Choke.

Slowly but surely, Suguru builds his boiling pot in the yawning mouth between ideal and reality.
/// an unconventional format Getō character study with some reader interactive elements. Diverges from canon after Shibuya.

Notes:

1. "Getou Suguru is His Own Warning" is a blanket warning for homicidal thoughts, genocidal thoughts, suicidial thoughts and tendencies, use of "monkey" as a derogatory term, unspecified eating disorder, (intense) feelings of inferiority, vomit, generally awful mental health, and probably more
2. additional warnings: god complex, superiority complex, obsessive behavior, gore, ableism, referenced prescription drug overdose, referenced child abuse, brief animal harm/animal death
3. the "Depersonization" tag is referencing what's generally referred to as "dehumanization" but I really dislike that term so I've opted not to use it
4. this fanfic is not a pick me up. It's not supposed to be a "sad" or "painful" read, but it's not exactly a light hearted or fluffy fic. More than anything, it's supposed to be "an interesting experience"
5. for this fic DO NOT HIDE THE CREATOR'S STYLE
6. READING INSTRUCTIONS. This fanfic has 3 reader interactive elements.
a. an external link to a twine game. the link is underlined.
b. invisible text. this hidden text can be revealed by highlighting it. an an example:

this is invisible text!

c. press/hover-to-reveal text. as an example:
invisible text will usually be in a conspicuously blank space within the fic, sometimes with oddly underlined text in the vicinity. hidden text will always be underlined. not everything underlined signifies that it's interactable or that there's interactable things in the vicinity.
some things with the formatting i could not get to work no matter how hard I tried, and while they shouldn't be too frequent or impact the reading experience too negatively, there may be some funky things.
I have no idea how the formatting of this fic would interact with a screen reader, but odds are most of the interactive bits and other formatting oddities will be inaccessible to anyone using a screen reader for this
with all that out of the way, have fun reading!

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

"Honestly,” Satoru says, hand pausing in Suguru’s long, unbound hair. “You don’t look too different now than you did before, at least to me.”

Slowly, Suguru slips open a few eyes, turning his head, watching Satoru. The hand returns to its rhythm stroking through Suguru’s hair, and he shifts where he’s sprawled half across the bed, half in Satoru’s lap. It’s ridiculous, because the eerie thing he’s become now looks entirely different than he did in life, before dying and dying again and becoming something worse. He contemplates not answering—Satoru will continue regardless, he knows—but it’s been a good day. He hums, lazily contorting his vocal chords to produce something understandable.

“Yeah?”

Satoru perks, visibly delighted, smile spreading across his face. “Yeah!” His fingers slip from Suguru’s hair, down his face, tracing his brows, nose, lips—features only he has eyes sharp enough to easily locate. “Your cursed energy hasn’t changed. It’s pretty unique, you know? I’d recognize it anywhere.”

Suguru hums in question, finding no motivation for anything more.

“Uhhuh! It looks really distinct. Black, gold, movement patterns like...” Satoru pauses, head tilting in a way Suguru has long-since learned indicates he’s attempting to translate information from his Six-Eyes into something understandable to others, “like it’s eating itself alive.”

He overdosed on antipsychotics, once. Popped the cap in the bathroom because he couldn’t sleep in his curse-infested room. Took one then two then three then more with the logic of a child: maybe it’ll work if you just take more and more and more all you need is more—

It didn’t work, of course, because he was a shaman not psychotic (his diagnosis) or fucking insane (the callous words of schoolchildren, before he had quite silked himself in careful charm) and he wouldn’t ever be normal no matter how many stupid fucking pills he took. So he lay on the linoleum floor, heart beating too-fast in his chest, muggy august heat kissing his clammy hands, sticky hair, trembling frame, until his parents found him unconscious. His next clear memory is of the hospital, of the sharp relief of returning back to normal from that hazy delirium. It came to him, as he watched a curse crawling along the white ceiling, with awful apathy, the quiet acceptance that this was reality.

In retrospect, he didn’t know what he was accepting. Truth felt firm, then, easy to grasp and hold, warm and solid in his palm. Not kind, exactly, but not unbearably cruel, either.

“Sorry for leaving you in storage for so long.” Warm(living!) hands scorch on their icy skin, drawing them from their numb unthinking. She lays them flat against a hard, metal surface. (A table? An autopsy table?) “It’s been busy, you know. Both of us have been busy as hell dealing with the mess Kenjaku made in your body. It’s mostly cleaned up now, though. We’re both here. We’ll properly deal with you this time. No one will be able to gather even a scrap of the ashes, much less use them.”

The click of a tongue against teeth. “Getting sentimental?”

Masculine. Familiar. (Six-Eyes.)(Satoru? Satoru!)

“Eh.” The hands leave. They wish, abruptly, that they could open their eyes, but their lids feel leaden. Ever bit of them feels leaden. “’Thought I might as well say something, since we’re doing it ‘properly’ this time.”

Feminine. Familiar. (Ieiri Shōko.)(Shōko!)

“Hah.”

“Yeah yeah, I’m getting on with it.”

Distant noises. The snap of rubber and clink of metal. Her hands come back, touching down their naked chest and settling on their stomach. A pulse of cursed energy runs through their flesh, veins, bone. Cold. Familiar. A diagnostic, they recognize, a body analysis. A memory surfaces: Getō Suguru and Gojō Satoru, fifteen, surrendering themselves with some embarrassment to Ieiri Shōko’s cursed energy because they managed to hurt themselves badly in a childish fight.

Shōko’s hands freeze.

A beat(?) (time is a somewhat muddied concept).

“Shōko?” The tap of a shoe against tiles. “Something wrong?”

An inhale. “There’s new cursed energy being created. In the chest cavity and stomach lining.”

“That’s not a funny joke.”

“I’m not joking. It’s not just lingering residuals. Look.”

Both their tones are utterly flat.

“Cursed energy can’t be created without consciousness. We took the brain out.”

“I know.”

Pause. Click click click. Another pause. The shift of fabric. “Shit.”

They hate that tone. They? (Singular or plural? Both?)

Fingers abruptly push open the lids of their eyes. The brightness is searing, all florescent whites and sharp silvers. Definitely the college morgue. Shōko is standing over them, to the left, looking faintly ill. Satoru peers down at them from the right, blindfold lifted up with one hand. His bright, human weapon eyes reflect a body against gleaming metal: the bloodless corpse of Getō Suguru.

Ah.

Suguru remembers how to blink, and his reflection fractures in Satoru’s eyes.

You’re eleven and there’s a raccoon by your feet and she’s not moving and you felt a bone snap and is that blood? It’s your fault it’s your fault and it doesn't matter that you didn’t mean to because you did and it’s your fault and she’s not dead yet and you’re not allowed to panic. You’re not allowed to panic, you fucking idiot, you’re not the one in pain! It was an accident; you felt her brush against your leg and kicked hard on reflex and she slammed into the rock so hard and—and—and—

STOP PANICKING think about this logically: she’s in pain and she’s still alive and your heart is beating so hard in your chest and you can’t hear much over the roar of your blood but she’s making noises, right? Because she’s still alive and you have to kill her you have to kill her you have to take responsibility you have to finish the job you have to—

Your parents find you with the body. They find you with the blood on your your hands, pants, shoes, hair (why is it in your hair?) and the awful fluids and viscera and they distantly ask what happened and you babble I’m sorry—I didn’t want—it was, I’m sorry—

and your father lets you sob into his chest and your mother holds back your hair while you vomit the contents of your lunch. Animals have never liked you and in turn, you’ve never liked animals, but that doesn’t justify this. You weren’t even able able to give a quick death, and when you look back at her corpse and try desperately to rub the drying blood from your hands, an entirely self directed flower of fear blooms in your chest, thorny and constricting.

In the metaphysics of identity, the Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. It is supposed that the famous ship sailed by the hero Theseus was kept in a harbor as a museum piece, and as the years went by, some of the wooden parts began to rot and were replaced by new ones; then, after a century or so, every part had been replaced. The question then is whether the “restored” ship is still the same object as the original.

How many pieces of yourself do you think you can replace, Getō Suguru?

So, it’s like this: the soul is the body is the soul and the implantation of Kenjaku’s brain into Suguru’s body caused their souls to fuse. When Kenjaku’s brain was torn from the body, Suguru became its dominant occupant, but. The improper removal failed to fully separate Kenjaku from Suguru, and most importantly, failed to completely extract Kenjaku’s cursed technique from Suguru’s body. A technique which centers around the possession of corpses.

Kenjaku’s technique allows the soul to dwell in a corpse without dying. It’s a passive technique; there’s no off mechanism. Even if there were, like most other mechanisms of the technique, it would likely be broken.

Suguru lives passed between the morgue and a specialized cell, now, subjected to a fruitless cycle of attempts to render him(because Getō Suguru ~~was~~is a he, and he is Getō Suguru) properly dead.

A few months into this, in the quiet aftermath of another failed attempt, Shōko taps her nails against the metal edge of the dissection table and says: “I think there’s one thing that might work.”

Satoru’s hands pause momentarily on Suguru’s shoulders, where they’re laying a kimono over the corpse-pale skin. Suguru tilts his head. “Yeah?”

Shōko hums. “What we need to do is separate his consciousness from his body and kill the new vessel.” They haven’t tried cremating or otherwise completely destroying Suguru’s corpse because the state of Suguru’s consciousness after something like that is simply far too much of an unknown; he’s already fully conscious without a brain. “We failed to emulate Kenjaku’s method of transfer, but…”

Satoru’s hands leave, stuffing into his pockets as he steps back and leans against the wall. A frown tugs at his lips, and Suguru imagines his brows are furrowing under that blindfold. “You don’t mean...”

“Getō,” she says, eyes sliding to him. “’You think you could become a curse?”

Ah.

“Probably,” he says. He likely would’ve become one as a result of his first death, had Suguru not been given peace before dying, had it not been Satoru that finished him off.

“No,” Satoru says. “No that’s—what the fuck, Shōko?”

The morgue’s bright white lighting casts everything a little stark, harsh in the way it lays thickly over the walls, tiles, medical supplies, deepening shadows and washing out real color. Satoru’s voice grates against the quiet, pulled taut, almost affronted. Suguru presses a palm into the table’s hard metal edge, and attempts to focus on the sensation with his dull, deteriorating nerves.

“It’s fine,” he says, pulling the kimono fully over his naked form and folding the fabric. “I’m okay with it.”

“But...”

Shōko sighs loudly. “You two can work that out later, not here. Getō, c’mon, your body is getting too warm already.”

