Chapter Text
“‘Miki, are you watching?” Satoru asks, and she jolts, picking her eyes up as she straightens, whipping her attention off of the miniscule curses riding the people that ride the train.
“Yes!” She assures, meeting his eyes behind dark black glasses, hands fidgeting in the skirt of her new school uniform in excitement and certain unease when she still hasn’t gotten used to being able to see the monsters Megumi can. “Our next stop is Akabane station,” she recites, and Tou-ru smiles, nodding, tugging gently on Megumi’s ear to grab his attention where it’s stuck on the window.
“Hey, you listen too,” he says, and Tsumiki leaves half a mind to the conversation, fingers jittering restlessly. Another curse wobbles on the back of a person a meter or two away, gurgling lowly, and she can’t help a shiver. “Suguru and I will only be riding with you for the next week, and then you’ve got to be able to do it on your own.”
She has no idea what this new school is going to be like. She sort of misses her old one, but Tou-san had explained that it was too far away to justify staying there, and Tsumiki can understand that. As it is, she’s a little nervous about making just a thirty minute trip to and back every day.
‘I wonder what the kids there will be like?’ She thinks, swaying slightly with the motion of the metro, leaning back against Tou-ru’s legs where he stands and holds one of the swaying hand-grips, butterflies fluttering in her stomach. The kids at their old school had been…nice enough, she figures, when they’d all been about the same. No one else there had had the money for new, nice uniforms, so she hadn’t felt too out of place when she’d show up each day with hand washed but clearly worn clothes.
‘You have five new uniforms in your closet,’ she reminds herself, smoothing her hands down the pressed sweater, dyed a dark, navy blue to match the skirt. ‘None of them have holes, none of them are dirty. You don’t look poor.’
“Easy,” Satoru chimes, catching her when the train lurches to a stop and she overbalances, the weight of her backpack pulling her down. It’s new too, shiny and a glossy red, what everyone has instead of the beat up old bag her mom had left her. He chuckles, gently pushing her back upright, adjusting her glasses and straightening out her sweater collar. When Tsumiki looks up, he’s smiling, fond and simple, before he blinks away to nag Megumi about not yanking on the neckline of his shirt again.
‘Come on, Tsumiki,’ she thinks, trying to muster up the determination to be excited instead of nervous as they wait for the doors to open, what she expects to be a two minute walk to their next stop, ‘it’ll be a good day- a great day.’
For once, she might actually fit in, and not because she comes from the part of the neighborhood below the poverty line. She’ll meet new people who will be able to see her for her, and not her clothes, or her hair, or her scuffed up old shoes, because she’ll look like them and have things to talk about like them. It won’t be awkward anymore, or lonely, or a little nerve wracking when her Sensei leans down with that awful concerned look on her face, and asks, ‘is everything all right at home, Tsumiki?’ As if she still has parents to be there.
Now, she does. Now, she’s like every other kid with a real closet and a real bedroom, real domestic adventures and real stories to talk about. ‘I’m going to make friends,’ she thinks, determined to be excited.
“I love you,” Satoru sings, smooching a large kiss to Megumi’s cheek to his souring scowl, and then an even larger one against Tsumiki’s just to spite him, knelt down to their level on the sidewalk. “Go to the front desk if you need them to call me for any reason, okay?” He reiterates, a thread of worry he hasn’t been able to shake all day making him spill the words again, even as both Tsumiki and Megumi nod.
The two of them know his and Suguru’s numbers by heart; they know not to talk about jujutsu there; they know just about everything but-
“I’ll be back here at three-thirty to ride the trains with you again,” he says, for what has to be the third time, and doesn’t protest when Megumi finally groans and shoves at his face in exasperation.
“Leave already,” he complains, a flush high on his cheeks like he’s embarrassed to be doted on in public, and Tsumiki snickers behind one manicured hand. Her nails catch the morning light, uncolored as per policy but still sneaking around it with a glossy finish of clear top coat.
Satoru only winds an arm around his waist, tugging Megumi in further to blow a raspberry against his cheek. “So mean already,” he pretends to bemoan as he quietly shrieks, wriggling. “Have a good day,” he wishes, pressing a real kiss to Megumi’s forehead as he calms down, murmuring, “I love you, baby,” to him, reaching for Tsumiki to pull her down for another he leaves on her nose, a soft-spoken, “darling,” for her.
