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“Suguru. Suguru. Suguru, I can’t sleep”, Satoru complains, tapping Suguru’s shoulder like a mad man. As if he hadn’t heard him the last four times. Suguru groans, blinking up at the other sleepy teen. And that’s the guy he calls his best friend… He really did bring this upon himself, didn’t he? Suguru sighs, turning around. “Well, try harder”, he groans in response. The seventeen year old clan heir and special grade sorcerer has the audacity to pout like a toddler, not having stopped tapping Suguru’s shoulder at any point during this conversation, because of course he hadn’t.
That’s just how Satoru is.
Aforementioned man-toddler clicks his tongue and leans a bit closer, all just to whisper “Can’t” into Suguru’s ear, like he’s supposed to do something about that.
Seriously, Suguru doesn’t get paid enough for this. Actually, he doesn’t get paid at all, and he can be just as bad, but that’s entirely irrelevant to this conversation. Point is, Satoru is bothering his attempts at getting enough sleep, and why?
Because he’s bored.
Figures.
Suguru shoves him back, sitting up himself – he doesn’t have a choice at this point – and pushes his own pillow into Satoru’s face, even if he’d bet a few thousand yen with absolute certainty that Satoru would lick it, but some sacrifices have to be made in order to get this nuisance off his back, at least at these unholy times in the morning. He’ll just turn it around and sleep on the other side. Or steal Satoru’s. Ideally both, he’ll have to see if he has the energy.
Although, if he’s honest with himself, he probably doesn’t.
“You know that you could just keep quiet and let everyone else in the room sleep?” Satoru, expectedly, scoffs at that and pushes Suguru away, securing the pillow for himself. “The only other person in the room is you, and you’re clearly awake, or you wouldn’t be talking to me right now.” Suguru rolls his eyes and half-heartedly grabs the pillow in hopes of getting it back, but he isn’t really up for a tug of war… So now they’re just both holding the pillow. “Maybe I was trying to sleep,” but Satoru lightheartedly huffs and shakes his head, just as tiredly pulling at the pillow.
They’ll both regret this in the morning.
“If you were, you were failing, so you might as well talk to me.” At this point, Suguru has given up on the pillow and just falls back into the mattress, closing his eyes. He’s so tired. But Satoru is right, he couldn’t sleep either.
Well, just because he’s completely correct doesn’t mean he has to know that.
“No, you woke me up. Now I’ll be tired tomorrow and it’ll be your fault.” Satoru sighs dramatically and returns the favour of shoving the pillow into his face, although he’s more carefully placing it on top of his face – Yeah, they’re both drained. The teen lays his hand on top of the pillow, seemingly rather resting than anything malicious. “Well, we’ll both be tired. You and me, Suguru”, Satoru yawns, patting the pillow.
Suguru half-heartedly shoos Satoru’s hand (and the pillow) away so he can breathe, and Satoru complies for once and just lies down next to him.
“You can’t just make all your problems my problems. You know how much Yaga hates it when we’re overly tired.” Satoru just dismissively waves his hand, tracing the stripes of the pillowcase with the other as he barely even looks up while responding to Suguru. “Why not? I don’t wanna suffer alone.”
Suguru huffs, again, because of course he wouldn’t. Who would? But that still doesn’t give Satoru the right to just dump it onto Suguru, sharing isn’t always caring. He looks to Satoru, lightheartedly jabbing his side. “You know, the universe doesn’t revolve around you”, he mutters.
Satoru shrugs and fluffs the pillow a bit, and with a passive glance besides himself, Suguru realizes that Satoru doesn’t look like he’s quite… There. He’s probably just tired.
“Mhhh. But I revolve around you. I wouldn’t leave.”
Suguru blinks, looking to Satoru who’s just drowsily staring down the pillow, fidgeting with the zipper of its case.
Satoru is still mindlessly mumbling a few sentences, but Suguru has other concerns than his odd blabbering right now.
Did he mean that? Did he even realize what he just said? The guy sure doesn’t look the part for someone who just casually admitted undying loyalty to his best friend.
So he assumes it’s an odd joke – Satoru says a lot of weird shit if you let him talk – and turns away from his friend, closing his eyes. “That might’ve been the cheesiest thing you’ve ever said”, Suguru huffs, facing away from Satoru. “Is the lack of sleep getting to your brain?”
But Satoru doesn’t react, he probably already fell asleep.
Maybe it’s for the better.
The sun hung low, the orange rays stretching over the landscape. The sky painted with such gorgeous colours – beautiful enough to forget what the remains of sunlight were illuminating.