Suguru is a monstrous thing, now, a humanoid black hole. Opaque darkness swallows his entire form, so deep it inks out the definition of his features, the nuances of his surface, the details of his miscolored kyōkatabira. It flattens him into eerie silhouette, burnt-amber outlining the edges of his loose hair and draping sleeves. Brass-gold eyes carve starkly over the Stygian void, blinking open from his hand, neck, skeletal wrists. A rotten scent clings to him, the cloying stench of curdled blood and cut flesh.

Satoru doesn’t mind, though. Or at least, not enough to disallow Suguru from finding home in his shadow, in the space behind his shoulders, the crook of his neck, the corners of his penthouse in Tokyo’s outskirts. These days, Satoru washes his hair with cherry blossom shampoo and keeps a collection of blindfolds and blackout glasses by the potted jade in his bedroom. He knows how to cook, now, and uses seitan in place of meat and oil for butter and eats maple-drizzled french toast in the mornings with a glass of extra-sweet rice milk. He no longer drinks, but sometimes indulges his evenings with amazake. Human food has lost all taste to Suguru, but Satoru creates little marbles of cursed energy that pop sweetly in Suguru’s mouth when Satoru feeds them to him from his fingers. Neither of them sleep, anymore, and their long nights are spent together: Satoru talking, Suguru listening.

It’s a stagnant domesticity.

Towards the start of third year, you got a project. The assignment was to chose a major development in shaman society and analyze it. You picked the 1956 outlawing of shaman-on-nonshaman violence.

“Okay so basically,” you rambled, pacing the dorm room restlessly, “the whole shitshow started on moral grounds, but in order to actually achieve any real legislation, the nonshaman-advocation party needed to gather support from people that had actual political power, meaning the Kamo and Gojō. It was actually a sort of unique opportunity—they’d tried to get support before but… see, what sparked the moral outrage that eventually lead to the 1956 Shaman-on-Nonshaman Violence Act was someone from the Zen’in clan’s main family seriously going too far. So the nonshaman-advocation party was able to get the Gojō and Kamo on board. But that made the whole affair into a clan politics mess which is what ended up totally skewing the final law to be such a disaster and—”

“Holy shit,” Six-Eyes groaned, sticking his socked foot out to trip you in your pacing. “How do you care about this shit? Why’s my best friend so boring!?”

Indignation filled your chest. “This is an important part of your history, too, y’know! The Gojō were super involved! This fucking law is the reason all—”

“Shouldn’t you like this law anyway!?” Six-Eyes rolled his eyes. “Considering how up-tight you always are about protecting the weak ‘n stuff.”

“Oh my god were you even listening at all!? I literally just told you about the negative impact it had on rural shamans ‘cause by the standards of that law it’s extremely hard to prove self-defense! And how little evidence is required to prove the opposite! It’s literally only used in petty clan politics shit and—”

You were—perhaps not deliberately—omitting the impact that law had on violence against nonshamans. It truly was an enormous step in the battle against unprovoked violence against nonshamans.

“Lalala I’m not listeninggg! C’mon Suguru let’s do something fun like—”

“Shut up Satoru oh my god—”

Six-Eyes didn’t notice anything odd about your fixation back then, though. Had he...well. It doesn’t matter now, does it? Hah.

Satoru finds him there on the second day in Satoru’s penthouse. It’s a small room tucked into the layout’s corner, dimly lit and more fit for storage than anything, and it is being used as a storage space, but…

“Ah,” Satoru says, quietly clicking the door closed behind him, somewhat awkward smile on his lips. “Sorry, forgot about this. I guess it might be a little weird for you, huh?”

It’s a room dedicated solely to Suguru. Everything from his old school dorm is here, tucked neatly into boxes. The shelves are stuffed with files and reports pertaining to him in his curse user days. There are catalogs of his associates. Meticulous photo documentation of him. Transcriptions of his speeches. How would he have even gotten half this shit?

Suguru trails the shelves of books with a hand. Books that mention him. Books by him. His clawed-finger pauses on the spine of one. He tilts his head at Satoru.

“D̴͉.̶̬͒.̸̼͠d̴̘̈́d̴̞͗d̴̳.̴̼̆.̶̬̐.̵̳̚” he forces his vocal chords into painful submission, “.̷.̶.̸d̶i̷.̶.̶d̴.̶.̶.̴y̴o̸u̵ ̵a̷.̷.̷c̷t̴u̷a̸l̶l̷y̶ ̸r̵e̸a̷d̵ ̷t̵hese?”

Satoru nods. The burnt light from the rickety bulb attached to the ceiling casts him in warm tones. “Yeah! All of them. Well. All of yours, at least.”

What does Suguru even say to that? It’s disorienting, this entire room. There’s a thin layer of dust on everything. An odd self-consciousness prickles down his surface, tingles at his hands. Satoru read his works? He knew, already, that Satoru kept a close eye on him during that decade, but this…

“Sorry, this is totally weird for you, huh?” Satoru rubs at the side of his neck, fingers tapping at the skin, twisting over one another. “I wanted to see what you were up to, y’know? I mean. I literally had to know ‘cause I tried to compensate for whatever people you killed by working more, and I also didn’t wanna like, accidentally kill someone you cared about, but—I don’t know. I guess it’s just—every memory of you turned a different side, you know?”

Ah. This room was Satoru’s attempt to piece together what was real about Getō Suguru, huh?

“’Cause you’d always—ugh. I half thought you did it on purpose, honestly. Y’know?”

Although he has no need of air, Suguru breathes in, and out. Lets the breath through the nebulous void of his lungs. He closes all his eyes, for a moment. Takes in the quiet of the room, tastes old-paper on his tongue. He slips to Satoru’s side.

“Yeah,” he says, dryly, managing to shape his voice right, “I woke up every morning like, ‘let’s gaslight my way through the day. Just another day of gaslighting all my former friends.’ It was my favorite pastime.”

Satoru pauses, cocks his head. There’s a blindfold cutting darkly across his face, but Suguru imagines the blink easily. “Really?”

He laughs, and it’s ugly in his throat. “N̸o. I’m fucking with you.”

“Oh,” Satoru says, after a moment, then frowns: “wait hold on, why’d you said that in your lying tone!? Suguru!”

Suguru sinks into place behind Satoru, pressing his head into Satoru’s shoulder, and letting his quiet laughs vibrate into the other’s skin. Satoru whines his name, poking his cheek and prodding for answer, but Suguru doesn’t speak again for the entire night.

The first time he was addressed as Getō-sama, it was with soft hesitancy. Getō-sama, Mimiko and Nanako decided to call him, all on their own. It startled him, made his head jerk around. He didn’t know how to respond, was still in the post-massacre haze that frenzied him for some weeks after the act. It was odd, uncomfortable; don’t call me that, he wanted to say, I’m not better than you, that’s not what this is. But he just didn’t.

Because there was something else there, too, sharp and sudden, foreign but undeniably pleasant, a bright spark: oh, I like that!

They’ve just crossed from the semi-arid strip across northern Africa and into the vast desert beyond, and their tent has been long-since built. Night has fully fallen, cloaking the sky above in inky blacks and deep blues, and when their small fire cracks, the starry void swallows each bright spark with ease. Although they have at least another day of travel left—a journey made far shorter and less exhausting with aid of his tireless curses, he’s told—Suguru has already been badly burned.

Miguel carves strips of aloe, handling the small knife with visible ease that speaks only of experience. He holds Suguru’s burnt-red hands gently, applying aloe to the peeling skin with with callused, careful fingers. Not cautious ones, though, and it makes Suguru’s chest tighten painfully because these days he’s always, always regarded with caution.

“I underestimated how delicate your skin is,” Miguel says, wrapping bandages over the aloe strips, keeping them in place. “Is this okay?”

Soothing coolness seeps into Suguru’s nerves, numbing the pain if not erasing it entirely. It’s far better than he expected, honestly.

“It’s good,” he says. It all would’ve been far worse had Miguel not persuaded him into wearing expansive clothing which covers his legs, arms, shoulders. A headscarf, too, which didn’t quite save his face from burn, but lessened it. “I feel guilty, honestly; you’ve been doing everything yourself.”

(Making the fire, cooking dinner, pitching the tent—while Suguru has barely been able to help at all, both for unfamiliarity and inability.)

“You’re doing more than enough by coming here at all.”

Miguel lets Suguru’s hands go, work done, and Suguru’s fingers curl, digging into the side of his stomach through the light, breezy fabric of his clothing. A faint chill works its way down his back, cold night air a stark contrast from daytime temperatures, and he feels faintly sick. Their past days of travel have been—nice. Miguel makes good company, humorous, lighthearted, although not unable to be serious when required. Competent. But—understanding is important, in families. Miguel has to understand this.

“Miguel-san,” Suguru says, steeling himself, “I don’t expect payment for this. I would do it regardless—a shaman is a shaman and the college may be ignoring your country’s shamans’ pleads for assistance, but I won’t.”

Miguel nods, movement making the loops of his earrings glint gold in the quiet firelight. “You said that at the start, too.”

“What I mean is that you don’t owe me loyalty. You never did.”

Because Suguru—whatever else he may do, he refuses to coerce this. If he can convince others of his ideals, then that’s wonderful, but a family is not a family if bound unwillingly, through obligation not companionship. For shamans, at least, Suguru wants his assistance to be freely given; shamans supporting shamans out of genuine care is something of beauty, and he won’t mar the integrity of his ideal with double faced offers and bear-trap hands.

“I know,” Miguel says, simply.

And—how does Suguru express this? That the greatest suffering is complacency? That a state of moral hypocrisy and meaninglessness is something that kills the soul? That his third year in Jujutsu Tech was a living hell for this? That Suguru will do a lot of things, but he won’t, doesn’t ever want to make family live in any similar state. He knows his beliefs aren’t palatable for everyone. He knows.

Suguru breathes deep, in, and out. Warm and dry in his mouth, throat, lungs.

“I know you don’t hate...them,” because he won’t say monkeys, he is a considerate person. He pauses, finds the words. “I don’t want you to live a life that your heart isn’t in, Miguel-san. You don’t need to stick by me.”

This time, Miguel takes time with his response. He sits cross-legged in the sand, hand absently drawing a line in the sand, and Suguru waits with cold anticipation. Finally:

“...You told me, once, that you can’t laugh from the bottom of your heart in a world like this.”

“I did.”

“That’s why,” Miguel says, as if that explains anything at all, “I want to see how you look in a world ideal to you. I want to see you laugh from the bottom of your heart. Larue is the same way.”

Ridiculous.

Suguru’s shoulders slump, and he sighs deeply, eyes briefly slipping shut. “You really don’t believe in my ideal like I do at all, huh?”

“...Honestly,” Miguel says, after a moment, and Suguru watches the line drawn by his fingers close up, sand lazily collapsing inwards, “I don’t think anyone believes so fervently as you do, Getō.”