“We will,” she promises, a wide smile on her lips and a clear hope in her eyes. “Isn’t Tou-san getting back from his mission soon?” She wheedles, giving him a side eye as she tilts her head, lips playfully pursing.
“I’m going, I’m going,” Satoru says, finally standing up, giving Megumi’s ear a last tug. He stands on the sidewalk a little ways away from the front steps, watching their hands slip into each other as they turn, steadily getting farther as they hurry to join the growing stream of students pouring into the gate.
“Please have a good day,” he mutters into his knuckles as he watches them disappear behind the brick walls, not remembering much about their schooling experience because he’d kept hands off about it the first time.
He sorely regrets that now. He doesn’t remember whether or not Tsumiki had friends here, if Megumi had problems. He hadn’t begun paying attention to it until they’d gone to middle school and Megumi had started punching people. The most involvement he’d had back then had been forging the documents to prove Tsumiki’s hair color and Megumi’s green eyes to be real, if paying for it out of pocket didn’t count.
He forces himself to sigh, tear his eyes away from the thrum of the crowd’s cursed energy swallowing them whole, and turn on his heel. Walking for a minute finds him a small ally he tucks into, vanishing with the scent of ozone and a slight, stirring breeze.
“Everyone,” Hayakawa-sensei announces, his voice low and smooth as he holds a hand out, gesturing, “I’d like to introduce you to Fushiguro Tsumiki. She’s our new transfer student from Itabashi. Please treat her well.”
“Hello,” she says, staring out at a small sea of kids who look- like her, she has to remind herself. Their new uniforms and undirtied shoes look like hers. “It’s nice to meet you all. Please take care of me.” She bows maybe a little too aggressively, nerves winding up her shoulders like the prickle of static, fingers squeezing tightly into the fabric of her skirt.
When she stands up again, she darts her eyes around the classroom, half an ear on listening to where Hayakawa-sensei points out her seat, the other absorbing the dull chorus of many voices repeating the greeting back to her. There’s two girls leaning together in the back of the classroom, whispering. A pair of boys exchanging a note. One girl with thick glasses eyes her curiously, another with a high ponytail scrutinizing her clothes.
‘It’ll be a good day, Tsumiki,’ she repeats, as she walks to the one open seat in the third row to the left, wearing a smile when she looks at the other kids she passes. Her hands feel shaky when she begins to unpack her backpack, the leather the same as all the others and yet the stares boring into her skin. ‘It will.’
The nerves don’t go away as she opens her textbook as Hayakawa-sensei begins class, the pencil case at her elbow that Suguru meticulously helped her pack flowered and cute and not missing anything everyone else has.
The stares burn against the back of her neck.
“Fushiguro-kun,” Sensei asks, halfway into their math section, chalk pausing as he finishes writing on the board, “can you tell me the first step to solving this?” She freezes as he points to the two fractions set up on the blackboard, a minus sign between them and nothing she knows how to do even though her notebook has steadily been filling for the past two hours.
“You,” she starts, stuttering, eyes darting to her sides where the girl with the thick glasses sits on her left, the boy who hasn’t stopped passing notes to his friend on the right, swallowing thickly. She doesn’t know. “You look at- at the…the bottom number?” She offers, shrinking in her seat as her words weaken, feeling stricken.
Hayakawa-sensei’s eyes narrow, a look passing over his face that she recognizes before he nods, tapping the board with a knuckle. “Correct,” he says, “but we call them denominators. Remember that,” he implores, and ears burning, she nods.
A snicker floats up from the back of the room, and Tsumiki sinks further, gritting her teeth together hard enough that her head hurts as Sensei calls on another girl and gets an expected answer almost immediately. Her eyes burn, and lips pressed together, she refuses to cry as she shakily copies down the problem onto paper with all her other notes.
The material is hard- harder than her old school had been. It’s hard keeping up, hard when Sensei starts in on a new topic or a new material that she barely remembers being introduced to, hard when it moves rapidly and efficiently and with no time to give to anyone lagging behind. She’s floundering, treading water just enough to keep her nose above the waves, but she knows it isn’t sustainable. She’s smart enough to put the pieces together when she finds them but she isn’t stupid enough to say she’ll keep from drowning, eventually.
