

One hand on his chin to steady him, heart beating inside his throat, swallowing whatever nonsense it was that Satoru was saying – Suguru will make him say it again, later, because he adores listening to each idiotic thing that comes out of that mouth – his thoughts turned to a faint buzz.

They come and go, kaleidoscopic flashes of images tumbling over each other, like the stars overhead. He has never kissed anyone before. He has never wanted to kiss someone who’s not Satoru before, or ever.

Not since he was fifteen. Nor any day after.

He tilts his head, nerves on fire, too out of his mind to register if Satoru’s into this or about to punch him in the face but...

Satoru’s mouth tastes like churros and cheap beer and spearmint.

His lips are soft. Dry. His...

Suguru bites his lower lip, hand blindly searching for Satoru’s knee as an anchor.

Satoru opens his mouth.

Oh.

He then makes a quiet sound that Suguru needs to find some way to roll into a joint and smoke till his lungs and his mind are heavy with it.

That’s a good thing...right? No punching in the face then...? His tongue is so much softer...can he taste the weed, the alcohol, the bitter curses on Suguru’s tongue...is it off-putting...is it...

Satoru’s hands come up to frame his face, fingers dusty with powered sugar and sticky from chocolate sauce. He pulls Suguru forwards and down, right on top of himself, long, lanky legs entangling with Suguru’s, and all the questions disappear like words written in the sand at the edge of the sea.

“What colour is my cursed energy?”

They’re in Satoru’s room – slightly larger bed, more room – and Suguru rests his arms on Satoru’s chest, his chin on his arms and asks him this. Satoru’s heart is slowly settling down from its recently-discovered rapid-fire rhythm to something sweeter. Slower.

“Huh?” He says, eyes heavy with sleep. “Colour?”

Suguru nods.

“I see yours in colour.”

Never one to answer a straightforward question straight, Satoru presses his fingertips into the dip of Suguru’s spine.

“And what colour is mine?”

“Blue.” Without hesitation.

“Which blue?” Satoru asks. “The blue of the sky? Or the blue of the sea? The blue of your azaleas? Or the blue of a seashell? The blue of glass? Or the blue of a bruise?”

Suguru kisses him on the neck, inhaling the faint smell of the perfume Satoru’s wearing. Wood. Citrus. Tube rose.

“The blue of the first morning in spring.”

Of youth. Of first love and last.

“Your turn.” He says then, and holds his breath. The sweat from the insides of Satoru’s thighs is cooling on his sides and Suguru knows there are many ugly colours that his own cursed energy creates. An endless palette of dark and sad and sick. Still, he asks, “What colour is mine?”

Satoru draws on his back. Letters of his own name.

“Black. Indigo. Grey.”

Suguru does not move, cheek against Satoru’s heartbeat.

Oh. Of course. Of course, his can’t be as beau–

And Satoru keeps speaking.

“The black of midnight, the quietest hour in the world. Black, like the inside of a blanket in winter. Black, like the womb we all come from. Like the first thing all eyes see. The only rest mine get in a world of too many colours.”

His hands run through Suguru’s hair, the black falling like rain past his fingers.

“Indigo. The colour of storms. The colour of every horizon. Of ink within a letter. Grey. Like dawn, when my sleep is the deepest. Like the last snows of December.”

His eye are faraway, far-off now, and Suguru cannot look away.

“Red. When you get angry. When you’re sad. When something bothers you but you know there’s nothing you can do about it. Not the red of a rose. The red of blood. Of lightning. Of embers and letter stamps. Green, when you’re at peace. When you’re happy. When you take me to Osaka and see that your flowers have bloomed.”

Satoru tips his head back, back until he’s staring outside at the moon in an upside down sky.

“Purple. Like dusk. Like violets. Perennial."

Like forever.

When he looks back down, Suguru suddenly finds his eyes filling with a blue that is endless, that is always.

“You are all the colours I know, Suguru.”

They continue to visit Suguru’s home each holiday because Satoru won’t go back to his estate and Suguru will not let him.

Sometimes, the possessiveness he feels for Satoru should be frightening for how intense it is. They can be in the kitchen and Satoru will do something stupid and secret like sneaking up behind Suguru as he sits shelling peas and planting a stealthy kiss on his cheek when Suguru’s mother has her back to them.

His hungry, greedy heart is sated in those moments; in every passing moment that Satoru spends in his company, glancing in that sweet, intent way at Suguru through the corner of his eyes as he goes over to help Mama with the cooking.

Keep him. Keep him. He wants to stay. Keep him and never let him go. His heart whispers, blissful and delighted; Suguru reels under the weight of it, screaming for it to shut up, agreeing anyways because what is he but an abyss that is endlessly hungering?

At others, he's lounging in the dorms or here, in his bedroom at home, and Satoru will come to him, make a space for himself in his arms, mouth warm over Suguru’s own. Suguru will let him, content to lie there for hours, or years, letting Satoru slip large, beautiful hands underneath his shirt, kiss his throat, and press the clothed bulge of his erection against Suguru’s stomach. 

He always touches the flushed nape of Satoru’s neck with a slow, gentle hand in those moments, mind aflame with that old hunger, and thinks:

Mine. He is mine. I won’t let anyone take him away. I’ll...I’ll...no one’s going to take him from me...

He’ll walk into his room and Satoru will be there, asleep though he doesn’t need it, holding one of Suguru’s pillows to himself. Pressed to his chest, hands curled tenderly around it, as if he were holding Suguru. He sees that and forgets that he has not needed to be held to be able to sleep since he was ten. The instinct is reborn in him like a dream coming awake and Suguru knows he’s not ever going to sleep again without Satoru holding him.

No one could ever do that for me, before. They hurt me, even in my dreams.

Especially there, where the protective arms of Mama and Dad were never able to find him, no matter how much their hearts broke in their inability to understand. To help.

But Satoru? Even in his dreams, Satoru holds him with a love, with a ferocity, that is strong enough to dare anything to try and take Suguru from himself.

Sometimes, almost maddened by what he feels, Suguru thinks it would be so lovely if he could stitch himself into Satoru’s skin. To gently pry open Satoru’s ribs and plant himself in there. To become the blood in his veins. The tissues that make up his heart.

To lend Satoru his technique for a day and become a curse that he could swallow and house inside himself forever.

Now, Satoru drapes himself over him, clinging to Suguru’s shoulders, leaning on his back, kissing his face, his jaw, his neck, the backs of his ears, arms taking the breath out of Suguru’s lungs, murmuring, murmuring, murmuring. Uncaring that Suguru’s parents are one unlocked door and a narrow hallway away.