HOW TO KILL YOUR PARENTS IN X EASY STEPS:

Kill 112 monkeys. It could’ve been more, or maybe less. Who’s counting?
Realize you have blood on your hands and two small children and no where to go. It’s not like you can go back to the college—hah! Not that you’d ever want to.
Open the door to your childhood home, quietly. You don’t have to bother finding the key underneath the steps—your parents never lock the door. Why would they, in a sleepy pocket of countryside like this? What do they have to be afraid of? It’s hardly like there are serial killers stalking these nostalgic cracked roads. It feels like a joke.
Take your shoes off in the genkan. Help the girls sleepily slip off their shoes, too. Mimiko lines them up nicely without you even asking, almost obsessively straightening them. It’s not good manners so much as trauma. You want to vomit, but push down the sensation in favor of smiling and bringing them through the house. The floorboards still creak in all the same places. It smells as it always does, like straw and dashi and boiled rice.
Tuck the girls into your childhood bed. Tell them: “Mimiko-chan, Nanako-chan, try to go back to sleep, okay? I’ll be back soon. Promise.”
Stand outside your parents’ bedroom. Rest your fingers against the wooden ridge of the shoji door. August humidity clings to the house. There’s a faint smell of mildew. You can’t see through the thick rice-paper screen, but you can hear your parents on the other side. Deep, rhythmic breaths. Your mother. More troubled breathing. Your father. Are his lung issues acting up again? It doesn’t matter.
Slide open the door and soundlessly step your socked feet onto the tatami mats.
Hesitate.
Don’t hesitate.
Stop hesitating.
Stop fucking hesitating
STOP HESITATING YOU STUPID TWO-FACED LYING BITCH. You came here knowing what you were going to do. It’s a mercy; they’ll be heartbroken to hear what your did, and if you do this, they won’t ever have to. You’re not allowed to make exceptions for even your own parents. What better way to steel your resolve than this? If you can kill them, you can kill any monkey. You already killed 112; YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO HESITATE.
Wish, desperately, hopelessly, that they hadn’t been home. That you came here to an empty house. That this stop could’ve merely been to orient yourself and the girls while you properly put together your plan. This place has a medical closet and warm blankets and familiar kitchenware, after all. In another world, if you hadn’t killed 112 ~~people~~monkeys maybe your parents would help you take care of them. That’s not this world, though. Stop entertaining meaningless fantasies like that.
Vomit in the bathroom toilet. At some point (when?) your hair slipped from it’s bun, and it gets all in your face. Your eyes burn. Your mouth burns. You’ve barely eaten in days, and it’s mostly water that comes up. You flush the toilet and heave more. The familiar taste of bile coats your tongue and the water goes yellow with it. All the noise wakes up Mimiko and Nanako; they peak in through the crack of the bathroom door, and Mimiko bursts into silent tears when you look back. You’re so useless.

Say: “Sorry, did I wake you?”

“...It’s okay,” Nanako says, slipping through the crack of the door, tension in her frame, stance an instinctively protective one; her sister is behind her. She nibbles at her lower lip. “Are—are you okay?”

Say: “Of course I am, why?”

Your voice comes out wrong: too blank, too flat, too wrecked. Your throat is sore.

Nanako glances around, at the walls, the sink, the toilet, and back to him. Nibbles at her lip. Worried eyes. “You’re crying...”

You’re crying?

Say: “Oh.” Then: “That’s just the body’s natural response to vomiting, don’t worry. I just ate something bad.”
Wash the blood from your hands in the bathroom sink after bringing the girls back to bed. It’s drying, tacky, sticking your fingers together and flaking on the edges. It won’t get out from the ridges of your palm and underneath your nails no matter how much you scrub. Why is there blood on your hands?

No, seriously, when did that happen? Why is there blood on your hands? Why is there blood on your hands? Why is there blood on your hands? Didn’t you kill them bloodlessly? Didn’t you kill them from a distance? Didn’t you? Huh?

Look up at the mirror. There’s blood on your face, too. And in your hair. And on your clothes. What?
Try to recall the details. Realize you just can’t remember how it happened.

Rationally speaking, murder isn’t actually that bad. No, really. There’s a real philosophical argument that dying isn’t bad because by definition, it can’t be bad for the individual who died, because that individual no longer exists. Consequently, murder isn’t that bad because it’s simply inflicting the state of death upon an individual. Even when taking this argument off the general atheistic plane, so what if someone went to some conception of hell? They obviously deserved it. So what if they went to some conception of heaven? Good for them! So what if someone got murdered then reincarnated? That’s a fresh start. Boo-hoo, right? Honestly, it’s almost enviable! Hah! There are so many fates worse than death.

“Y’know,” Shōko says, leaning against the frosted wall, breath puffing white in the chilled air of Suguru’s cell, “we’ve been going through all this effort trying to kill you, but do you even wanna die?”

Suguru leans back into his chair, arching a brow. “You’re really asking me if I wanna stay in a rotting corpse?”

His functions get progressively worse by the week. He can barely feel the cold against his skin, even though it’s truly freezing in here—conditions set in an attempt to stall the decomposition of his body.

Shōko just hums, though, eyebags stark against her pale, light-deprived skin. The clinical white lighting of his cell makes her look almost ghostly. “I’ll take that as a yes, unless you say otherwise.”

A beat. What is she even still doing here?

“Would it even matter if I said otherwise?”

It’s not that he wants to die, exactly—it’s that there’s no reason to live. It’s different than the grim acceptance of death he knew in life; he’s already died. He feels detached, exhausted; his girls are dead and his ideals are… unachievable, like this. Feel worn thin, colorless, hollow, maybe. (~~Amusingly pitiful~~.) He doesn’t believe they are, of course, because he’s Getō Suguru but there’s that awful part of him that isn’t Getō Suguru, and—

“’Dunno,” Shōko says, and smiles, cynical, sardonic. It isn’t funny. “I’m not the one that’d kill you, so.”

Your name is Getō Suguru. You have been a special grade curse for approximately eight hours. You are far below the ground, in the dark underground on Jujutsu Tech. Warm candlelight illuminates the room. Every surface of the walls is covered in seals and flickering shadows. Your new form blends into the dark. You are alone with someone who loves you. He is standing straight ahead, only a step away, looking at you, shattered blue. His hand is pressed against your chest, and you can feel it vividly, even through the fabric of your burial kimono.

You are about to be executed. Your executioner is taking a while.

“Shit,” he mutters, eventually, “I don’t want to do this.” And then: “Would it—would it be that bad if you stayed? I’d kill you if you ever did anything bad, of course. I just... I want you to stay. Shit, I want you to stay. Can—can you stay with me?”

How do you tell him you can’t stay?

A. Close all your eyes, because there’s no other way things between you can ever end, and you don’t want to see the hesitant hope in Satoru’s expression fall, and say: “I’m sorry.”

B. Take his hand because you’re the responsible one, and say: “Don’t falter.”

C. Lay your hand over his and slip it past your kimono, into the cavity of your chest, around your heart. But, gods, you don’t want to put him through this again; he can go through this again, of course he can, but this Satoru is not the Satoru that killed you after the Night Parade. The Prison Realm broke something in him, you think.

D. You love him so much. You love him so much. These past months have only reminded you of your love for him. You could play nice, for him. You could, would do a lot of things for him.

E. This isn’t fair; nothing ever is.

F. As if there was ever any choice.

Satoru, you’ll never read this, but I love you. Satoru, I love you. I love you I love you I love you I love you. I never told you like I wanted to. That’s okay. It’s better that I didn’t. It would’ve been harder on us both when I inevitably left. I don’t regret that, by the way. What you don’t understand—Satoru, if I stayed, my soul would have died. I can’t live like that. I can’t live passively. I can’t live in a world I hate without doing anything to change it. I truly think I’d rather die than live like that.

You might have loved me, too, once. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. You made me so happy, you know. You made me so happy it doesn’t even feel real. Those memories of you feel candied. Did you know my parents had dreams before they married? My mother wanted to open an artshop in the city and my father wanted to move overseas. They gave those aspirations up for each other, though. And they were happy with it. But I’m not that type of person. I can’t do that. The sluggish, purposeless domesticity of my childhood made me want to die. I would die if I didn’t follow my ideals, Satoru.

Fuck. I think maybe I should’ve asked you to join me, on the off-chance that maybe, maybe you would’ve. That would have been the right thing to do, I guess. Or maybe it would’ve just pissed you off enough to actually kill me. Hah. I don’t know. I know you’d never agree with my ideals, though. You’re just that type of person. That’s probably the real reason I didn’t ask you to join me; I love you too much to do that to you.

I wish I were a stronger person. Gods, I don’t even know why I’m writing this. Larue said stream of consciousness writing can help relieve stress. I’ll probably burn this later.

You lived your life carefully from the start, calculating your every step up the desperate climb of your self-imposed duty. Your technique, for all it truly is a brilliant technique that harbors potential on par with or outdoing the Six-Eyes and Limitless combination, has a steep upward curve. You started with nothing. In order to grow your ability you would constantly be wracking your brains for how to capture a curse that was stronger than you. You considered each opponent thoroughly. You went against the odds and succeeded through rigid dedication and meticulous planning.

Maybe that was part of your instant dislike towards Six-Eyes. It irritated you beyond belief, his flippancy with curses. His casual disregard towards the importance of duty. The sheer power in his fingertips. How easy he had it. You wouldn’t call it jealousy, but… If I could be you, even this foolish ideal of mine would be possible, right?

Satoru isn’t leaving. He’s hovering by the door, hand on the handle to Suguru’s cell. His blindfold cuts an awkward line of black over his face, and Suguru hates that expression so much. The thin line of Satoru’s lips, the tension in his shoulders, the odd placement of his shoes, the way his fingers keep twitching indecisively. It would be so easy to let this go, to shift his attention towards the newly delivered batch of books and wave Satoru to leave, but—

“What?”

Satoru almost startles. One hand shoves into the pocket of his uniform. “Nothing. Sorry. You probably don’t want—I’ll go.”

It’s uncharacteristic, the way his words stumble. The way he treats Suguru in general. He was never like this before, hesitant, awkward. Stupidly, horribly tentative. Satoru starts turning the door handle, and Suguru closes his book with a sharp snap that reverberates and rattles against the frosted silver walls of this small metal cage.

“Wait.” He allows his voice to be hard, commanding—it’s a voice he hasn’t used in a while.

Satoru freezes. Slowly, Suguru stands from his chair, wooden sandals clacking against the floor, soft fabric of his white kimono shifting over his numb skin. He stops a couple steps away from the other, and studies him. The white light casts him in harsh contrast, all pitch-blacks and bone-whites. Monochrome. He’s bent at an awkward angle, turned halfway to face Suguru, one foot twisted to the exit, fingers still on the door handle. Suguru can feel with acute awareness the prickling intensity of Satoru’s attention. He watches him watching him.