‘Private schools are too much,’ she thinks, frantically erasing a character she wrote wrong to put the right one down before Hayakawa-sensei moves on again.
No one had ever cared back at the old school if she’d used the wrong terms, or didn’t turn in her homework, or spent class figuring out how much they could spend to buy ingredients for dinner so long as she passed the tests. No one had ever said anything if passing meant barely, or her attendance was one absence away from a call to the office, or if neither of her missing parents had never showed up to conference week.
No one had cared so long as she kept afloat, so long as she showed up, did enough to not slip under, and left with her head ducked and Megumi trailing after her. No one cared if she spent every evening helping to do his homework just to show up to class the next day with none of her own done.
‘It’s okay,’ she thinks, hand cramping and a headache picking up behind her eyes as she tries to make sense of the problem on the board, ‘I can fix this. Tou-san and Tou-ru can fix this. I just have to get through today.’
She blinks, noticing glasses-girl abruptly look away from her, and keeps her own eyes resolutely fixed on the board.
‘It can still be a good day, Tsumiki,’ she thinks, even though the words warble inside her own head, her pencil shaking in her grip. She hasn’t made a pariah of herself yet.
‘This is miserable,’ she thinks, isolated at her desk over the lunch break in a room full of chattering kids, unpacking the bento Tou-ru made her this morning and looking around at the circles of already established friends. She’s the only person by herself- even the girl with the thick glasses sits at the window talking to someone.
‘No,’ she thinks, holding onto her bento as her nerves racket higher, eyes landing on the main group of girls in the center of the classroom, laughing and talking and eating together. ‘It doesn’t have to be. Try to make a friend,’ she thinks, slowly standing. ‘Just try.’
“Hello,” she says, interrupting the group as she falls to a shuffling stop at the edge of their circle, roaming through a myriad of curious eyes. “Could I eat with you all?”
“...You’re the new girl, right?” One asks, sleek dark hair and a little red barrette pulling it back from her face to the left side of her temples. She’s pretty.
“Yes,” Tsumiki answers, holding a little tighter to her lunch, trying her hardest to exude as much friendliness as possible as she smiles. “I- We just moved to Itabashi,” she offers, stumbling slightly, not entirely sure of what to make of their expressions.
“So you’re not from Saitama?” Another of the girls asks, her hair short around her face, the brown of her almond eyes a dark, rich chocolate.
“No,” Tsumiki replies, shaking her head slightly, “I’ve always lived in Tokyo.”
“Really? Which parts?” The girl with the red barrette asks, oddly interested to know, and swallowing down the sharp lance of nerves, Tsumiki only shrugs slightly, fighting to keep the smile placid on her face.
‘Don’t say Yanaka,’ she thinks, the shout loud in her head, ‘say anywhere but Yanaka.’
“M-Minato,” she lies, a harsh wave of anxiety settling in her stomach, and can’t help the wary thing in the back of her head from shuttering slightly as all the girls seemingly lean in, interested.
“Really? Tell us about it,” one asks, overlapping with the short haired girl’s request, “what’s the best boutique there? I’ve been begging my mom to take me to Tokyo for weeks.”
“Well,” Tsumiki begins, falling down into the empty chair behind her, absently popping open the lid of her bento, breathing out a sigh of relief that she has an answer because Satoru and Suguru took them shopping at a few malls over break, there. Tucking one of her bangs behind her ear, she starts to talk, recounting what she remembers as the questions come like Sensei’s demands for mathematics answers.
‘Friends,’ she thinks, as two of the girls bicker between each other over the merits of different stationary names she doesn’t even recognize, ‘right. It’s not so hard.’ Even sitting in the group, included in the conversation and complemented on the adorable lunch her mother must have made her, she doesn’t entirely feel right.
A glasses-heavy stare lingers on her back for the rest of the period.
“Seriously Suguru, why’d you eat them? You didn’t need to,” Satoru chides, a note of discontent in his voice even as his hands stay on his forehead, holding back his hair as he retches. Suguru only heaves, dragging in long, gasping inhales, struggling for any oxygen he can get in between contractions.
He feels the palm that skims down to his back, cool where he’s hot but warm by itself as it rubs carefully between his shoulder blades and his newest tattoo, a silent, wordless comfort wrinkling his shirt. Maybe a year ago, maybe two, he would have taken Satoru’s words as callous, or ignorantly mean. Maybe between all his convulsing shudders, he would have heard the berating and lashed out in turn.