He didn’t dare to look. He was afraid to see the shadow of a man he didn’t want to see anymore.
He couldn’t acknowledge that shadow. Not eleven years ago, not now, not ever. So he had hidden, had limited his field of view and given himself no time to adjust to the slowly ever decreasing light.
Now the darkness was blinding him. He didn’t want to adapt.
Everything felt so dense, like he’d been buried in wool, cotton, yarn. All that’s soft and comfortable sheltered him from the outside world until it was far too late. Wool can hide, cotton can suffocate, yarn can strangle. All his senses, and everything he had had – It all made him blind to what was right in front of him.
And now it was right back, unable to be missed. Not letting him miss it again.
In a shape that he didn’t want to see, he didn’t want this to be real, but it was, wasn’t it? And it was his fault. Because he had been blind in that bubble, all because he had never wanted to look past his own horizon. His own little world.
Now what once was his world was dying in front of him.
“You’re late, Satoru.”
That name, that voice, God, he didn’t want to hear it. He couldn’t want anything less. But he had to. He knew he did this time, or he wouldn’t even be able to return to his make-believe cocoon.
He just stared. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t speak. But it didn’t really matter, did it?
Suguru was still talking. And he was hurt. Badly hurt. His eyes zeroed in on the gaping wound on his left shoulder, unable to focus, and yet the wound was staring back at him.
Cursed energy remnants were floating around it, but Satoru couldn’t concentrate enough to figure out whose. All he could think about was his last words, these were Suguru’s last words. And he was here to witness them. Should he be the last to have seen him?
“To think you’d be the one here at my end”, Suguru rasped. He was injured. Terribly injured, his whole arm was missing. But he could survive, it would just have needed– Shoko. And proper treatment, and time, and- All those things that Suguru didn’t have anymore. He was set out for execution still. Of course he was, he was a mass murderer and a highly dangerous curse user no less.
He would not be left standing this time, would he?
But shouldn’t Suguru Geto have been dead to him for a decade now?
Only when Suguru asked something about his makeshift family, Satoru realized that he had just been staring. He looked down at the injured man in front of him.
But not like that, never like that, Satoru couldn’t ever look down on Suguru. They were on the same level; they always had been. So did it have to be Satoru?
Could it be Satoru?
“Every last one of them managed to escape. The ones in Kyoto were under your orders too, right?”, Satoru answered the figments of Suguru’s question he had actually processed. He was to stay level-headed while on the job, so that was what he was trying to do, he supposed.
Even if that meant he couldn’t breathe a few beats.
He just had to get through this.
Suguru smiled, leaning back, his hand was still holding his injured shoulder. Like that would stop the bleeding, like that would replace the missing limb. But Suguru knew that, Satoru knew, he was just too proud to make his suffering obvious. The more Satoru looked at him, the more signs he saw. His hand was cramping up and he was shaking lightly, likely also from the draining act of having gotten here at all.
He was exhausted. He could finally see that Suguru was at his end. Maybe not only physically. This could not be the only time he had missed the signs, and that fact was starting to dawn on him. All the symptoms and warnings he had– He had what, exactly? Ignored? Not seen? Excused? He was not sure, but he wasn’t sure of much at all anymore, anyway.
Satoru pushed the trains of thought aside; It was far too late now, and, in this moment, he could only focus on one thing at a time.
It was either staying calm or panicking over his past blindness. He had made his choice way too long ago.
Suguru took a sharp breath and mumbled “Yeah, unlike you, I’m a kind man”, huffing and still smiling like he had any energy left. The more Satoru watched him suffer, the more ridiculous the front seemed. Satoru could not exactly blame him, because he would have been doing the same, but he did hate watching him act like everything was fine. Apparently Suguru was not at all bothered that he didn’t answer to the bait, because he just rambled on; “You sent those two assuming that I’d defeat them, didn’t you? To set off Okkotsu?”
Satoru slightly tilted his head. Had he? Had he really assumed that they were doomed to die in battle, a necessary sacrifice?
No. No, he hadn’t.
“I trusted you. Trusted that a man with principles such as yours wouldn’t kill off young sorcerers for no reason.”
All those years and he still could confidently say that he trusted Suguru. It was all so much more than twisted.
“Trust, huh?” Suguru paused, and Satoru knew what he was thinking of. He knew, because he was reliving those same memories.