“Jeez,” Satoru says, after a moment. “’You just gonna stare at me? If there’s something else you want, I can get it.”

Satoru’s visits are infrequent, brief things. That’s okay. He’s a busy person, after all. That’s not what bothers Suguru. It’s this. This uncharacteristic courtesy, this tentative indecision, like there are things he wants to say but won’t. It’s the way he only ever stops by with an excuse for doing so. As if, as if—

“Since when do you need an excuse for dropping in on whoever you want?”

Satoru frowns. “I don’t.”

“Then why are you acting like it?”

Satoru looks away. “I mean...”

The tone of his voice. The cautious tension of his posture. The tightness of his right hand around the door handle. Awful realization blooms, a dreadful disbelief slicking his throat. There’s no way Satoru seriously—but Suguru is good at reading people, and he knows Satoru, and no matter how many ways he fits together the pieces…

“You think I blame you for this?” His voice sounds numb.

A beat.

“Well,” Satoru says, hand losing it’s tightness on the handle and dropping limply to the side, and his voice sounds so small against the thick quiet. “It’s my fault.”

Mimiko. Nanako. Shibuya. All the dead shamans that resulted from Kenjaku wearing his body. That Suguru is now stuck in a corpse, slowly rotting. And it is Satoru’s fault, in part, but blame is such an ugly word.

“You think—” incredulity bubbles in his chest, knocks against his ribs, cold and terrible, “you think I’m angry at you? That I’m harboring a grudge? That I hate you?”

It’s awful, the icy slowness of that moment: the downward slope of Satoru’s lips, shoulders, his head tilting just a little to the side, off-centering his gaze, harsh white light amplifying his monochrome. Coldness stilling the air around them. A breath, two. The wretched quiet of his tone when he asks: “You don’t?”

Of course he doesn’t. He wants to cry despite the incapability of his body to produce tears, wants to scream, wants to tell Satoru to stop being a fool; no, he doesn’t hate him. And how does he even express this? That his love for Satoru is unfaltering, unequivocal? That he never wanted to die but was willing to press Satoru’s hand to his heart and accept judgment without complaint? That any hatred he has ever held towards him has only been a reflection of his own self loathing?

There’s no words to capture this feeling, these feelings, the softness of their color and depth of their aching. So he reaches out instead, taking Satoru’s hand from its limp hanging on his side, half-kneeling as he brings it close, then closer, and presses his cold lips to Satoru’s warm skin.

Satoru’s breath hitches.

This is the hand that killed him. These are the fingers which aimed Hollow Purple through his chest and blew out his heart. Suguru slips shut his eyes and feels Satoru’s pulse beneath his dead lips, the rapid buzz of Satoru’s cursed energy, hummingbird-light. He kisses down the skin, the ridge of his knuckles, the slender bend of his fingers, the tips of his nails.

I love you, he says, I love you, I love you, I love you.

Let me gently into the temple of your heart.

“Oh,” Satoru says. “Oh.”

He pulls up from dormancy the moment he senses that cursed energy, all eyes snapping open and honing onto one point. He's across the train station in an instant, closing distance faster than anyone can react, wrapping his arms around the other, lifting him from the ground, whirling him around, and hugging him tightly. Suguru's laugh is inhuman and delighted.

"M̵i̶g̴u̵e̵l̵-̷k̵u̷n̴!̸"

Under his hold, Miguel is stiff, alarm in every bit of him, and Suguru pulls back with reluctance, presenting himself for study. Even this bright day, blinding sunlight laying the small train platform in pale golds, doesn't do anything to unveil Suguru's form. Miguel seems to understand anyway, though.

"...Getō?" It's not a question so much as a realization, a verbal confirmation. Alarm slips from his frame, but the tension doesn't leave. It lingers, pulls taut in the hard line of his jaw, hands clenching tight, knuckles paling even through the darkness of his skin.

Ah.

"Y̷o̷u̴ ̵l̶ook well," Suguru says, because he does. Suguru had worried, when he first learned that Satoru had Miguel take Okkotsu Yūta under his tutelage. There's nothing speaking of subjugation in Miguel’s frame, though, even as Satoru stands just a few steps away, watching in what might be shocked silence.

"I'm doing well," Miguel confirms, "but you..." he turns halfway to face Satoru, lips thinning, curving downwards, jaw still clenched. It's closest to a glare he can get with his eyes covered behind his shades. "I didn't hear anything about this."

Satoru bristles, a subtle chain of movements, almost imperceptible to those that don't know him well. Opens his mouth, but—

"It's not widely known," Suguru cuts, Miguel's attention focusing back to him. Self consciousness pricks down his surface, a deep-set awkwardness in his form that directs hyperawareness to how displaced he appears in this quiet train station on Tokyo's outskirts. He's a thing made for dark bloodied rooms not idyllic breezy days. "I'd rather you didn't tell the others," Suguru says, because this is why he's never, never sought his family out despite Satoru telling him their goings, "they deserve to move on properly."

"You deserve to move on properly, too," Miguel says.

"That's not your business," Satoru interrupts, hand in his pockets, tone that irritating drawl that means he’s feeling a little mean, wanting purposely to get under another’s skin, and he wouldn’t fucking dare— "Miguel-kun."

But he would, because of course he would; Gojō Satoru is Gojō Satoru.

"Don't speak to my family like that," Suguru snaps, tone sharp, hard, exhibiting more real bite than he's shown in all the months since his rebirth as a curse, and Satoru visibly startles. Anger fills his mouth, indignation. "And it is his business, he's my family."

"...I didn't mean—"

Suguru doesn't care. He turns to Miguel, and, softer, reassuring: "Don't worry about it, alright? I'm fine with this. He's not...kee̷p̴ing me here against my will."

Miguel's frown only deepens, though, pad of his index finger lifting up to rub at his temple. Miguel, Suguru knows, has spent months training Okkotsu Yūta—apparently, they do genuinely get along—and Suguru knows too, that Orimoto Rika was exorcised; let go for her own sake. Miguel has always been responsible, mature, made Suguru feel almost ridiculous, at times, his ranting bordering on grating against Miguel's silence. An echo of that feeling surfaces now; Suguru's reassurance against Miguel's concern.

"This is why I’m worried," he says, “You have an easier time getting angry on behalf of others than yourself.”

He could deny it, but Miguel knows him far too much for that, and Suguru has been so exhausted with lies for so long. Hasn’t quite been able to muster energy for them since his death.

“Okay,” he says, simply.

“I don’t trust him.”

It’d be impossible to miss the distaste with which Miguel regards Satoru. Miguel lives his life giving loyalty less to ideals and more to people. It’s a sort of selfishness that Suguru never wanted or allowed for himself. Both he and Satoru, to different degrees, value their principals above any individual. I don’t blame him for killing me, he wants to say, please don’t hate Satoru on my behalf, but doesn't.

“Alright,” he says, “then trust my trust in him.”

The first time Suguru saw Satoru any semblance of polite, he’d just fatally wounded someone. It was first year, a relatively normal job to clear a dilapidated hospital of curses. Yaga still insisted on pairing them together even though both of them were perfectly capable of carrying out missions on their own. It went off the rails halfway through and ended in Satoru standing over the dying body of an assassin.

He stood straight, hands in his pockets, shadow long over the bloodied, sunset-washed stone. He wasn’t smiling when he said: “Any last words?”

It was an odd tone, somewhat flat, almost considerate, strange and foreign on his tongue. Suguru watched from halfway across the parking lot, pressing his bare heel into the cracked pavement, feeling lost, just lost. He was too far away to hear the response, but Satoru crouched down, supporting his assailant’s head with one hand while he listened to whatever muted words Suguru wasn’t privy to.

It only took a minute. By the end, the assailant was dead. Satoru stood abruptly, hands stuffing back into his pockets, scowl taking his features. “Tch!” He stuck his hand out to Suguru. “Phone.”

“...What?”

An eyeroll. Satoru’s glasses were broken. “Mine broke. Give me your phone.”

Normally, Suguru wouldn’t have obliged such a rude request, but this time, he did. He handed his phone over numbly and watched Satoru dial up a short call, give only a few clipped sentences, then hang up and hand it back. Then walk away. Suguru’s response was delayed when he ran to catch up, uncertainly glancing at the corpse behind them, still laid against the hospital’s crumbling wall.

“Wait shouldn’t we—we’re just leaving it there..?”

“Someone’ll pick it up later.”

Like it was something that’d happened before. Like it was something that happened often. Like it was routine. Like it was normal.

Satoru noticed his staring, of course. Something oddly defensive rose on his face. “What?” Voice snappish.

“Nothing,” Suguru said, even though it wasn’t. Hesitation. Satoru glared. “Just—is this normal? For you?”

Satoru huffed, paused in his pace body turning to face Suguru full on. “Yeah,” he confirmed, bit, “so what?”

Suguru swallowed. Felt loose hair tickle along his neck, jaw, sticky and irritating. Heat crawled down his back. Five minutes before, Satoru appeared more deity than boy, but as Satoru tapped his shoes impatiently against the pavement, scowl across his face, hands unable to settle in one place, he looked so sorely human. Regardless of his uncovered eyes, celestial blue and violently bright.

There’s a price to godhood, Suguru thought, then. There’s a price to godhood.

It didn’t feel fair.

...insatiable emptiness, ambition, gravitationality, venomous snakes, bile, cold worms, perfect spheres, writhing darkness, event horizons, the twist of a roller coaster, implosion, push, pull, slow disintegration, chinese handcuffs, bodhisattva smiles...

He finds Satoru outside the temple, and the sight of him surprises Suguru, although he knew it was him before confirming it with vision. His sandals clack loudly in approach, and Satoru barely even turns to look at him. Satoru’s sleek modern blacks contrast sharply against the surrounding white marble, displaced in the traditional aesthetics of this place.

“Satoru,” he says, “what are you doing here?”

“I had to check if I was seeing this shit right,” Satoru says flatly, finally turning his face from the statue to Suguru, bandages wrapped over his eyes. “Turns out I wasn’t mistaking it, though.”

Satoru navigates by cursed energy more than anything, the flow of it around objects, the way it dusts surfaces—all those details invisible to anyone but him. It can be hard for Satoru to clearly make out these patterns at a distance, he knows, the layers of cursed energy overlap, confuse the image.

“Not a fan of the décor?” A smile twists at Suguru’s lips despite himself. “I did say gold-leaf may look gaudy.”

“Fuck, I can’t believe you sometimes,” Satoru says. “Seriously, Suguru?”

He makes a vague gesture towards the statue. The installment is new, centered on a smooth stone platform and indented within the temple’s wall. There’s ample room for worshipers to pray and leave offerings by its base. It’s a pretty thing, legs crossed, large hands resting laxly on its knees, thin eyes slipped shut, lips carved into a serene little Buddha-smile. Draping robes and long hair that flows down its back, spilling halfway over its shoulders. It turned out well, Suguru thinks, it was worth the long hours of providing model, sitting still.