“I-” He gasps, choking on strings of his own bile, “wanted- sp-spares-” He’s ducking down again before he can even get the words out, the back of his throat burning and the enamel of his teeth twinging as more acid spills past his lips.
“Easy,” Satoru murmurs, the hand on his back winding further down until it becomes an arm curling around his chest, holding steady where his rattle with trembles holding onto the toilet’s rim, his body seeking betrayal in turn for his own. “Don’t waste your breath.”
As it is now, though, he knows better than to assume Satoru could be chastising him. The words are harsher because they’re worried, discontented because they’re anxious. They don’t match the tightened grip of his arm in anything but tone, can’t seem to reconcile with the palm on his forehead holding back his hair until he looks past the words themselves and at the way they’re said.
‘We’re both just a pair of liars, aren’t we?’ Suguru thinks, and he’d laugh if he wasn’t busy throwing up all the nothing he had in his stomach.
He groans, finally slumping, knowing Satoru will catch him when he crashes. He feels awful. His head pounds, his stomach is cramping, he can feel the curses slowly unwinding in his belly into little ribbons of malice and hatred and poison. Maybe Satoru is right that he shouldn’t have eaten them.
He turns his head into the cold when he feels the baby wipe against his cheek, eyes shut as he sits against Satoru’s shoulder for a moment and tries to remember how to breathe. His tongue tastes like a burnt body, like ash and corpse and death beneath the bile. His hands are still shaking, tremoring in a way he’s never figured out how to avoid whenever a curse comes back up.
“...Did the mission go alright?” Satoru asks, after another handful of shortened moments pass, and exhausted, Suguru cracks open his eyes.
“Yeah,” he rasps, unable to help a cough, bringing one hand up to unsteadily smear at his mouth again even though all the saliva and acid was wiped off. “Took an hour. Said it was second grades. Guess what they actually were.” He snorts, blinking his gaze upward to look at the thinned expression on Satoru’s face, the unhappy press of his lips together.
He tilts his chin up when the kiss comes, skimming his fingertips along Satoru’s jawline even as they shake slightly, sinking into the softness of his glossy lips and relaxing into the palm cupping along his neck. ‘I love you,’ he thinks drowsily, eyes lidded as he watches the fan of Satoru’s white lashes up close, content or relieved that even tainted and soiled like this, he’ll still touch him. It makes living with the ugliness easier when he knows that even at his lowest, at his most vile, Satoru will still love him.
“Can you stand?” He murmurs, finally pulling away, if away could be called the faint distance between their noses where their lips still touch. Suguru hums, snaking one hand into Satoru’s front pocket for the lozenges he knows he brought.
“It’s like they pay us just to be a pain in our asses,” he grumbles, aimlessly rambling as he pulls them to standing, not moving at all as Suguru wiggles his fingers around in his pants for the two cough drops. “I mean, seriously, they’re still lying on mission records? I have to respect the balls at least, but I would have thought the passive aggressive backlash would have taken longer than two weeks to come back.”
Suguru snickers, unwrapping one of the menthol candies. He pops it into his mouth, pressing a soft kiss to the underside of Satoru’s chin as he finally meanders away on unsteady legs, ducking out of the bathroom for the small sitting area outside of it. He hears the toilet flush, more grumbled complaints floating past the doorway, and crumples the wrapper in his hand as he glances at the vending machine sat against the right wall.
‘No,’ he thinks, collapsing on the bench with an accidental groan, head tipping back to thunk against the shut windows, ‘it’ll just come back up.’ He wonders for a moment if killing another elder might solve their problems- they wouldn’t be so bold to give him an incorrectly labeled first grade mission if they murdered another one of them, would they?
A sudden flash of cursed energy has him tensing, wondering who else is in this part of the school when he’s unable to recognize the feel of it. It’s almost certainly not anyone from a clan- they wouldn’t be in this wing, and it couldn’t be any other official. There’s no reason for anyone to be looking for them outside of the verdicts no one is intent on fulfilling.
So who, then, he wonders?
“Hey,” a voice calls, and curiously, Suguru looks up. “Are you Getou?” Brown eyes stare back at him from the doorway, and he feels his brows furrow, trying to recall how he knows this woman from under a faint wash of déjà vu.