He’s a lot like the sea and loving him is a lot like drowning and coming up for air at the same time.

It burns.

“Do you want to go and see the lake?”

Suguru asks him, pressing an open-mouthed kiss on his forearm, because he knows that Satoru doesn’t like to swim but loves small water bodies into which he can dip his feet and watch the fishes play.

They’ve only ever come here in winters before, when the lake is frozen and he and Satoru can try – and mostly fail – to ice-skate on its solid surface or take walks around the snowy white barrenness surrounding it.

Now it is early monsoon and there will be freshwater each evening and vivid hydrangeas and bright, fattened koi and pike and small carp with sun spots on their scales.

Satoru brightens.

“The lake?”

I would die for him, Suguru thinks when Satoru leans more wholly against him, hugging him tighter, nodding, eager. Happy. Happy.

Kill for him, he knows, when Satoru takes him by the cheek, turns his face around and sews their lips together like a needle mending a rip in a tapestry. Making everything whole again.

The first time he visited Suguru’s home, Satoru had wandered off to the back of the house and discovered the old bicycle still chained to the gate. He had spent the remainder of their stay devoting an hour each evening, in the cold, fixing the old thing. Up to then Suguru hadn’t even known Satoru had ever owned a bicycle of his own, let alone knowing how to fix one – given how little he seemed to know about the most ordinary of things – but…

“I’m not that sheltered, weirdo! I learnt some stuff by myself!”

Right as the day is getting warmer, the sun rising from over the edge of the fields like a loaf of bread baking in the oven, among a scattering of stray rain clouds in the sky, they bike to the lake.

That is, Satoru bikes.

Suguru sits behind him, arms around his waist, cheek pressed against the space between his shoulder blades, watching as the sliver of pale skin that is the nape of Satoru’s neck goes from white to pink to a hectic splash of rose every time Suguru breathes in time with his heartbeat. 

Does love blossom, he wonders, when the flower you pressed into the pages of a book finally dries up into something brittle, something immortal?

Satoru swings his legs back and forth in the water, jeans rolled up to his knees, making the little fishes near his toes scatter like multi-coloured crystals in the blue. As the sun rises in the sky, that blue turns to a shimmering green, the sunlight reflecting from fish scales like a hundred strange mirrors.

Suguru’s almost asleep on the stubble grass dotted with yellow and orange and white blooms, face turned away from the sun, head on Satoru’s thighs, arm over his eyes when Satoru stills and the soothing back and forth movement of his legs stops.

He looks up to find that his sun is looking up too, at the sunlight falling from the tree that they parked the bike against, at the spotted canopy of dark green and patchy light.

“Curse.”

Satoru murmurs just as Suguru sees the flash of bright, beautiful spring colours peeking around a branch, two beady pale-blue eyes blinking back at the two of them just as curiously.

Fanned out fins of white like fine silk. Like clouds trailing behind it, so bright they have no colour and every colour, all at once. Scales that reflect each tint that the sun throws at them. A shadow…

Curses don’t have shadows.

He sits up, arm over Satoru’s thighs.

“Not curse. Curses.”

He says, fascinated as the shadow separates into another pair of eyes, light violet, fins like heavy tassels of moss or seaweed, as dark as midnight, swallowing up each shade of sunshine until it shimmers from within.

Satoru watches too, unable to take his eyes away from this pair of strange, unearthly fishes that are not fishes at all, playfully circling each other like day and night, sun and moon, weaving through the leaves and branches because the very air and the sky are the water they live in.

Suguru stretches out his arm like he’s casting a net in the sky. He is.

What an impossible, strange, beautiful thing. Fishes that can swim in the sky. Fishes that can fly.

Satoru nods in agreement, a laugh startled out of him in his wonder, a school of koi gathering to circle his ankles in the water of the lake.

“Yeah. Yeah. Curses.”

“Suguru.”

Suguru likes how Satoru says his name. Unhurried. Slow. Tender. Like something needing sunlight and soil and water and patience.

Su-gu-ru.

“Yeah?”

“Do you know how stars are formed?”

Satoru wears the colours of the dusk on his face when he looks down at Suguru and grins, all lopsided and cheery. Suguru watches the shape of his mouth; the slope of his neck; traces the fine, knobby bones of the wrist he has in his hand.

He watches Satoru and thinks about watering the earth and then, waiting. Waiting. Waiting. And waiting, unable to do anything but whisper encouragement and endearment and adoration to the little saplings as they take root.

He thinks of the first time their tiny, veiny hands part the soil and emerge, out into the sunshine. Of bending over till his face is close enough to inhale their smell. Earthy. Warm. Alive.

He looks at Satoru in the otherwise empty classroom, haloed in the last light of today, smiling at him like he knows that each sunset is the promise that they’ll have another tomorrow together.

“So, do you know?”

And Suguru looks at Satoru and thinks, How are stars formed? Perhaps, like all the other beautiful, eternal things.

With patience. With love.

With...tenderness.

He kisses the hinge of Satoru’s knee; the soft, freckled inside of his thigh.

And just a little bit of magic.

“I don’t. Tell me?”

Ever since they were sixteen, Suguru’s parents have been setting up Satoru’s things in the guest bedroom and each time, Satoru will politely wish everyone good night, go inside his room, shut the door and sneak out and into Suguru’s the minute the last light is turned off in the house.

He did it at sixteen and he does it now, at twenty.

Suguru’s bed is a tiny, cramped thing for the two of them, but Satoru, who got used to sleeping right on top of Suguru like a human blanket in the dorms, doesn’t really mind.

What’s more difficult for him is that they’ve got to keep quiet, to be careful not to wake Suguru’s parents through the thin walls. While Satoru’s been biting down on his forearm hard enough to make it bleed, there’s nothing that can keep down the sound of the springs in the old bed creaking.

The mattress dips each time Suguru moves and beneath him, Satoru’s breath has begun to catch, hitching up and towards that familiar, beloved crescendo, cresting like a wave as he pants open-mouthed against the inside of his arm, face turned away from Suguru, hair falling into his shut eyes.

Suguru leans down to press his teeth to his neck, biting kisses onto the already reddened and bruised skin, Satoru’s free hand clawing at his back, pulling on his long hair till Suguru hisses from the grounding, steadying pain.

He drops his head against Satoru’s shoulder, breathing shallow, gut feeling like someone’s gone and lit it on fire, limbs pulled taut like a string ready to snap.