“Mm,” Suguru tilts his head. “So you aren’t here to talk to me, then? Well, if you aren’t...I’m sure you can see them, but there are plenty of monkeys around right now.”

Hostages, he means, because this is how all their infrequent, inconsistent encounters go these days: Suguru using monkeys as collateral to reassure his own safety. After all, no matter how skilled Satoru may be, Suguru is still special grade, could bathe this place in blood quicker than Satoru could really stop him.

Satoru grimaces. “Can you not go five minutes without going on about your bullshit?”

Suguru hums noncommitally. “It’s fine if you are here to talk, y’know. It’s a bad refection of moral character, to associate with someone like me while you hold beliefs like yours; to treat someone you disagree with so deeply and seriously with such civility, but that’s okay. Really, Satoru, no matter what Jujutsu Society unfairly demands of you, it’s fine for you to have some flaws.”

“God you’re so fucking condescending,” Satoru says, and something about his tone—Suguru pushes it aside smoothly, but knows it’ll loop in his head all night. “And let me guess: it’s okay for me to have flaws—” and he spits the word like a mockery, “but you don’t have any?”

Were their positions reversed, Suguru knows he would have killed Satoru by now. Because Satoru a kinder person, but Suguru is a better person.

“Of course I have flaws,” Suguru sighs. “Really, Satoru, what sort of person do you think I think I am?”

“Oh yeah?” Satoru isn’t smiling. “Then name one. I could give you the full list, and you’d give me a speech on why each of them don’t apply.”

“Sure. I—” but he doesn’t know how to continue. It’s true, he realizes, he really can’t

~~å̸̳w̸̪̐f̵͇͑ṳ̷̓l̴̡̅ ̸̝̔p̷̹̉e̴̍ͅr̸̬͌s̸͖̃o̴̫͗n̷̹͗~~

“Tch!” Satoru scowls at Suguru’s silence. “You’re such a hypocrite.”

Shamans are gods, he decides. In all the ways that matter, shamans are gods.

Alongside the fundamentals of this world, gravity and electromagnetism and physical constants—all those innately-binding forces that need not ask compliance—there exists morality: less concrete but just as shackling. It demands submission, coerces obedience with sugar-sweet promises and unforgiving ultimatums; you don’t want to be a bad person, do you? It elects itself an imperative, becomes a fixation, unflinchingly decrees ethical obligations. Deference, Suguru learns, ever-studious even in his own subjugation, holds most power when given through the illusion of choice, with reverent hands and thankful words.

Everything he does is the right thing to do. Morality is his god of gods and he’s a prophet and a follower and a selfless martyr. He’s grand, he’s correct, has the truth on his tongue and purpose in his every move. His body is a puppet and his face a canvas and his words a script, and his audience falls easily in love. Rightfully so. But sometimes—

sometimes it all feels like paper; he’s petty and insignificant and nothing is changing and everything has already changed and it’s not enough and it’s not anything at all and he doesn’t regret anything and he’ll never regret anything and he’s trembling and it’s three in the morning and he wants someone to hold his hair back as he vomits in the toilet and

he’s a god and he’s at the peak of humanity he’s in the pits of hell and he’s smiling and shaking hands and wiping blood from his cheek and his sandals are clacking against the marble of his temple and he’s saying hello and saying goodbye and one moment he’s in ecstasy and next he’s scrubbing his skin red and he’s saying I love you and he’s saying I hate you and he’s living more fully than he ever has before and he’s dying and dying and dying and dying and dying and

satoru sees him sometimes and he can’t stand being seen with those eyes because they know him too well and he can’t stand how larue and miguel sometimes look at him because it’s so different from reverence or hatred and he no longer knows how to deal with anything but those and

he looks at himself in the mirror, black robes and long hair and sharp eyes and smiling face and gold gojo-gesa and doesn’t recognize the reflection and

he loves his family so so so so so so so much and sometimes he imagines just stopping and living a domestic life with them and the thought is so awful and so lovely he wants to die and he wishes so desperately that he wasn’t human. that he were ideology incarnate. that he were truly the walking propaganda piece he sometimes feels like. and sometimes he thinks of killing satoru because he could do it maybe, if he played all his cards right, but,

It’s wrong to compromise ideals for love, but is it wrong to compromise himself for love? He’s already compromised himself for his ideal—when does it end and he start? Is it wrong for them not to be one in the same?

you hate monkeys you hate monkeys you hate monkeys you hate monkeys
you hate monkeys you hate monkeys you hate monkeys you hate monkeys
you hate monkeys you hate monkeys you hate monkeys you hate monkeys
you hate monkeys you hate monkeys you hate monkeys you hate monkeys
you hate monkeys you hate monkeys you hate monkeys you hate monkeys
you hate monkeys you hate monkeys you hate monkeys you hate monkeys
you hate monkeys you hate monkeys you hate monkeys you hate monkeys
you hate monkeys you hate monkeys you hate monkeys you hate monkeys

(

if you repeat it enough you’ll really believe it

)

The day of his twenty first birthday, Suguru realizes he’s a scary person. The whole family (~~except Satoru and Shōko and Yaga-sensei and Nanami and—~~) is gathered at the temple and Suguru’s mood has been so high but then some dumb monkey runs into him and he drops the homemade cookies Nanako made. Suguru butchers the monkey right there, mutilates them so badly the body isn’t even recognizable.

It’s not that he hadn’t known before, that he was a scary person, he did know. Ever since he massacred that village, he’s known in an objective, intellectual, and entirely distant sense that he’s become a scary person. That it’s logical to fear him. Knowing isn’t quite the same as realizing, though. Candlelight shades the corpse in warm tones, brightly illuminated its exposed ribs, glinting off its terror-struck eyes. There’s no draft within the temple’s deepest halls, but Suguru shivers anyway.

The memory surfaces unbidden: Shōko in Shinjuku, Just to be sure, are those false charges? the flicker of something when he denied. Her hand trembled when she reached for her phone, fingers white around the frame, and dialed Satoru. I met Getō in Shinjuku, she said, and then: no way, I don’t wanna die. As if he ever would’ve—

He’s slamming open the door of the common room before he knows it, anxious fear brimming in his veins, a fervent need to—to—

“Suguru?”

Larue is looking up at him from where he’d been painting his nails on the couch, brows beginning to furrow. Miguel has abruptly cut off from where he was animatedly telling a story to the girls at the kotatsu, who have whipped around to see him in the doorway. Negi and Manami are both staring at him. They’re all startled.

He likely looks like a mess, breathing heavy, tension in his shoulders, half bent over, hand still on the door. Tangled hair slipping past his neck. Blood drying tacky on his skin, the ridge of his cheekbone and back of his knuckles.

“Getō-sama? Is something wrong?”

Shōko in Shinjuku. Satoru in Shinjuku. The things he didn’t say. He has to—

“I love you,” he blurts, and once he starts he just can’t stop. “I love you all so much. You—you know none of you ever have anything to fear from me, right?”

A beat.

“Of course,” Larue says, slowly placing his nailpolish to the side, pulling himself up, frown tugging at his lips. “Do you think we don’t know that?”

“No,” Suguru says, but it doesn’t feel like enough. His heart is beating so hard in his chest, pounding against the cage of his ribs, and there are odd jitters down his arms, spine, knocking at the bones, rattling. “We’re all equals here, you all know that. Just—never be afraid of me, okay? Please never be afraid of me. I love you.”

They’re all a little taken aback, he sees, but Nanako is first to recover, grin spreading over head face, leaning back on her palms. “We know!” She chirps. “We love you too, Getō-sama!”

His inner circle is all gathered within this room. The people he’s swayed to his side, to stand by him, one way or another. Charisma is his second skin, but the ease that Suguru handles people is not instinctual, it’s calculated, a carefully constructed method of acting cultivated since childhood: since he was eleven and revolutionizing the entire culture of his school, ethically shaming his classmates into correct moral behavior. Endearing himself to classmates, turning the air poisonous with self directed judgment until it all but erased the toxic bullying culture that’d previously held that place in chokehold. He may have liked some of those monkey-children, but he never found companionship with them; they were never family.

“I love you,” he repeats, rushing across the room and hugging Nanako close, kissing her forehead. Doing the same for Mimiko. Then Miguel, Larue, Manami, Negi. I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you.

He loves them so much his chest will burst, so full with the love he hold of them. He’s brimming with it, shaking, falling apart, so full of this overwhelming affection, gratefulness, disbelief that he has them. They make him so happy it doesn’t even feel real. He loves his family so much it feels like he’s going insane.

...dead ends, crossroads, split flesh, pink seashells on the beach, salted wounds, lemon water, the gnawing demand of nonphysical hunger, garbled voices through radio static, a blooming lotus, blinking stars, human vertebrae, acid reflex, gold leaf, severed hearts held without reverence…

You are manifested around the back of the man you love most, who now holds your soul in the palm of his hand and lets you hold his in the palm of yours. His students are worried, angry little things, all sharp, grated edges. They’ve been irritated by your presence for months, but it’s only now coming to a head. It’s a curse, they say, spitting the word, not just a curse, a curse of THAT guy. How do you know it’s safe?

Satoru just laughs, though. Takes your jaw and sticks his fingers between your teeth. Demonstrates where your mouth is. Look? See? He’s not even biting me and he could do much worse, trust me. Laughs again. Creates a ball of cursed energy between his fingers. Feeds it to you. He’s cute. Perfectly safe, see? You can do it, too!

You watch him offer the condensed cursed energy to his students with numb disbelief. As if you’re some sort of pet. As if you’re nothing to be afraid of. As if you aren’t even a person.

Do you let his students treat you like some sort of domesticated pet? If not, what do you do instead?

A. No.

B. No. What the fuck.

C. No. Close your mouth. But Satoru’s fingers are still on your teeth, hand between your jaw, and the weight of it is so heavy. A block.

D. No. Bite Satoru’s fingers off. He could regrow them. Bite his students hands off right after. You’re not about to allow some strangers to put their damn fingers near your mouth feeding you little balls of cursed energy like cheap treats from the pet store. But… they’re Satoru’s students. You can’t do that to him.

D. No. Leave. Just leave. Return to the odd liminal space you dwell in when you’re not fully manifested. But you’re frozen in place, simultaneously distant from your body and trapped within it, hyperaware of every point of contact between you and Satoru. You’re stuck in place.

E. Yes.

F. What choice do you have, really.

G. This isn’t fair.

H. You’re really not a person anymore, huh. So what? So fucking what? Not like it’s a new realization. You haven’t felt like a person since you died, not really. You spent god-kows-how-long in that fucking box and then months waiting to die and now—now—

I. Look at Satoru, his sharp, delighted smile. Oh. Satoru isn’t stupid. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s enjoying this.