“Who’s asking-?” He says, and blinks in slight surprise when he’s completely talked over.
“What’s kinda girl’s your type?” The woman interrupts, her bright eyes imploring where they look down at him for an answer, and Suguru quietly closes his lips to keep the sour sort of annoyance off his face.
“Tsukumo?” Satoru asks, surprised as he steps out of the bathroom, and he watches as she turns, something excited tugging her lips into a smile.
“Oh, so you do know me!” She says, splitting into a grin, and immediately Suguru finds the words stuck on the tip of his tongue.
‘Tsukumo Yuki, the special grade who never goes on any missions,’ he thinks, slumping further down the bench as Yaga’s mantra recites in his head, ‘and fucks around taking trips overseas.’ He watches her back as she and Satoru start to talk, a flurry of words he’s in no mood to keep up with when it’s not even eleven in the morning and he’s already got heartburn.
So that’s who.
‘What’s she doing here?’ He muses, batting away a wave of tiredness he wouldn’t normally be feeling after a normal grade, mundane mission. He definitely shouldn’t have consumed those curses- not after testing out what he had. Even partially forming all nine pieces of Jougo’s reclaimed domain, incomplete dregs more than anything else, is swallowing him whole.
“I heard you two nuked the higher ups,” Tsukumo chortles, inviting herself over to sit down beside him, slinging an arm along the window ledge as she crosses her legs, immune to his oily side eye. “I’m impressed, really,” she continues, before Suguru even has time to tense, flipping a stray strand of long blonde hair over her shoulder with one raised hand. “It’s about time a special grade caused some societal collapse around here.”
“What, too lazy to do it yourself?” Satoru ribs, crossing his arms where he stands in the middle of the room, one white eyebrow raised and black glasses set firmly on his nose. Tsukumo scoffs, gesturing lazily as she rolls her eyes.
“I’ve been busy,” she replies, tapping her foot aimlessly along the floor, “and besides, I hate the college. I want nothing to do with those old gasbags, murder included.”
Beside her, Suguru sits, not saying a word as he feels his eyes widen. He’s never met another sorcerer who openly admits they hate this system, this hierarchy. Kento is too stiffly polite to say it, and Haibara tries to find the optimism in things even when he’s agreeable to acknowledging that they’re broken. Mei Mei profits off of their messed up system, and Utahime is a bit of a traditionalist because to her, it’s always been the way it is and will always stay the way it is.
It’s just been the three of them together alone, unified in their animosity.
“Just kidding,” Tsukumo jokes, shrugging, and Suguru carefully sets his face into stone. “But not really. We don’t see eye to eye. They want to just keep chugging along treating the symptoms, but I wanna get to the cause,” she says, turning her head to catch his eye, and carefully, Suguru doesn’t react.
‘What is she looking for,’ he wonders with no small amount of wariness, noting the way Satoru has gone unnoticeably tense across from where they sit. She sort of reminds him of the therapists his parents had made him see when he’d been a kid, already having made up their minds about him before they’d even met.
“What do you mean?” Suguru offers, tone pleasantly polite when it becomes obvious that she’s looking for a question, and Tsukumo tilts her head, long blonde hair swaying with the motion.
“I don’t want to hunt cursed spirits,” she claims, the set of her eyes certain and heavy when he meets them, weighted by a determination he’s only recognized in Satoru before. “I want to create a world where cursed spirits aren’t born.”
“Isn’t that a little ambitious?” Satoru cuts in, and Suguru recognizes the nervous thing in how he hides his hands in his pockets, how he won’t meet anyone’s eye if it isn’t through opaque glass. For a moment, he’s confused- what does Satoru have to be nervous about? And then it hits him.
“Only if your plan was to kill all non-shamans,” he murmurs, crinkling the lozenge wrapper between his fingers as he pulls it back out of his pocket, staring at the black glasses hiding Satoru’s eyes. He knows exactly what sigil his fingers are entwined into inside his pocket, knows exactly what thoughts are running through his head.
“...You know, Getou,” Tsukumo starts, her clasped hands under her chin as she thinks, eyes moved away for the moment, “that’s a decent plan.”
He can’t help how he tenses slightly, how the cool feeling of slippery anxiety begins to drip into his stomach with the leftover remnants of his swallowed curses.