They should probably be a little more quiet…Suguru should probably take it a little slower…

But then, Satoru’s making a soft, strangled sound and tightening his thighs around Suguru’s hips, arms twitching, and that means that it’s good and he wants more, he wants to be loud and he’s saying Suguru’s name in a choked whisper, pretty blue eyes all unfocused as the bedsprings dip and groan almost dangerously beneath their combined weights, and oh, Suguru needs to…he just needs...

“Suguru?”

He’s not sure if he falls out of the bed on hearing the knock on the door or if it’s Satoru who flies out of his arms at the sudden noise that’s not from them. His elbow catches Satoru on the nose and Satoru kicks him in the neck trying to detach his absurdly long limbs from Suguru’s body.

“Suguru, are you up?”

Suguru, who’s unfortunately up and quickly forgetting how to speak, tries to scramble up to a sit. His mind is in shambles, still trying to process the shift from extremely aroused to extremely panicked.

“Uh…” He tries and fuck, that probably, most definitely, sounds like he was just having sex with his boyfriend – who his mother, standing outside his door right now, still thinks is his best friend – and judging by how Satoru, the traitor, slowly begins shrinking back inside the blanket, they’re both very dead.

He clears his throat and tries again, pawing in the dark for his clothes.

“Uh, yeah.” He shoves his arms through his t-shirt, praying he’s not got it on in reverse. “Yeah, I’m awake, Mom!” He stubs his toe on the corner of the bed, trying to hop into his sweatpants. Satoru is nothing except for a lump in the blankets now. “Just…just one second!”

Suguru runs his hands through the wreckage of his hair, trying to breathe normally as he grips the doorknob. The light in his room is off and he doesn’t open the door beyond a tiny little crack, hoping his best expression of having just woken up isn’t too bad and Mama doesn’t notice the flush Suguru can still feel on his face.

“Hey. Mom. Is…uh, is everything okay?”

Mama stares at him, expression worried, trying to peer into the room. Suguru leans against the door frame, blocking her view, his sweetest smile out in full force.

“I was in the kitchen to get some water and…I heard noises. From your room.” Her voice drops to a hushed whisper as she leans in closer. “Was it…was it a curse?”

Six years since they’ve known that whatever Suguru said he saw was always real and never bad dreams or made-up stories and still Mama cannot speak of it without sounding like her saying the word might actually summon something. It’s not hurtful. Not anymore. Ever since his parents found out, they’ve tried, as much as they can, to be…supportive of him. Or to not be as afraid of what he can do.

It’s…sweet. In its own weird way.

Suguru laughs softly, his heart slowly returning back to its normal rhythm. At least this gives him a good enough excuse.

“Yeah. Yeah, it was a…curse.” He can hear the lump on the bed shuffling around.

Mama looks even more worried, her face drawn thin.

“Is it…should I wake up Sato–”

The lump stops moving.

“No! No, uh, I mean…no need to.” Suguru clears his throat again, smile strained. “I took care of it. It’s gone now.”

When she doesn’t move, he adds, nodding sweetly at her, “You should get back to bed, Mom. I’m…I’m okay.”

Mama stares at him for a very, very long moment. There’s absolute radio silence from the direction of the bed. Suguru fidgets, shifting from foot to foot. Looking at his mother is making him nervous and he’s half scared that if she keeps staring, he’s probably gonna blurt out what really happened just to make her stop.

Finally, Mama sighs. She looks away, first, and Suguru feels like he could collapse from the relief.

“Are you sure you’ll be okay? You always get so sick when this happens, honey. Do you want to go and sleep with your friend–”

There’s a faint chuckle, so quiet it’s almost not there, from the bed.

“It’s alright, Mom. I’m okay. It really wasn’t so bad.”

Mama smiles then, gently patting his cheek.

“My brave boy. Always ready to take on the world alone, hmm? Alright, sweetheart. You get back to bed and try to get some slee– Oh, Suguru what is that on your neck?”

Suguru’s hand flies to the still throbbing bruise on his neck where Satoru kicked him. His mind, which decides at this point that it’s had enough and will now be retiring, has no intention of processing what leaves his mouth.

“The curse. The curse did it. It was…”

The chuckling grows muffled, like it’s being suffocated against the pillows and Suguru loves Satoru, he adores him, he really, deeply does but…

“It was very hard to tame.”

More snickering.

He’ll have to kill him. He will. He will strangle Satoru to death as soon as his mother leaves and bury the body in the backyard.

Only when Suguru finally closes the door with a click, locks it and watches  the light in the hallway go out, does Satoru throw off the blanket and emerge from within like an ancient sea-monster with white, fuzzy hair, hands over his face, wheezing.

“Curs…curse did…it..? Seriously?! That’s the best you could come up with?!”

He clutches his middle while he’s saying it and Suguru is a mature and responsible adult so he doesn’t bother to dignify this with a response. Instead, he picks up a pillow from the floor and throws it at Satoru’s face with only semi-murderous intent.

The pillow collides with Infinity and Satoru falls back laughing, arms held out, grin cheeky as he beckons with his fingers.

“C’mere.” He says, snaring Suguru by the wrist as soon as he’s within reach and tugging him forwards and on top of himself. His arms come up around Suguru’s shoulders like honeysuckle as he laughs again, gently pulling on Suguru’s bangs. “I’m a curse, huh?” He kisses Suguru on the side of his jaw, smiling wide and wicked.

“The worst.”

“And hard to tame, too?”

Suguru huffs, settling down more comfortably on top of him, letting Satoru slip his fingers underneath his shirt and along the scratches he’s left on Suguru’s back.

“You give yourself too much credit.”

Satoru only laughs, kissing Suguru on the cheek.

“I think I give myself just the right amount! You give yourself too little. After all…” He traces the shape of Suguru’s lips with his forefinger. “I don’t think you ever met a curse you couldn’t tame…”

His lips are feather-light over Suguru’s.

“…ne, Suguru?”

“Won’t know unless I try.”

Suguru breathes, soft. Reverent.

Satoru eyes are diamonds in the dark, glittering and full of promises; his Cheshire grin sharp and lovely as he nips playfully at Suguru’s ear.

“Then, try.”

Okay, so he maybe won’t kill Satoru for laughing at his misery. Not just yet.

“I think you should move in with me.”

Satoru, lounging against Suguru, using his chest as a table for his book, peers at him over the top of the pages, eyes narrowed.

“What, like, at your place?”

Suguru shakes his head.

“Nope. I’m not going to live with my parents.”