“How long are you gonna let yourself get used like that, Suguru?”

It’s laughable, really, that Six-Eyes thinks he’ll be able to call Getō Suguru to the surface by calling out blindly to him. What Six-Eyes fails to understand is that Getō Suguru no longer exists. Not in any recognizable way, at least. They want to sneer, laugh in his face, pluck out his pretty eyes and swallow them whole. Want to watch any glimmer of foolish hope disappear as they explain the intricacies of their technique. God, they’ve been waiting, preparing so incredibly long for this. They’re so happy they could cry. Finally, finally—

He follows Satoru’s voice to the surface, climbing up and up and up because it’s all he has. Everything is a disoriented haze. He’s everywhere then no where then in Shibuya Station. It’s a total wreck. What happened here? Satoru is directly in front of him, gorgeous eyes on full display, body hunched half over, kneeling, limply struggling against his bondage; an insect caught within gossamer thread. And he’s glaring at him, glaring with real hatred. Satoru? He wants to ask, wants to scream. But his vocal chords won’t work. What? He has to—

Their right hand twitches.

Their?

(Singular or plural? Both?)

	!		!

Their right hand lunges upward

wraps around their throat

squeezing

tighter

tighter

Hah! Now that, that’s amusing. No, that’s so interesting, fascinating. This has never happened before! What could possibly cause something like this? Is the body simply reacting to Six-Eyes’ voice? A dragonfly twitching after death? Perhaps, but it doesn’t feel right. No…	Not hard enough. He’s trying so hard but it just won’t work and he wants to cry and scream and there’s sound spilling from his lips but it’s laughter. That’s not right, that’s not right at all, but his body isn’t his. It’s being used to hurt Satoru. Nothing makes sense...

A memory surfaces:

It was first year and you weren’t friends with Gojō, exactly, but you weren’t enemies, either. You’d just finished a job, swallowed the second grade and took down the curtain between that little playground and the city outside. You sighed, fishing a coffee can from you pocket and downing half of it, turning towards Six-Eyes and gesturing him to follow. You aborted the movement halfway, though, because even through his glasses, you could tell he was staring at you.

You frowned, brows furrowing. “What?”

Six-Eyes stared harder, matching your frown. You brought the coffee back to your lips. After a moment: “Dude, are you like, some kind of hive-mind?”

You choked, hacking coffee all over the ground, wiping your chin with the back of your hand. “No? What the hell.” Exasperation bubbled in your chest. “Where did you even—even get that idea?”

“Okay but like,” Six-Eyes said, “you say ‘we’, y’know?”

“What?”

“Like, literally five minutes ago you were like, ‘make sure not to kill it, we’ll take it in in a moment’! While you were talking to your curse!”

It was true. You did say we. You didn’t know how to explain it, though: the way curses edges against the boundaries of your mind, soul. The way swallowing one truly was taking it into the core of your being. So, instead, you said: “I’m just...not.”

You?

(Singular or plural? Both?)

(Dissociative?)

(It feels similar but it’s not quite the same...)

Oh. So that’s what it is. Right. That makes sense. Your mind is used to retaining its individuality and function even when sharing space with other souls. It seems even my technique can’t overpower your natural resistance towards being swallowed into other minds, hmm… Ah, well. You’re still easy enough to deal with. Still, you really gave me a shock, hah! Go back to sleep.	. . . . and he’s trying to keep his head above the water so hard but he just can’t

So this is his world now: four walls and the sensation of his skin becoming increasingly numb from the freezing cold and lack of stimulation. Logically, he knows his situation: he’s a corpse now, awaiting proper processing. It’ll end eventually, maybe, probably. There is no end. He barely remembers the beginning.

He recounts memories to keep himself sane. His childhood home. Elementary school. His parents. Highschool. Satoru. Mimiko and Nanako. Miguel. Larue. Manami and Negi. The temple. Swallowing curses. Dying. The night parade. Watching through Kenjaku’s eyes. Creating the death paintings. The first time they transferred to a male body. Forming a binding vow with Sukuna. Shibuya. Harajuku. Etc, etc.

Did you know? When people are kept in isolation (sensory deprivation), information input via the senses (such as hearing and sight) is reduced. A person who remains alert during a period of sensory deprivation is likely to experience vivid fantasies and, perhaps, hallucinations. A slight amount of stimulation directed toward the senses may further increase the likelihood of hallucination. Kenjaku knows this from experience (on others), and Suguru just knows this from experience.

…and then his skin stops being numb and the itching sets in…

...and they’re

into

hell

...And they’re in the void and the center of the universe and the bottom of the ocean and they’re eating and they’re being eaten and and they’re skinning themself alive and they’re swallowing eyes and they’re vomiting blood and then licking it and they’re stepping over the corpses of people they knew and they’re someone and they’re no one and there’s nothing and nothing is real and everything is real and they’ve always been a rational person, a careful calculator, a mastermind, a meticulous planner, and they try to solve this logically...

Getō Suguru’s life can be split into two easy sections: before the massacre, and after.

Or perhaps it’s: before Jujutsu Tech, and after?

Or maybe: before Kenjaku, and after?

No, there are hundreds of little divisions like this that could be made. If one wants to cleanly divide his life in sections, it would be:

certainty

and

u n c e r t a i n t y

“I think therefore I am” or, more self-explanative: “I am thinking, therefore I exist” is a preposition on the nature of existence and truth. There is only one irrefutable truth of this world, a fundamental concept that all other musings can be built from: in order for the nature of truth and existence to be contemplated, there must be someone doing the contemplating. Be definition, to think, there must be a thinker. So if nothing, else, they (sugurukenjaku) exist. They are real.

But

still

it bothers them, a self-directed

idle

musing:

who

are

you?

He fucked a monkey, once. Met them in some warm Tokyo bar, charmed them with smiles and small-talk and lightly trailing touches, walked them to a love hotel, all clumsy hands and one-sided laughter. Endured the way every touch itched and crawled and made him nauseous until he just couldn’t anymore, until he came to his senses and killed the other halfway through. Blood splattered his sweat-slicked skin, mixed with the come, painted over the miscellaneous smears of lube. Suguru lay there for a moment, feeling disgusting, just disgusting.

Their terror-struck face peered up at him, eyes wide in death, cock soft over the cheap plastic blankets, and the realization that that thing was inside him sank in fully. A moment latter, he clambered out of bed, stumbled into the bathroom, keeled over the toilet and heaved into the bowl. Jabbed his fingers to the back of his throat until he was vomiting all over his hand and water was splattering his skin and acidic tears were burning at his eyes, down his cheeks. All that came from his stomach was alcohol and tea because he hadn’t actually eaten anything in thirty-something hours. He showered, after, water so hot it burnt his fingers as he washed his hair and scrubbed his skin so hard went pink then red then bled.

Twenty eight hours after the entire affair, Suguru got a call on his personal phone and picked it up against better judgment. Static filtered blankly over the line, filling the late-night quiet.

“What the fuck, Suguru. You’re fucking people then killing them, now?”

Satoru’s tone was hard, almost disbelieving, oddly blank. Suguru slipped shut his eyes, leaning back against the soft plush of his pillows. It was well into witching-hour; he could’ve easily pretended to have been asleep. There weren’t many reasons Satoru would call him. “You guys found that, huh?”

It was almost startling, how even he managed to keep his tone.

“I’m at the scene right now. Not even gonna deny it?”

“Do you want me to?”

“Tch. No. Your residuals are all over the place.”

He hummed, opening his eyes. Shadows blanketed the room, warm lamplight brushing over expensive fabrics and glinting lemony off gold leaf Buddhas. “’Have something to say?”

“This is disgusting.”

Well.

Yeah.

It’d been playing in his head all day, night, phantom touches ghosting his skin, every memory causing so much revulsion he could hardly look at himself in the mirror that morning. He thought, though, of implying it could happen again. Something like: want me to come to you instead? Briefly entertained the idea of Satoru offering himself as a replacement, but it was a thought so far removed from any real reality that he discarded it easily.

“Hah. For once, we’re in agreement. It won’t happen again, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Satoru didn’t respond immediately. Static hung heavy in the air. Then, eventually: “Was it even—was it even consensual?”

Oh, he thought. Oh.

An unbidden smile forced its way onto his face, tilting at his lips. “You think I’d resort to that? Honestly, Satoru, I’d think you’d know me better than that.”

And it all came out so much more mocking than intended.

“Just answer the question,” Satoru said, voice tight, then: “please.”

An uncomfortable beat. Suguru shifted in bed, smooth fabrics rubbing over his irritated skin, still raw, scabbing in places. An abrupt sickness rose in his throat. “Yeah. It was. Up until the murder bit, at least.” And he tried to shape it like a joke, like something funny, but just couldn’t.

Satoru didn’t reply. They stayed in uneasy silence for half a minute before the line abruptly cut. Just like that.

... bodhisattva smiles, glittering gold, sharp teeth, stomach churning, soft silks, gold, distant supernovae, black light, gnawing, skeletal wrists, spider lilies, karma, white marble, the harsh white of clean bone...

It all breaks the moment Satoru crosses the threshold to his bedroom. The unspoken and unacknowledged tension that’s been hovering between them since Satoru’s bullshit comes to a head all at once, delicate civility shattering. It takes less than a split second for suguru to manifest itself, taking sharp shape in the air and slamming Satoru into the wall of its incomplete domain expansion.

Even like this, pinned and caged by suguru’s form, a special grade curse in all its awful manifestation, Satoru doesn’t appear concerned at all. His shoulders are relaxed, smile casual on his face, hand curiously testing the fleshy wall of suguru’s incomplete domain expansion. He whistles. “Since when do you have a domain expansion?”

Since becoming a curse. It was never something suguru managed to achieve in life, but the knowledge came more naturally, instinctively, intrinsically after it became a curse. If suguru were in a more focused state of mind, it’d have manifested a complete domain, but its entire head is just so so so tangled and muddied and it wants to scream until its throat goes raw that its domain is not the fucking point—

A snarl tears from its mouth, teeth baring, hair bristling, claws ripping the stupid fucking blindfold from Satoru’s stupid fucking face because he’s harder to read with it on. “D̸̙̊o̶͉͘e̷͕͂s̸̻͝n̴̋͜’̴̙̉t̷̲̓ ̴̞̆ṃ̶̂a̷͇̋t̷̹̎t̵̟̉ȇ̵̥r̶̥͝!̷̲̚”

It doesn’t bother forcing its voice into something more human, less garbled and layered and many-toned. The words reverb, grating, a screeching feedback loop.

“Ah,” Satoru says, after a moment, bright eyes sliding from suguru to the distant wall, then back, “you’re really upset, huh?”