‘Is this how it started?’ He wonders, the cold of rancid memories chilling his skull. He doesn’t know all of it- he doesn’t think he could handle knowing all of it, but he knows more than enough from everything he’s seen in Satoru’s domain, everything he can guess on his own. The little trembling words that had whispered against the shell of his ear in the dark when it had first dribbled out into the open like an oil spill.
“It could be easier, using evolution against itself,” Tsukumo continues, like she hasn’t noticed the sudden thickened air, how Satoru stands and doesn’t speak, as if he can’t bring himself to even open his mouth. “But it would take someone crazy to do all that,” she huffs, raising her hands in a shrug, “and I’m not that nuts.”
For a moment, none of them speak, and Suguru sits on the bench in the small room on the edge of the school, drowning in the roiling waves of his thoughts. Hatred, he thinks, is a very fickle thing.
“Do you hate non-shamans, Getou?” Tsukumo asks, leaning against the wall, a curious expression on her equally curious, non-judgmental face. He sees Satoru twitch, catches the flinch that doesn’t but desperately wants to tear through him like a blade, and looks to his left where brown eyes study him as if they’re trying to dissect him alive.
It almost reminds him of the person wearing Itadori Kaori’s body, but he knows better than to compare ancient, malignant evil to ethically dubious curiosity. Maybe they become the same thing once either of the two lives long enough, but Tsukumo is no curse, and she’s no immortal either.
‘Yeah, right,’ he thinks, the look in her eye familiar for more than just scrutiny. It’s Shoko, he knows, and maybe just the same as she is now, itchy-fingered and deathly curious- possibly even given too much power to abuse, and fighting the urge to wield it recklessly. He doesn’t know.
For a moment, he hesitates to answer, because as much as he knows what he believes and what he forced himself to in another life, he has a taste for that curiosity, too.
“...Yes,” Suguru says, just to see the genuine flinch crack through Satoru’s frame, just to try the weight of the words on his tongue, “I could.”
He wants to know- wants to get a look at those crossroads, to understand a taste of what he might have felt in another world, another life. He wants to wade through the hatred, the paralyzing indecision, the ‘I don’t know,’ that would have ruined him, once.
“Oh?” Tsukumo tones, intrigued. “Why’s that?”
“Non-shamans are dangerous to us when they’re ignorant, and they’re the reason we have these terrible jobs at all,” Suguru begins, eyes narrowed and fingers restless as he toys with the candy wrapper, unable to help his own curiosity as he thinks through the problem, even if it hurts Satoru a little to do so. It isn’t a hurt they can’t come back from in the slightest, and besides that, he wants to understand.
Maybe if he does, it would feel less like a guilt.
“If we eradicated them, then what curses would be left to form? We’d have an ideal world with no suffering for sorcerers, wouldn’t we?” Even as he speaks, he can see it- the hazy, unclear vestiges of a plan he must have believed in, once.
If there were no more curses, then there would be no more pain for people like him, with parents that hadn’t understood and had tried to fix, all to his own detriment. There would be no more weight for people like Satoru, overworked to the bone and alone in his own power. They wouldn’t have to carry the world on their shoulders if there was no world to carry, and for a moment, it all makes sense.
“But that’s circular thinking,” Suguru refutes, watching the wrapper fold and unfold in his hand, a sort of sympathy for his counterpart diluting in the simmering disdain for missing the obvious entirely. “Non-shaman’s negative emotions create our problems, we only have problems because negative emotions create them. Isn’t it missing a little nuance?” He knows one rash outlash of murder was what pushed him over the edge into forming a decision, but he also knows there was space between it and his choice to walk away.
‘Is that how you lived through every day?’ He wonders, maybe a little cruelly as he thinks of another him, lying to himself that playing god could give Satoru any semblance of peace, even if it came at a cost, just to make it easier to sleep at night. He can’t see any other way he could live with leaving for no reason, other than a hastily made meaning besides a cushy bed of lies.
‘And what does that make me now?’ He muses, red on his hands already if not for the same reasons, if not for different meaning.
Tsukumo barks a laugh, a sly smile slipping onto her lips as she darts a glance at where Satoru stands, unerringly silent as they quietly talk. “You have proof of that?” She asks, lifting a brow, and he shrugs.