Satoru laughs.

“Then mine? Where there are a hundred old people who keep pitching marriage proposals I’m going to shamelessly keep rejecting like the proud family disgrace I am?”

Suguru laughs, too.

“Nah.”

“We have the dorms to come back to after missions.”

“Mm yeah, but it’s temporary. We’ll be done at the end of this year. It’s going to be missions and teaching and then, you’ll be back in that horrendous penthouse you don’t even use and I…”

“You could come stay with me at the penthouse.”

Suguru makes a face, running his hand through Satoru’s hair.

“No. It’s too massive and I know the only reason you even bought it was to spite your mom.”

“Hey! That was one of the reasons. The main one but not the only one and I–”

Suguru tugs sharply on his ear.

“I was thinking more of a no-man’s land. Somewhere neutral.”

Satoru half sits up now, book forgotten, looking intent. Hopeful.

Suguru traces a thumb over the swell of his cheekbone.

“Not yours. Not mine. Someplace that’s…”

“Ours?”

Satoru asks, looking like Suguru’s told him that he’s visiting the moon so would Satoru like a slice for himself?

Suguru takes his hand, lacing their fingers together.

“Ours.”

October.

Autumn spreads like a beautiful, untamable fire across the tops of the trees, turning everything from burnished gold to vivid orange and finally, the scarlet of lit embers.

The smell of leaves, damp and dry, is thick on the air and the wind is crisp and swift, a little cool, like new marble and not yet touched by the frigid chill of winter.

Suguru is almost twenty four by the time he and Satoru have enough money between themselves to move into the tidy, small two bedroom place in a really quiet neighbourhood.

It’s the one thing that Satoru had refused to touch any of his family’s money for.

He unpacks their clothes just to find something to calm the buzzing in his nerves, kneeling in the new bedroom, empty and unlived in for so long, and then arranging them in neat sections, beside each other, in the shared closet.

Satoru is fast asleep on the foam mattress in the tiny living room, knocked out from the two consecutive missions he finished so they could move in here together on the same day.

Suguru checks on him once and then goes back to roaming the small, cozy place that’s going to be home now.

There’s a 3×3 nightstand beside the bed in the room they both decided they’d be sleeping in. It’s bare; no night-light; drawers empty.

But there are other things scattered on its surface.

Little things.

The worn-out Cinnabon-shaped purse that was Suguru’s birthday gift to him in their second year and that Satoru still uses to keep his cards and keys in. Suguru’s reading glasses. A dark green lighter. A stick of green-apple gum.

The open, half-empty suitcases on the floor. The contrast of colours that is their shared wardrobe now. Even back at the dorms, more than half of Satoru’s things were always in Suguru’s room. Now, everything that is Satoru’s and Suguru’s is here, all in one place.

Little things that make it look real.

Lived in.

He wakes up Satoru during a sudden, brief spell of rain in the evening. They order takeout from the same hole-in-the-wall place they found way back in their first year.

There’s isn’t even a couch yet so they sit on the floor to eat, Suguru watching the rain, Satoru talking animatedly about how they’re gonna decorate the place.

This is their housewarming, on a rainy, windy Friday. Quiet. Private. Just the two of them in this place with scattered boxes around them, waiting to be opened.

Just the two of them sharing takeout fried rice that’s just the perfect amount of greasy, breaking a bar of peppermint chocolate, that Suguru manages to find inside his backpack, in half for their dessert.

Just the two of them over the wisps of a cigarette that Suguru lights up and then they shotgun; the only time, the only way Satoru will ever consider even touching a cigarette.

This is their housewarming, just the two of them on the mattress on the floor before the open window when Satoru crawls into his lap and kisses him. They’ve had sex so often, but never made love in a home that’s wholly theirs and does not need them to rush through the unravelling of their souls before each other.

Here, Satoru unfolds like the vast sea in Suguru’s arms and it’s not just because he can’t ever envision love without seeing also the endless blue of water.

It’s in how Satoru has always pulled his attention towards himself, without really trying to, just like the roaring of the waves did when Suguru had first visited the beach with his family for a whole week. Much younger and immediately in love, Suguru had lain awake in bed each night of that week, waiting for daylight to come so he could run down to the beach again.

What does that make me? He wonders.

“The shore?”

Satoru says, kissing the side of his neck and Suguru realizes he must’ve said that last part out loud.

If he’s the shore...

He thinks of the sand, golden and burning under the sun. The bright and speckled bits of shell and stone, lovely in the light, left by the water, embedded within the soft surface, sharp enough to pierce your foot if you weren’t watching your step.

The jagged rocks where the beach sloped to a thin line, the driftwood sticking up towards the sky, with slashes of white from the brine in the air, the places where the sea left its touch.

Thinks of how the waves break apart on the rocks, scattering diamonds into the air, falling to pieces on the unyielding granite.

Edges that can cut someone open...

Like a whisper in the dark, Infinity settles over him as Satoru’s arms slide around his neck. He finds Suguru’s lips; the piercing on his tongue that Suguru is sure is his true rival in love when it comes to Satoru’s undivided attention.

“Should get another one for how much you love this...”

He mumbles between their lips and Satoru just laughs, breaking the kiss to whisper his reply into Suguru’s ears; Suguru’s face burns from it. Scarlet as the sun in summer.

He thinks of the waves again, remembers how it takes years and years and years, but eventually the relentless loving of the sea wears down the hard, brutal edges of the rocks into something softer, something one could press their toes into and smile, something little crabs and starfish could come and fall asleep on.

How the waves can shape the rocks into the shore by breaking themselves into pieces on their jagged faces again and again and again.

Satoru’s mouth moves to the line of his jaw and a slender finger twirls around the perfect bang that rests so arrogantly, so beautifully at the side of his forehead.

“Can hear you thinking, Suguru...”

Suguru presses his fingers into Satoru’s hips, leaves their shape on him, thinks, aching, Do I hurt you, does it feel good, do you want more...

He thinks his heart might give out from its fullness but Satoru has it between his teeth, held up securely by the scruff, and will not let go. On the place where Suguru’s shoulder slopes to meet the line of his neck, Satoru’s lips take on the delicate traces of a faint upwards turn that means he wants to smile but is trying not to.

“I want you.”

He whispers and Suguru can feel the tides of his breathing, beating heart against his own.

Is this what home is? Is this what it does?

Oh, if that is so, then Suguru cannot ever unlearn it now.