“i’m not some sort of pet,” suguru spits, “i’m not.”

“I know.” He’s no longer quite smiling. “I was just finally putting my cute students at ease, proving you’re safe to have around. That’s all.”

For a split second, suguru really does hate him.

“i’m not safe to be around,” suguru hisses, and desperately hates the way those words feel plastic, flimsy, a shallow denial of its domestication, “even if i was,” and the words press around in its mouth all wrong, lungs tight, throat aching, “even if i was… you can’t just...”

Now, now Satoru has gone tense, stiff. Hands flexing by his sides. “If you protested I would’ve stopped.”

Anger surges through its form, rattling its lungs. Hatred. The walls gurgle, room beating, breathing, acid slicking over the softened ground. Any outside light has been completely shut out, and all illumination comes from the now precariously balanced lamp on the bedside table.

This isn’t fair.

“You knew what you were doing,” suguru says, because it knows Satoru, and for all he may sometimes play fool, he’s scarily intelligent. “You enjoyed it.”

A beat. The walls pulse around them, their own stifling cocoon of cursed energy so thick it’s choking. Like this, they’re completely shut away from the world, together. Satoru looks odd in this lighting, fleshy pinks and eerie reds coloring over his lighter shades, melding into his dark blacks. His eyes remain unchanged.

A beat, two. Satoru’s mouth opens to reply, then closes. His lips purse. Another crawling moment, and,

“Yeah,” Satoru admits, just like that, and the tension drains from his frame all at once, shoulders slumping, “you’re right. Sorry.”

His tone is plain. Genuine.

Just as always, suguru is startled by how easily the admission and subsequent apology comes. It took suguru off guard in first year, when Satoru was an arrogant brat who suguru didn’t think had the capability to admit fault and take responsibility right up until he did. After a particularly nasty spat mid-mission that left suguru almost dead at the hands of the curse they were supposed to be exorcising, the first thing Satoru said when suguru woke up in the infirmary was: that was my fault, sorry. It stunned suguru into a quietly muttered uh...don’t worry about it, back then.

Now, too, it makes suguru falter. Makes it draw back, curl in on itself, leg folding up to its chest, head bowing as it settles on the edge of the bed. It’s still angry, it is, because this is something it deserves to be angry over, right? But...

“I did enjoy it,” Satoru continues, straightening, hands shoving in his pockets when he walks over to it. His tone is dreadfully monotone. “Still do, honestly. I like the control I have over you. I like it a lot. I’m possessive and borderline obsessive. It’s just, I don’t know, you decided to stay with me. For me. I wanted to prove to myself—and you, too, maybe—that there’s nothing that’ll make you actually really leave. Again. That you’re really, really mine. Something like that, I guess. I went too far, though. I’ve probably been going too far for months, even if I can’t think of anything specific right now. Sorry.”

It’s not a bad apology. If suguru explained the extent of its upset over this, it’s sure Satoru would properly address and apologize for that, too. How how does it even explain that? That while it is Getō Suguru, Kenjaku impacted it irreparably? That Kenjaku viewed Getō Suguru in a clinical, objective way, saw him as a foolish existence, viewed the ideals he held as badly pursued and meaningless, and as consequence, suguru can no longer cling to them? That suguru still despises this world to its core, hates it so much, but once again has no method to change it? That suguru holds its ideals so close they become its lifeblood, its identity, and is incomplete without them?

“You don’t have to forgive me,” Satoru says, eye contact briefly breaking. A hand rises to rub at his neck, inexplicably awkward. There’s tension back in his shoulders. “It’s—you don’t have to see me, if you don’t want to. That’s fine, too. Just so long as you’re not, like, killing people, you can go do whatever. Sorry again.”

Really, how does suguru explain it? That suguru knew even when it chose to stay that it wouldn’t be viewed by the large majority of people as a person, knew it wouldn’t be treated as a person by most people, but it thought… it thought…

Satoru is saying something or other. It doesn’t care.

“Am i a person to you?”

Satoru freezes. His hand drops. “What?”

“Satoru,” it repeats, “am i a person to you?”

“Of course,” Satoru says, words almost stumbling from his mouth in a sudden frenzy, “I—of course. That’s not what this is about at all, just ‘cause—it’s not—”

“i don’t feel like a person,” suguru says, uncurling and slipping all its eyes shut because it can’t bear looking at the growing horror on Satoru’s face, “i really don’t.”

A dream/memory/hallucination:

he’s laid flat on a dissection table, naked and clean, and the white light overhead is blindingly bright but his eyes won’t close no matter how hard he tries. A mirror of himself stands over him, and the sound of Not-Suguru’s gloves snapping on echoes around the empty cavity of his skull. Slowly, steadily, he is cut apart and replaced, every bit of him, broken and replaced; how many pieces of yourself do you think you can replace, Getō Suguru?

A reddish darkness stretches around them, undefined cavern slowly, steadily filling with boiling blood. There are monsters in the liquid, mutilated ghouls crawling closer and closer but never quite reaching. He wants to scream, ask what the hell Not-Suguru is doing—leave the boiling pot! Don’t you feel the temperature rising?—but every time he tries, a hand closes over his mouth and Not-Suguru tells him this is GOOD even though it’s not GOOD and it can’t be GOOD and it’ll never be GOOD but no matter how hard he tries it just won’t get through.

Hasaba Kenichi (1968 – 2005) and Hasaba Youko (1972 – 2002) moved to the countryside in 1993 due to financial and safety concerns associated with living in the curse-infested hellhole of Yokohama’s inner city. Hasaba Youko died in childbirth, leaving Hasaba Kenichi alone with their twin daughters, Hasaba Mimiko and Hasaba Nanako. The college gives loans and assists rural shamans with moving into urban areas, but its help is not freely given, it’s a conditional care, a bear-trap hand that demands its debt be payed in full; Hasaba Kenichi would’ve had to make exorcisms his full-time job. Unable to accept the very real, very high risk of orphaning his infant daughters, he stayed in the countryside despite its hostility. He orphaned them anyway, dying in 2005 to a sickness that wouldn’t have killed him had he lived in a community that actually wanted him to live.

It’s not an uncommon sort of story. It is, in fact, horrifically common. Molten rage fills Suguru when he finally finishes piecing everything together, so overwhelming his teeth grit, knuckles going white, nails cutting incisions into the callused skin of his palms. If shaman society actually cared about the well-being of fellow shamans instead of ruthlessly sacrificing them to stupid fucking monkeys, Mimiko and Nanako would’ve never had to—

“…Getō-sama?”

He startles, glancing at the door, at the little heads peeking through. Breathes deep, uncurls his fists, smiles. Slips from his plush chair and makes his way over, crouching down to their level. They lean back a little. “Nanako, Mimiko. Sorry, I might have looked scary for a moment there, but I’m not bothered by you getting my attention. What is it?”

“Um,” says Nanako, “it’s boiling.”

“Thank you for telling me,” he says, standing up and slipping by them. Dinner has already gone by, but the girls couldn’t sleep and he put a kettle on for hōjicha. “I’ll go get that.”

Suguru does his best for them, he really does. Spoils them rotten, never raises his voice, never never hurts them, never denies them food or restricts their freedom of movement. But it still doesn’t feel like enough. He enters the kitchen, turning off the stove heat and pouring into two cups, color immediately seeping from the teabags into the hot water. The girls tip-toe after him, barely reaching his hips.

“It’ll be done in ten minutes, ‘kay?”

“’Kay,” Nanako says, and Mimiko nods. Then, before he leaves: “Um—! Getō-sama...”

“Yeah?”

“’Love you.”

His chest swells. The girls have started doing this thing, sometimes, where they’ll say Getō-sama, we love you! And they’ll look at him, nervous but hopeful, until he smiles and says, I love you too, and then they’ll say it again and again he’ll respond the same every time, again and again: I love you too. It’s a pattern, a repetition, a reassurance. He’ll say it however times they need.

“’Love you too,” he says, bending down and pressing a kiss to both their foreheads. He waits a moment, but this time the question doesn’t come again, only two shy little smiles.

Back in his room, there’s a cold cup of black coffee. Tomorrow, he’ll wake up early and act out Getō-sama the cult leader. But here, in the kitchen, right now, he’s Getō-sama, the guardian. For this, he thinks, it’s worth it.

...children’s laughter, a gunshot, white noise, scattered brain matter, the pulse of a heart, disembodied rib cages, bodhisattva smiles, origami cranes, floating lanterns, red, the pulse of a heart...

A list of things that Getō Suguru, six and in love with most things, loves:

his parents
the possibility of having a little sister (Okaasan said it might happen..!)
the mountains behind his house, long winding trails lined with Shinto statues and piled stones and pretty wildflowers, sunlight filtering through midsummer leaves and brightly dancing on the earth
bright summer festivals, when his town is strung with color and taiko drums sing into the night and he can dance till he falls over his feet laughing
sitting on his father’s shoulders
being carried on his mother’s back
holding both their hands
the old couple down the street who sometimes give him weird—but not bad!—crackers when he stops by on the weekends
miso soup and salted lemon water
helping people
reading
a lot of things
so many things he doesn’t even have enough fingers to count them
the feeling of being loved
the feeling of loving

Love, Suguru thinks, six and in love with most things, is—

“Fuck,” Satoru mutters, right hand over his eyes, fingertips digging into his skin, blindfold still laying where suguru threw on the floor no too long ago. He’s crosslegged on the floor, slumped against the wall, tucked into the bedroom corner, no strength in his form. “Why do you even stick around?”

Around them, the bedroom is still somewhat a wreck, items shifted and displaced in the aftermath of suguru’s partial domain expansion. It slips from the bed’s edge, across the floor, settling in front of him, knees drawing to its chest, caged by its arms. It tilts its head. Smiles.

There’s really only one way to answer that, and honestly, Satoru likely already knows.

“Because i lo̷v̵e̶ you,” suguru says.

“That’s awful,” Satoru says, and suguru catches a glimpse of otherworldly blue through the gaps of his fingers before the opening closes. “That’s genuinely horrible.”

It’s wrong, suguru knows, to compromise its ideals for love. But that’s not quite the same as compromising itself for love.

“It’s what you wa̴n̶t̷ed in the first place, isn’t it?”

The hand slips from Satoru’s face, settling weakly on the wood below. His eyes are sloped, bright irises under long snowy lashes. Moonlight falls in from the far window to their left, laying soft silver on Satoru’s edges, glinting sharply off the shattered pieces of their bedside lamp. Satoru’s head dips to the side.

“It’s selfish,” he says, quietly, “you shouldn’t pay the price of my selfishness.”

It reaches out, taking Satoru’s right hand in its own. Clutching tightly, cold void on cold skin. “’Love is the most twisted curse of them all’,” it quotes, lips quirking, “right?”