He’s been thinking about that new world Stitches had spoken about, what Satoru’s told him of it and those sentient curses fallen in an obedient line for it, so desperate to be human even while proclaiming to be better than them. He’s been wondering how, if they created their perfect world made of curses, wouldn’t it stand to reason that in creating a new status quo, curses would just evolve with the sentient ones? What kind of evil would inhuman turmoil make?
“Not for you, I don’t,” he snarks, unwilling to hand out precious information to someone he doesn’t know. There’s a reason Satoru hasn’t spoken, after all, even if most of it comes from the agonized want for Suguru to come to his own decisions and conclusion, even if it means a destruction, a small death.
“So…what,” Tsukumo muses, waving a hand, “you want anarchy?”
“No,” he says, watching Satoru fidget imperceptibly, “I want equity. I don’t know if creating an ideal world like yours is possible,” he admits, shrugging slightly as he turns back towards Tsukumo’s gaze, heavy and a little scrutinizing, “so I’d rather change the things I can instead of chasing after a fairy tale.”
“...And what about Fushiguro Toji?” Tsukumo presses, a narrowing of her eyes the only sign of her mild irritation. “He had absolutely zero cursed energy,” she says, holding up one hand in a perfect circle, “and there’s another girl almost like him who was born a few years ago.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t possible,” Suguru throws back, lacing a pleasant smile on his face to be placating or annoying or both, “just that I don’t want to waste my efforts on the theoretical.”
Tsukumo huffs again, not quite a scoff so much as a harsh exhale, a note of frustration hidden in the coy smile on her lips. She was looking for something in him from the moment he said he could hate non-shamans, he knows, spinning the wrinkled wrapper between his fingers. Just like everyone else had, just like everyone else does- peering with widened eyes, with narrowed ones, looking at him as if they could find what it is they’re searching for if only they did it long enough.
“What?” She says, as if she’s thinking out loud, tilting her head as she looks him up and down. “You have someone to make it better for?”
“If you’re asking who I knocked up,” Suguru begins, snide as he stands, “you’re barking up the wrong tree.”
Satoru muffles a sputter into a closed mouth cough, looking away as his ears start to redden, and Suguru decides that he’s done for the day. He was tired before the philosophy debate, and now he’s just exhausted after it. It feels a little too close to a psych evaluation for his tastes, and he’s been more than tired of those since years ago.
He only sticks his tongue out when Satoru glares at him, unrepentant for petty revenge. He ignores Tsukumo entirely as he raises his hands to cup both sides of Satoru’s face, pulling him down the handful of centimeters they stand separate to meet his eyes over the rims of the glasses. He’s glad when the naked fear isn’t hidden in the lines forcing them taut with stress, that he isn’t lying with a false bravado, and offers a wordless apology in the taste of a menthol-cold kiss.
He doesn’t dislike Tsukumo, he decides. There’s a point in her contrary words and poking philosophies, and he can recognize that they need people like her- they’re too busy to run with theories and ghosts when they’re tethered to the real world. Tsumiki and Megumi need them, and so long as they do, neither of them will have the time necessary to dedicate to changing the whole world instead of just a part of it. Changing their own world is the most they can do for now.
“I like selfless, egotistical idiots,” he says, turning his head as they break apart with a smirk at Tsukumo’s simultaneously elated and gobsmacked expression. “To answer your question, earlier.”
“Hey,” Satoru tones, brows knitting together, but he doesn’t say much else- a testament to how rattled he must feel.
“I’ve gotta know,” Tsukumo starts, a mischievous thing in her narrowed eyes, the sly smile crimping her lips. “Does the carpet match the drapes?” Satoru’s mouth drops open in scandalized offense as Suguru laughs, genuinely amused.
“I bet the higher up’s hate you,” he snickers, unable to help a real grin, and Tsukumo shrugs, raising her hands.
“Guilty and proud,” she proclaims. “I wanted to be at the trial they held for you two, actually, but I was tied up in America.” Satoru hums in slight surprise, blinking behind his glasses.
“It’s probably better that you weren’t,” he says, hands creeping along his waist until they find enough fabric to curl into. “One of our kohai yelled, ‘that’s bananas,’ after we got the verdict, and it would have been kind of hard to be taken seriously with someone cackling in the stands.”
“You’re joking!” Tsukumo sputters, rocking up onto her heels as she barks out a cracking laugh, hands around her middle as her face splits into a widened smile. “Oh that is rich,” she cries as she settles back down, dragging a finger under one eye. “You’re right. I’d have loved to witness the murder but that would have killed me on the spot.”