After, neither of them are willing to move from where they are. They stay on the mattress, right there in the living room, Satoru sprawled on top of him, murmuring quietly about all things mundane and boring and beautiful as Suguru strokes the top of his head, eyes growing heavy, limbs heavier.

Ever so often, Satoru will take one of his hands and bring it to his lips, press it against his cheek, his eyelids, inhaling the scent of the skin stretched thin over Suguru’s wrist, over his own name inked across Suguru’s pulse point.

“Hey, Suguru.”

Suguru hums.

“Nothing.”

I love you, it spells, in how Satoru, a boy born of the sun, abandons the sky to come and settle within the circle of Suguru’s arms like it is the only home, the only world he ever wants his rays to touch.

Suguru smiles into Satoru’s hair, arm gently slipping past the hemline of Satoru’s t-shirt, rubbing circles over the warm skin.

Here, in this home with barely anything in it, how the love runs down the walls like paint, how heavy it is in the beams that hold up the ceiling, how it’s flowing even now in the water pipes, and filling all these empty spaces, just like furniture waiting to be uncovered. As uncertain as the uncertainty that is the only assurance, the only hope at life’s beginning, Suguru knows that there is nowhere else he would be except here, holding Satoru.

Opening his eyes to Satoru each morning is not unlike being born over and over and over again, each life more full of promise than the last.

He kisses the fragrance of rain and wind and autumn lingering on Satoru’s neck, on that tiny, hidden spot behind his ear and Satoru’s arms tighten further around him. He breathes soft and warm and sugar-sweet patterns onto Suguru’s neck, leaning his whole weight onto Suguru’s till his bones ache. The tips of his hair tickle Suguru’s throat and his spine creaks, getting bent out of shape each time Satoru moves.

He’s gonna wake up with a crick in his spine and neck like this, and it says a lot about Suguru that all he feels at this is an immeasurable fondness, all it makes him do is kiss the top of that snowy head.

What is he, what has he ever been, but a boy kneeling in a garden, at the sun’s feet, longing for the light?

He tends. He waters. He prunes.

“Whatever you say.”

He doesn’t have to wait. Satoru’s love is perennial. Endless. Always flowering. Always giving.

Satoru blooms. He gives. He turns his face to Suguru for sunshine and touch and nurture and...

I love you too.

They get assigned the mission the following Tuesday. Suguru offers to go alone.

Satoru stays back, because he had to be extra wonderful and come up with the idea of having all of Suguru’s plants shifted to their home and they’re getting delivered that day.

“Satoru, where will we even keep them?”

“The balcony.”

The ‘balcony’ is a tiny space barely large enough for both of them to stand in together without it being a tight fit but Satoru had waved him off with an uncharacteristically serious, “You grew them since you were a kid. You love them. Now go and finish this so you can come back soon and help me settle them. I still don’t know shit about plants, Suguru.”

And Suguru, grateful and overwhelmed and in love, had only smiled and said “Okay. I’ll be back before you know it, Mr. Grumpy.”

So that’s why he’s here now, in the middle of nowhere, struggling to hold onto the Cursed Spirit – which isn’t a spirit at all but an obscure wood spirit that still seems strong enough to be able to decimate a small village – while protecting the three civilians who were unfortunate enough to be in the same place where Suguru got jumped by the howling, shrieking creature.

His right arm is on fire. Probably broken. God, Satoru will kill him when he gets back, even if this thing doesn’t.

It’s already destroyed three of Suguru’s First Grade Spirits and even Rainbow Dragon is struggling to hold onto it as it claws and scratches at the shimmering scales, turning them dark with purple blood.

“Go! Get out of here!”

Suguru says to the three civilians, half an eye on the Spirit tearing through Rainbow Dragon’s coiled body trying to hold it in place long enough to allow him to exorcise it.

There’s a succession of small towns dotting the outskirts of this forest. If the Spirit gets free before Suguru can absorb it, it’ll take no time to make its way through all of them.

It’s not going to work, Suguru realizes, with slow clarity. Dragon can’t hold it much longer. But I can. I can keep it stalled.

Satoru will really kill him.

He gestures at the civilians again, more urgent this time, already taking out his phone so he can contact the school for backup.

“Take the path out of the forest and don’t turn back no matter what. Just go. Now, please!”

He turns around just as the Cursed Spirit tears past Rainbow Dragon. It’s a towering thing, one-eyed and enormous, a thick garland of shrivelled heads around its neck.

It roars just as the call connects, bringing down one gargantuan fist, blotting out the last of the light from the darkening sky.

Suguru falls when the ground beneath his feet trembles and cracks apart, and the phone goes flying out of his grip. He lands on his broken arm, vision going white from the pain, dust in his eyes and still barely able to think of anything but the villages at the end of this forest. 

Too many people. Too many.

He can’t let this thing get away or out.

He thinks of Satoru.

The Cursed Spirit roars again, raising both fists to the sky.

Come back soon. Come back soon, Suguru.

Suguru really hates breaking a promise.

Satoru doesn’t arrive the entire time that Suguru spends looking nervously at the door to the morgue while Shoko works on his arm.

“Please stop it. You’re making me nervous and I can’t work like that. Look, if you’re scared he’s gonna–”

“I’m not scared of Satoru–”

“–come here and throw a tantrum, then it’s okay, because I’ll kick him out. But I couldn’t not let him know. He kept blowing up my phone. If I hadn’t told him, Utahime would have.”

“He doesn’t throw tantrums.” Suguru sighs, rolling his neck to relieve some of the tension  that he feels settled inside his bones. His mouth tastes dead. “He...worries.”

Shoko makes a face, even if her eyes are fond and goes back to checking him for other injuries.

“Gross.”

He’s waiting for Suguru on one of the stone benches near their old haunt. The usual gold of the hunched-over osmanthus tree has been replaced by a reddish-brown that seeps even into the green of the leaves, making them indistinguishable from the little petals. It’s late evening and there’s no one else in sight when Suguru walks up to sit beside Satoru.

“Hey. I waited for you to show up, y’know.”

Satoru says nothing, feet kicking idly at the swathe of petals gathered on the ground. Suguru looks up, up at the swaying leaves. This tree keeps shedding flowers like old clothes or fur. Even the bench they’re sitting on is dotted with yellow and orange petals, bright red leaves that smell like nothing anymore.

“Not gonna talk to me, huh?”

Silence.

“Satoru.”

“What.”

Suguru can’t help but smile. Satoru has never not responded when Suguru is the one calling.

“You tell me what. You’re the one here acting like this is the first mission that went a little sideways.”

Satoru turns to look at him, glare withering.