Satoru stares at it, for a moment. Nods. Doesn’t ask how it knows. “Yeah.”

“i disagree,” suguru says, eyes shutting, bringing Satoru’s hand close, then closer, pressing its lips to the skin. “It’s the greatest ble̸s̸s̷ing, i think.”

Because this life is made of cruelty and this world is merciless beyond words, and even still, it can be worth it. Because suguru rarely knew times without strife but never wanted to die, always loved and was always loved. All the best things it’s done, it’s done for love. There’s no purpose to love but there is meaning in it. Because hate is simple but love is simpler.

Satoru is quiet for a long time, even as he allows it to rest the side of its face against the back of his hand. Eventually, finally:

“Do you want me to exorcise you?”

It’s an abrupt change in conversation, maybe. A deep breath shakes through suguru’s lungs, and it exhales, long, eyes slipping open. Sorrow curls in the corner of its mouth, mild and bitter, green tea, the lingering aftertaste of dead-night black coffee. “Do you want to?”

“This isn’t about me.”

Except it is, because suguru doesn’t want to be here if Satoru doesn’t want it here. There’s no other reason for it to stay. The path has hit a dead end, plateaued, become stagnant, purposeless, and the crossroads are far behind it. It releases Satoru’s hand, pressing its entire body closer, instead, resting its head against Satoru’s chest, collar bones, draping him in darkness. It’s always this.

A beat. Satoru’s hand hesitantly comes up, heavy against the back of its head, hair. Satoru hugs it close. “I’ll exorcise you whenever you ask,” he continues, reiterates. “You only have to ask, I’ll do it, I will. I won’t ask you to stay again. I won’t—won’t keep you here. You know?”

It presses closer. Feels Satoru’s heartbeat, the steady rise and fall of his chest, the pulse of his blood, listens to his breath. One, two, three. And, eventually, soft: “i kn̶o̵w̵.”

Because if love isn’t worth it then what is—

Something broke in you the night you found Mimiko and Nanako in that cage, moonlight filtering in bars over the tatami mats, over their bruised faces, dirty clothes, thin limbs. It all clicked into place for you, then. Or rather, you forced the pieces into place. You bent your reality, spun new truth between your fingers, crossed an event horizon of your own creation. This world was simply too much for you to bear. It’s pathetic, really.

Sometimes, things simply don’t have meaning or purpose. Pointless, inevitable cruelty. You couldn’t reconcile with that. So you grew your garden of complexes instead, savior, martyr, cloaked yourself a god, superior. Brutalized yourself, smile by smile. Hah! It’s hilarious!

Another reality you failed to recognize: it’s impossible to build something greater than oneself. For all you fancied yourself a god, you were really just so petty. An awful curse user, yes, the worst born in centuries, one of the worst in recorded history. Caused a resurgence in anti-nonshaman sentiment. Carried out the night parade of a hundred demons. But in the scheme of things you were just so insignificant. You recognized it too, even if you’d never, never admit it. You were more relevant in death than you ever were in life, your greatest significance always lay in your role to another; a lover, a tool. Your technique truly was wasted on you. Or rather—no. That’s not it.

You were wasted on yourself. You were a sun, a neutron star that collapsed under its own mass, caught everyone in your supernova, an implosion that turned you destructive. Your gravity had always been undeniable, magnetic. Easily charming, scarily charismatic, pulling people into your orbit, beyond your event horizon. You were the type of person that’d burn the world, yourself, those dearest to you, in an instant, just so long as you thought you could make something better from the ashes. The type of person you were… you could have been something truly grand, monumental, terrifying, a real god on this earth. Something like that.

It’s almost scary, to conceptualize a version of you that committed yourself to an ideal you fully believed in.

Two months into your appointments with her, your new therapist introduces you to an imposing man with dark shades and a goatee. He tells you that you aren’t mentally ill (you already knew that!) and that you’re a ‘shaman’. He tells you that you’re not alone, that there’s a school for people like you. Asks if you want to enroll.

Do you accept his offer?

A. Yes.

B. Yes, please.

C. It’s going to be hard to convince your parents.

D. It could be a scam; don’t trust things too good to be true, right?

E. But it doesn’t seem like one.

F. You want to cry.

G. You need this.

H. Of course. Of course. Because you’ve always wanted to be understood and now all of a sudden you are, or at least there’s the possibility of it. Not only is it a place for people like you, it’s a place that’ll support you in your ideals, in protecting those weaker. It sounds like paradise.

He realizes, one wretched day, that Satoru is happy. Truly, really, actually, for-real happy. He eats a minimal of two meals a day, sometimes more, and snacks regularly. His nights often pass without sleep, but not for lack of self-care; Satoru neither needs nor particularly craves sleep. He doesn’t see it as respite from living.

There are people who care for him and which he cares for in turn. He spends Saturdays out with Shōko, pays a visit to Kyoto every other month and settles down at a café to talk with Utahime for hours about their respective students, spends weekdays teaching teens and checking up on those that’ve already graduated. Sends obnoxious cards or throws over-the-top parties for the birthdays of his friends and students. Is the first person that Hoshi Kirara and Hakari Kinji tell about their engagement. He leaves flowers by Nanami and Yaga’s family graves on Sunday, but doesn’t dwell in grief.

Satoru is happy. He’s happy with Suguru, and he was happy without Suguru, and he’d continue be happy regardless of Suguru.

…flesh-pink, gurgling, stomach lining, bile, an inescapable pull, the pits of hell, the sanzu river, rushing water, ten kings, judgment, the screeching feedback loop of two phones in close proximity, acid reflux, garbled voices in the dark, a void, the maw of a dragon, purple...

As a curse, suguru no longer sleeps. Satoru doesn’t sleep either, not usually, and inevitably, this means many of their nights are spent together. Tonight, warm light falls from the kitchen, bathing their living room in dim amber, kissing the edge of every ripple in Satoru’s cup. He’s on their couch, one leg over the other, suguru sprawled over the cushions, head rested against Satoru’s thigh.

“Hey,” Satoru says, breaking their hours of silence, “did you ever ever believe any of that shit you preached? Like—not the ideology stuff. I mean the religious stuff.”

It shifts, looking up at him. Shakes its head, movement minute.

Satoru picks up on it anyway. “Huh,” he says. There’s a pause, time passing quietly. Satoru sets his cup down on the nearby coffee table, still half full with now-cool sweet peach tea. Not alcohol, never alcohol; Satoru doesn’t drink anymore, after all. It makes sense. That uneasy shift of reality when inebriated, the liquidity of truth, it was never pleasant. “Honestly, I like the idea of Buddhism.”

Ah.

That takes it a little by surprise, and it blinks up, tilts its head in question.

Satoru laughs, quiet. “Yeah, really. You know all that stuff about leaving behind worldly things? I dislike attachments, I really do. Emotional ones especially. Love’s a curse, but so is hate, and… well, all of it, I think.” Small pause. “It felt like enlightenment, when I learned reverse cursed technique, did you know? I seriously couldn’t muster much feeling for anything at all, just this mild pleasantness. I didn’t love anything, or hate anything, either. I’ve always wanted to go back to that. Especially after you left.” Its chest clenches painfully. Doubtless sensing an uneasy shift in suguru’s cursed energy, Satoru runs a hand through its hair. “Sorry, that got sort of depressing, huh? It probably isn’t fun listening to me ramble all the time. Bite me if you want me to shut up, ‘kay?”

It’s possible to have love without hate, it wants to say. Wants to tell Satoru that he can have the positives without the negatives. But it doesn’t, because Satoru likely understands that; he and suguru are just too different.

Instead, it says: “Do you ever wish you killed me in Shinjuku?”

Satoru pauses, leans back. It listens to the rhythm of his breath, one, two, three. “I did before you died,” he admits. “’Still do, sometimes. ‘Would’ve saved a lot of people. Maybe I wouldn’t’ve been able to handle it, then, though. ‘Doesn’t matter now anyway. Why?”

It shifts, just a little, looking up at Satoru. Around them, the house is dead-night quiet, living room folding them away, warm kitchen light, soft couch cushions. They’re an awful perversion of what they could’ve been, suguru knows, had it never left. But that’s okay. It is. Satoru meets suguru’s gaze, face pretty and blunt, and it observes itself in his house-of-mirrors eyes: the reflection of itself repeated again and again at every angle, getting blurrier and blurrier, lost in distance.

“Okay,” it says,

...bubbling, the pulse of a heart, a steady liquid hum, squelching, the roar of a beast, teeth tearing flesh from bone, begging hands, gurgling, acid reflux, tides, bile, the distorted grate of rubber against rubber, constant chatter, inhuman growls, stomach of the shinigami, acid reflux—all these things that constantly pervaded the line between him and his curses, just beyond the boundary, the stomach of his technique, the nebulous space where his curses dwell. Upon his grotesque rebirth as a curse, he was finally able to…

Twelve days after his manifestation, Suguru expands his domain by the edge of a clandestine wildflower meadow tucked deep within the mountains, far from civilization. Satoru is unaware, occupied, has entrusted him with brief solitude, momentary separation. Cursed energy shapes fluidly around him, completing the expansion, cage.

He stands atop the white marble stairs of temple nestled into an oversized lotus flower, ink-black petals touching against surrounding leaves. He traverses the encirclement with some difficulty, avoiding the cracks, the sharp slopes, leaves layered and disjointed against each other, until reaching its peak. Around him stretches an acid lake, crimson liquid sloshing against flesh walls, extending far into the dark above, both existentially large and stiflingly claustrophobic. He knows, by instinct, that below that surface lurks every curse he’s ever taken in, and here, too, lies every wretched thing he’s ever allowed them to swallow. Bones and body parts lazily bob on the surface, build up against the lotus leaves, macabre pollution.

A heartbeat pervades the air, constant, too loud and too quiet all at once, like everything in this place. He could, Suguru idly muses, bring Satoru here, one day. Could keep him here, swaddle him in silks, lay him on plush cushions, house him in the lotus temple and worship him with devotion. It’d be possible, he knows, looking at the walls, the darkness above, the bottomless acid depths below, after all…

more than anything, his domain is unique for being inescapable.

Notes:

Aaaaa. Gonna scream. I'm so excited to finally have this posted. I’ve been working on it for a long time and it’s been on my mind for months. For me, it was an extremely challenging project and it didn’t turn out perfect at all. In a lot of ways, I think it’s really messy. Still, the fact that it’s coherent at all, that it EXISTS, is an achievement for me. I really gave myself a headache with this one haha. Honestly, I’m sort of nervous to be posting this!! There are still so many things I’m uncertain about with it.
As usual, or rather, more than usual, constructive criticism is welcome and comments make me really happy! With this project especially, feedback is really appreciated. I’m not always able to respond quickly, but it genuinely makes my day, so don’t be shy!

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