Suguru contemplates for a moment, his palms still soft on Satoru’s face, staring at Tsukumo where she stands just behind them. She isn’t any sort of evil that he can recognize, and she isn’t any sort of uptightly moral he can see. She’ll do her own thing, her own research, whether they work with her or not- but she’s the only other special grade in the world aside from them, and for all that they’re strong enough on their own, they don’t have to be.
“Yuki,” he says, catching her attention as brown eyes flicker to his face, an open consideration in them at his offer, “the drapes.” He smiles, thin and pleasant. “They do match the carpet.”
She howls a laugh again as Satoru pinches his side with no small amount of force, face flaming, and Suguru only shrugs, squishing his cheeks together. He tilts his head, lifting one brow, and knows Satoru gets it when he heaves a sigh and doesn’t say a word, grumpy above the relief. Suguru kisses him again, just because he can, and it’s only tame because Tsukumo Yuki is stood barely a meter behind them, laughing like a hyena.
“I’m sure I’ll see you two around,” she chortles, shoving her hair out of her face as they both turn, listening.
“Definitely,” Satoru replies. “We might know some things that could be useful for your research,” he hedges, eyes narrowed in thought. “The next time you’re in Tokyo, give me a call.” He shuffles one arm back, reaching into his pocket to toss his phone to her, and Suguru lets his eyes shut through a yawn, head dropping down onto Satoru’s shoulder.
“Will do,” she says, whistling a short song as she taps away at his phone. “You owe me a fight, too. I saw the shit you guys did to the school. If I don’t get one full technique spar at least once then you can kiss my ass the next time I’m in the country.”
Suguru snorts, eyes hidden against Satoru’s dress shirt as he feels the tossed phone being caught. “Big balls for someone who never takes any missions,” he mutters, though the words are good natured, and smiles when he hears the snicker.
“Yeah yeah, call me a bum and get on with it,” Tsukumo calls, the step of her boots loud against the wood as she starts to leave. “...Suguru, Satoru,” she starts, the words a little more serious and slightly hesitant as she lingers on the stairs, and he looks up.
“If you ever wanted to just- tear it down, get rid of all the old assholes.” She just looks like a normal person standing on the steps, blonde hair blowing in the soft breeze and clothing casual next to the formal architecture of the school. “Hell, even if you just need a third set of hands to handle whatever shitty apocalypse is happening. Give me a call,” she promises, “and I’ll be there.”
It’s the weight of her gaze that sets her apart, the unwavering stone to her face that speaks of conviction made of hardened, tested resolve. How she stands perfectly relaxed after a declaration of a massacre, intent to do anything wrong so long as it makes even one right.
“...We will,” Satoru agrees, the other half of the promise. Suguru nods, uncertain if he’s disappointed to see her go, relieved, or some odd combination of the two.
“It was nice to meet you, Yuki,” he calls as she reaches the road, her bike parked on the shoulder. She raises one arm, waving it behind herself as she mounts it, the loud rumble of its engine shaking the walls as it’s started. They stand together, watching her disappear down the road, a trail of blonde hair and wild cursed energy.
“You’re such a jackass,” Satoru mutters, pinching him again, and Suguru tries to scoff- the noise interrupted into a wheeze as he’s thrown over his boney shoulder.
“And yet you love me-” He cuts off into a loud gagging noise as Limitless compresses around them, the world melding away from the school and into the walls and colors of home, a dizzy feeling making his head spin as his back hits their mattress.
He groans as Satoru collapses on top of him, wrapping arms around his sides anyway even though the weight doesn’t help the return of the nausea any. “Later,” he promises, thoughts on that kiss forced to be tame in the presence of company. “Give me an hour t’ not feel pukey.”
Satoru nods into the curve of his neck, finally decompressing within the safety of their own home. He shivers faintly with residuals of stress, remnants of old despair, and Suguru wishes he didn’t have to feel it even though he doesn’t regret the little bit of hurt he caused. They’ve done worse, and it wasn’t a pointless sort of wound.
‘I wonder,’ he thinks, the edges of expensive glasses pressing into his cheek as soft lips meander lazily along the skin of his neck, ‘why you ran away from him, instead of towards?’