“A little?”

“Okay...a lot. I am okay, so that counts right?”

Satoru scoffs, eyes roving over Suguru.

“Yeah right. You’re okay. I’m not blind yet so I can see that.”

Suguru frowns, really not able to understand why Satoru, who’s literally spent his teenage years fooling around on every single mission, who’s grown up fighting curses, and who, better than anyone, knows the risks involved in what they do, is so rattled. His arm is fine now. Most of his other injuries are superficial, nothing to lose sleep over. He even managed to absorb the curse, though his insides feel like shit right now.

No dinner for him tonight probably...but yeah.

This is really nothing but a minor blip, considering the kind of stuff Satoru and he have been through...

He’s still pondering it when Satoru speaks again, softer but no more friendlier.

“They said it could’ve killed anyone else.”

“I am not anyone else, Satoru.”

Satoru turns to face him then, eyes imploring.

“I know.”

Oh. Oh.

His hand is close by, resting on the stone, among the petals that Suguru makes his way through till his pinkie is touching Satoru’s.

He taps on the tip of it. Like little knocks.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five...

Till Satoru loses that guarded, prickly layer of defensive anger and his face returns to a quiet, pensive youthfulness.

“Hey.”

Satoru taps him back on his pinkie, more aggressively than he usually would.

“Hey yourself.”

“Satoru.” Suguru coaxes, reaching out to take that fair hand in his. Satoru lets him, staring at his feet sullenly even as he links his fingers with Suguru’s. “Don’t be like that. I’m sorry I worried you.”

“I wasn’t worried.”

“’Toru.” He chides and it seems to work, all the slow, careful conversations they’ve had about Satoru needing to be more open about how he really feels paying off when Satoru’s shoulders deflate. “You don’t need to hide. Not from me. If you’re upset with me–”

“Not with you.”

“No?”

“No. You were brave. Good. You always are. You saved a lot of people.”

“But you are upset.”

“...yeah.”

Suguru says nothing, letting Satoru get comfortable enough in the silence to speak. Sometimes, the only way Satoru can say what he feels is if they both pretend no one’s there and listening.

Satoru squeezes his hand.

“I wasn’t there. I wasn’t with you. I was...I didn’t even know.”

Ah, so that’s what’s going on inside that beautifully strange mind.

“Satoru.” Suguru soothes, running his thumb over those calloused knuckles. There’s a few faint scratches on the pale skin, probably from unpacking the more thorny plants that Suguru has, and the idiot hasn’t even healed the little wounds. Sometimes, Satoru cares so much in his own awkward, silent way that Suguru thinks he might die from it. “Hey. It’s okay. Look, we haven’t been on a joint mission in a long, long time, love. And it’s alright. Don’t you trust me? Do think I’m wea–”

“No. You’re never weak. Not you.”

“Then there’s–”

Satoru shifts, sideways till he and Suguru are arm to arm. He leans his head on Suguru’s shoulder, tracing his forearm like he can feel where the bone was broken, rebroken and then, reset.

“Suguru, you could lose all of your powers right now and it wouldn’t change the fact you’re the only person in the world strong enough to stand beside me.”

Suguru’s breath catches as Satoru leans his head against his shoulder. Satoru takes their linked hands in his own free hand and holds it in his lap, oblivious that Suguru’s still trying to process, “...only person in the world strong enough to stand beside me”.

He runs his hand over Suguru’s palm.

“Y’know when I was a kid, my mother once asked me what my dream was. Just once. ‘Satoru, what do you dream of?’ I didn’t know what to tell her. I didn’t have a dream. Everyone always said I was born with everything a person could dream of and I believed them. There was nothing more I could have asked for, right? And then, I met you.”

He traces the ink on each of Suguru’s knuckles.

“I met you. You...you were the first person who didn’t know who I was and who didn’t give a single fuck about it either. And I realized, oh, that’s my dream, right there.”

“Me?” Suguru teases, laughing when Satoru elbows him.

“Yeah, as if.” He retorts but he’s smiling, finally, and Suguru can breathe again. “When you go all your life living what others see you as, you forget how to be anyone else, Suguru. And me? I didn’t even know I could be anything else for anyone else. I just wanted to be strong. What else mattered anyway? I was just...Gojō, when I met you. I’d lost Satoru a long time ago. Back when my family, my tutors, my clan, and even I, decided that that kid wouldn’t have been able to become everything the world needed him to be. And after all of that, I think I....I think all I ever wanted was for someone to not know Gojō.”

Someone to know just Satoru.

He stops, unable to tell Suguru anything more but Suguru doesn’t need him to. He knows the feeling when the secrets one’s not ready to share are forcibly pried out, like pulling out a shaky tooth when it would have been better to give it a few days more. In Satoru’s case, Satoru has spent so long unaware that he's allowed to crave for anything other than power. That it's okay, it's needed, just to be Satoru.

“Come here.”

He says, instead of ‘it’s not your fault if the adults who were supposed to love you and hold you and tell you "it’s alright", forgot you were just a child’ – Satoru doesn’t look like he’s still ready to fully believe that – or ‘it’s okay, Satoru, I have you now’ –  because he doesn’t think it fully is, not yet, at least – and Satoru leans into him till his face is pressed to Suguru’s neck.

“Suguru. I don’t think I ever went a single day when I was little without thinking about how I could make my parents happy. But with time, I realized that it didn’t matter. They didn’t want to hear about my day because all I did was fight curses that they would arrange through my tutors. They didn’t know about my friends because I had no friends. No one who didn’t befriend me because they were trying to kill me, at least. They wanted progress. I gave it to them. They wanted strength. I grew stronger. They said I was a god. I thought I would be one, for the rest of my life.”

His arms come up and around Suguru’s neck.

“I’m twenty four. And what you’ve given me? I’m not used to that. I never was. They didn’t teach me to be. Sometimes, I don’t even know if I love you like you should be loved. That’s why I can’t say it as well. I think it so much, all the time, that sometimes, I forget you can’t read my mind and that I have to say it out loud too. Suguru, if I was born in another world where you didn’t love me as much, or where you loved me even this much,” And he pulls back to lift up his hand, the thumb and forefinger nearly touching, space enough only for a strand of hair between them, “that would still be more than anyone’s ever loved me in my whole life.”

Satoru’s not crying. He looks like he always does. Young. Beautiful. Tired.

Kind.

“I grew up in a world that I didn’t know had you. Now, I see one which does. If something happened to you, it wouldn’t kill me. My childhood built me to be that way. I would keep living. And it would be so much worse than if I’d died. My youth taught me that. You taught me that.”

He takes Suguru’s face between his hands, the slightest tremor in the palms and brings their foreheads together.

“So, next time, try not to do something that’s going to take you away from me forever. Okay?”

And Suguru, so shocked that he can’t even speak anymore, tries to open his mouth but his throat is all choked up, for different reasons now as he tries to process what Satoru just said. Maybe this is why the idiot stays all clammed up. If such conversations become a regular occurrence, Suguru’s heart will give out long before he even reaches thirty.

He breathes in Satoru’s scent, overwhelmed, nodding, carding his fingers through that soft hair.

“Okay. Okay, Satoru.”

Thinks of a world where he and Satoru really got to grow up together. Skinned knees. Collecting fishes from a lake. Jumping puddles together. Getting ice-cream together. Laughing together. Being afraid...but not alone.

Not just falling in love. Growing into it.

Thinks,

Why didn’t I find you when I was born? Why didn’t you? Just how many lonely nights did we spend, longing, dreamless and under the same starlight?

He tells Satoru only a few weeks later, almost like a nebulous memory now coming back to the forefront of his mind.

“I did, you know.”

“Hmmm?” Satoru says, hand stilling over the plate he’s drying. He turns to look at Suguru. “Did what?”

“Dreamt of you before I met you. Before I knew who you were.”

Satoru doesn’t drop the plate. He sets it, very slowly, very carefully, back down on the rack.

“W-what?”

Suguru smiles, shrugging.

“Just the one time.”

Curses have memories.

Memories that are broken. Memories that are splintered. Memories that are viscous and amorphous. Half dreams. Mostly nightmares.

When he grows up, Suguru will know how to tune them out, like muting the television though the pictures keep moving on the screen.

Now Suguru is only eight and a little excited because he acquired one that can fly. It is large and pale. The colour of his eyes. Shaped like a strange, large fish. With large wings. Two tails. A little mouth that looks like it’s smiling.

The curse is hiding out behind a wall beside the konbini when Suguru - still trying to decide what to get with the few new notes that Dad gave him this morning because he was a good boy and helped in sowing the new batch of vegetable seeds - finally notices it. Once he does, it comes to him willingly, happily even.

Is it a fish? Suguru thinks, staring warily at the large, cheerful-looking thing making its way towards him.

It chitters like a big bird when Suguru gathers up the courage to inch closer himself and tentatively pat the top of that flat head.

Cold, he thinks.

“Hello.” He manages to say and the strange creature flaps its fins? wings? flying-swimming thingies? and nudges Suguru on the belly with its head, almost making him fall over.

“Ow.” Suguru giggles. “You’re heavy. Do you want something to eat?”

He goes back home with an onigiri for himself, a pack of little sugary donuts which his new friend doesn’t seem interested in, and, for once, no lingering pain in his belly once he absorbs it.

The curse is oddly quiet, too. Perhaps, it was never a person? It seems to have no memories. That night, when Suguru gets into bed, he doesn’t get any flashes of sludge-brown and red, like a badly done painting, playing before his shut eyes.

He does, however, for the first and the last time in his childhood, see the boy.

When he opens his eyes, he’s not in his bed any longer. His room is gone, replaced by the blue sky of fair-faced winter. He floats. Flies. Hovers, with his feet above a ground. He is himself.

And not.

A dream, Suguru knows, blinking blearily. It’s not unusual for him to wake up inside dreams when the curses sleep inside him, reliving moments they lived. It is unusual, rare, never, that the dreams are so slow. So quiet. So...

Beautiful.

A thrush settles on the branch beside him, staring at Suguru curiously. This must be something his newest friend remembers enough to show Suguru.

He drifts in the stillness, trying to see if the bark feels like bark against his hand even in a dream. It does.

There’s snow on the ground but Suguru isn’t cold, eyes scanning the large pathway stretching out before him. In the distance is a massive staircase made of stone, crowned with a gate. Red. Towering. Like the horned head of a demigod.

Suguru watches, fascinated.

He has never seen such a place.

Sometimes, him and Dad will watch old black and white movies where they show places just like this one but Suguru didn’t know they were real!

Unable to help himself, he drifts closer, drawn by that gate, the red tiles shining in the frozen landscape. The steps are so fun to climb when you can just fly!

Suguru is never climbing steps the ordinary way ever again. He twists and turns like he’s weightless, the cold air tickling his arms, chilling his lungs in a way not unpleasant, giggling softly to himself as a few snowflakes fall right into his eyelashes.

He’s reaching out for some, distracted from the gate by these little stars that can be held in his palms when he hears the voice.

“...toru? Satoru?”

Suguru turns around, towards the steps. Towards the gate.

“Where are you, Satoru?”

The voice sounds like a lady’s, like Mama’s but...faraway. Different. Chilly. Like a ghost’s. He stills when his eyes fall on the figure at the top of the stone steps, standing beneath the gigantic arches.

It’s too far away for Suguru to be able to make out anything. Anything except that the figure is small, dressed in what looks like a tiny kimono, and, with a lot of snowflakes on their head.

Suguru giggles to himself, unable to stop when he thinks of a person with a head full of snow instead of hair.

As if they heard him, the figure turns, head slowly moving to face the place where Suguru drifts, weightless and not in himself, hundreds of yards away. The short hair means it’s a boy, right? But the girl who stays two doors down the street from Suguru’s, Misaki, has really short hair too...

Suguru tilts his head, trying to make out if the person sees him.

He hears the woman call out again. Closer now.

“Satoru? Enough now...”

Six Eyes, he thinks, feeling a strange reverence suddenly wash over him like the smell of incense and worship and devotion...no. No. 

Not him. That’s not him. That’s not his thought and Suguru immediately shies from it, just like he shies from incense smoke, which has always made his eyes burn.

He frowns at the curse's memory, unable to understand. Six Eyes? What Six Eyes? What does that mean?

Suguru squints, trying to make out if the figure has eyes just like his but...it’s too far. He really can’t make out what the person even looks like, let alone if they have six eyes or ten.

But he does stay awake in the dream long enough to see, through the eyes of the curse, the figure begin to raise one hand, halfway in the air, like they can see him too, like they’re about to call out...

“...ru? Suguru.”

Suguru feels the drop back into his own body, one hand coming up instinctively to shield his face from the sunshine.

Mama’s smiling face comes into his view, all blurry at the edges. Suguru rubs his small hands against his eyes and frowns at her till her face stops looking all fuzzy.

Mama smiles. Kisses his forehead. His cheek.

“Wake up, baby. Mama’s making breakfast and you can help.”

“Can we have zaru soba?”

Mama’s laughter is like butterflies. It tickles when she holds Suguru. Her bosom smells like dough and flowers and talc. Suguru breathes in, clutching her.

“Of course, sweetheart. We can have whatever Suguru wants.”

She takes Suguru’s little face between her hands and he peers up at her, blinking away the last of his sleep from his swollen eyelids, staring intently at her face.

Her eyes. Same violet shade as his.

Two. Not six.

Satoru is still staring at him, mouth open and Suguru laughs.

“What? Told you it was a dream. I think the curse remembered meeting you. It’s what I saw when I first absorbed–”

Satoru kisses him like a drowning man grasping a straw. He takes Suguru’s face in his hands and kisses him brief and hard and full of disbelief.

He kisses him till Suguru’s lips are aching and he has to hold Satoru at bay, laughing from deep in his belly, cheeks all warm.

“You...you found me. You saw me.”

His vivid blue eyes, also just two and not six, are wide and shining and fathomless, and Suguru thinks, I didn’t. Not really. If I had seen your face that day, I don’t think I’d have been able to leave that dream behind to wake up.

Satoru hugs him, urgent and warm, chin cutting into Suguru’s shoulder, leaning his whole weight against Suguru.

“Suguru.” He breathes and it sounds like...it sounds like worship to Suguru who remembers walking past stained glass windows and the long-lost prayers at a bedside, whispered between folded hands, slipping past the opening that his fingers made.

“Suguru.” Satoru says again and Suguru remembers being six and frozen in a dream, his eyes drawn to a white starker than snow and thinking with a mind not his, Six Eyes.

“Suguru.” Like it is all he knows to say and Suguru holds him tight, laughing, nuzzling into that hair.

“I thought your hair was snow.”

He whispers, teasing, conspiratorial and Satoru trembles, perhaps with laughter, perhaps because the hammering from Suguru’s heart gives him away.

He breathes in the scent of that hair, the small, pale pink bruises on that fair neck that Satoru never heals, hands coming up to rub Satoru’s back. He whispers the question onto Satoru’s skin like touch.

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Ever dream of me?”

Laughter. This time Satoru’s. Sweet. Joyful.

“No, no! Never. I’m not that sentimental. Besides.” He pauses, like the first blue clouds at dawn, before burying his face into Suguru’s neck. The place where he’s been storing all his secrets, big and small and each one in between, since they were teenagers. “You are more than anything my dreams could have made up, Suguru.”

December.

The deafening clamour of thunder rings out in the stark, grey landscape, threatening to cleave the skies open; where there is the beginning of new frost, a river of rain washes it away.

It is cold. Frozen. Merciless.

Beautiful.

Inside the heat and warmth of the private quarters, a wet nurse places the bloodied, wailing infant into hands that are steady and do not shake. He has a head full of hair that is the same shade of winter, bloodied red, plastered to his little crown.

He weeps lustily; his eyes are bright, wide with tears. Ten thousand skies in each shimmering orb.

December’s infant, he is born with the frigid colours of winter imprinted on his face like the very season kissed it before leaving him in his mother’s arms. With the sunny, crisp warmth of a fireplace.

As he is wiped clean, his pink, pale fingers reach out, seeking something; they close around the finger his mother holds out.

His grip is unflinching; unwavering.

Strong.

Swaddled and warming up, he is set back into his mother’s arms and another wail, more indignant than the last, declares that he is hungry and must be fed.

A thousand curses are born when he opens his little mouth in a curious gurgle. A thousand more when his beautiful, omniscient eyes shift from one face to the next. Alert. Intelligent. His mother holds out the infant, twitching like a pupa in the chrysalis, to his father.

“Satoru.”

He is named; and little Satoru, bewildered by all these new faces, tilts his fair, snowy head and stares solemnly up at everyone with his blue, blue eyes.

“You know what I think can actually share souls?”

“What?”

“Stars.”

“Stars?”

“Yeah. All of them are made of the same things. Star...stuff. Stardust. Big or small, they all shine when it gets dark. And they shine the same. For each of us.”

“You don’t think people are the same way.”

“People can shine, too. I guess.”

“We’ve got a little stardust in our souls then?”

“Yeah. Just a little. Not a lot, though. That’s why we’re different from the stars. Our souls burn brighter only for the people who try to find and follow their light to us.”

The thought – of one soul holding up a light in a dark forest, waiting to see another light at the other end – is so fascinating.

“I think...I don’t think you can find someone who’s made up of you, of whatever makes you. I think, all our lives, we try to look for someone who can...who can complete us, y’know? Like a puzzle? If all the pieces were the same, the picture would never be complete. It’s because the pieces are different that they make sense. I think souls are like that. You know the guy who said we’re always looking for the half that can complete us?”

“Plato.”

“Mmhmm. I think that’s how our souls are. We’re not like stars. Each of us doesn’t have the same stardust in our veins. And we all have separate souls. Different. Incomplete. But always searching for that one other piece that was made just for us. For you. For me. Not the same. Never the same. But when we’ve found our own missing piece, the picture that’s life seems to make a little more sense and you...”

Suguru is thirty and the ring that’s been sitting in its pretty, velvet box inside his favourite overcoat for the last two years has never felt heavier than it does when Satoru’s hand comes to rest on his knee.

“...you complete me, Suguru.”

Hundreds of miles away, inside the dark, quiet womb, a feet kicks out, the shape of it pressing against her stomach.

She smiles, laying a hand on her belly.

“You’re very eager to come into the world, hmm?”

But Suguru, who can no longer hear the faint, faraway wail that came to him from somewhere beyond time and dreams, like a call of a name he still does not have, does not move anymore.

As Satoru is laid down to sleep beside his own mother, snowy eyelashes fluttering against rosy cheeks, Suguru curls closer around himself in the water of the womb.

His mother talks to him, whispering sweet nothings but Suguru is already asleep, dreaming of the colour blue.

February, again.

Suguru is thirty when he takes Satoru’s hand in one of his, tracing the familiar peaks of those knuckles with his thumb. Satoru looks at him, full of that December warmth. Like an early Christmas.

“Hey Satoru?”

“Yeah?”

Suguru tends. He waters. He prunes.

Every season, one that keeps giving. He reaches inside his pocket with his free hand. He smiles, real, from the bottom of his heart.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you...”

“If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it...He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”

-Emily Brönte.