“I didn’t think I still had any of that left.” But Satoru could not bring himself to react, so the shared moment only lasted a beat, and Suguru seemed to be eager to return the conversation back on track, if there had ever been one in the first place. He shakily fumbled some sort of card out of his torn-up sleeve and handed it to Satoru, who took it without much thought.
“Return this for me, will you?”, Suguru weakly gestured towards the object.
Satoru flipped the aforementioned card around.
Yuta Okkotsu’s student ID.
Huh.
His eyes still on the identification, he remembered a series of events, a certain anxiety that had not known rest since the incident welling up again. Had he always known? He was not sure, and his thoughts may have been racing but that much of a conclusion he could make, even when his head felt wrapped in fabric and his breaths wouldn’t listen anymore.
Where else could Suguru have gotten that ID?
Not looking up, he quietly asked “Was the elementary school your doing as well?”
Suguru was still smiling, expression ever unchanging – Satoru wished he had been, too.
At least one of them had been convinced of their choices until the end.
“Yeah.”
The standing man didn’t spare him a reaction, his sight still lowered. He didn’t want to see the one he had once called his best friend proudly tell him he had, in fact, let curses loose on an elementary school as well as two of Satoru’s students just to secure a special grade for his own sake. That wasn’t the Suguru he’d grown to appreciate, and therefore not the Suguru he’d acknowledge. But, with all his hatred for change, it was in front of his eyes now.
And Satoru knew what he had to do about it.
No matter what it would take from him.
“Do you have any last words?” The lack of emotion in his tone was laughable, but did it matter?
He couldn’t be seen caring about a curse user.
Because that’s what Suguru was now, an enemy, maybe one of the worst in modern history.
Suguru leaned back against the wall, clearly nearing the end of his time. Satoru could not help but wish he had taken his blindfold along now, but he hadn’t. He could not afford to look away here, not this time.
“No matter what anyone says,” and Satoru had almost let himself hope, “I hate those monkeys”, but he managed to silence that spark just as quickly as he had lightened it.
There was really only one person who could ever play with his feelings like that.
“But I never held any hate for those at Jujutsu High”, and Satoru knew, he knew, because he had felt the same, but should he not have? Shouldn’t he have hated Suguru for spiraling? For leaving, for killing, for giving up on himself and Satoru… But no matter what he had ever tried to reason with himself with – He had never hated Suguru. And probably never would.
“I just couldn’t wear a heartfelt smile in this world.”
When Suguru finished speaking, Satoru took a sharp breath, his eyes flicking back and forward between his former best friend’s wounds and his face, and it slowly felt like the suffocation was lifted, maybe this was real, maybe this was how it was meant to be from now on.
Satoru Gojo, the strongest Jujutsu sorcerer, and Suguru Geto, a special grade curse user who brought hell to earth.
Maybe this was all they were anymore.
Former best friends.
Maybe that’s what Suguru was, should have been, for the past ten years.
“Suguru.” The man spoken to actually tilted his head to the side, and whether it was in reaction to the lasting pain or because he wanted to signalize that he was listening, Satoru couldn’t tell, but it didn’t matter regardless.
Satoru knew he was.
“I never left.”
Suguru took a sharp breath, and it felt like he was really looking at Satoru for the first time again, now, as he was squatting in front of him because he didn’t have an option, because he had to do this, because he would do this. They both knew that, like they both knew a lot.
They knew and had known a lot about each other, because even as they had changed over the years, the parts they had kept in memory of each other were just as clear now as they once were.
In a way, they still had been the strongest, hadn’t they?
The most dangerous curse user of modern history, the strongest sorcerer in recent eras – in a way, they had still been the top of the list, together.
That had been a page that Satoru would rip to shreds now. A dead man couldn’t haunt the masses, only people.
And when had Satoru ever been a person? He had been a legend and a myth, an object of caution, but not human. It was just in those years that he had ever been more than his name.
The fatally injured curse user smiled, leaning his head onto his unwounded shoulder as his bangs fell into his face.
“At least curse me a little in the end.”
Satoru stood up, looking down at the one who had been a danger to both non sorcerers and sorcerers alike for the past decade, the one who had been terrorizing innocent and guilty citizens alike.
Curse? He could never have cursed him.
Not Suguru, and, by some miracle, not even the curse user classified as a public danger.
Satoru raised his hand, and the man in front of him didn’t protest. There was nothing left to be said, they both knew what Satoru had to do.
Because they both knew that, like they both knew a lot.
But this was something they wouldn’t be able to share any longer.
Satoru pointed his finger at the other sorcerer, closing his eyes.
He felt it was appropriate to let Suguru Geto be the one that died back in the early 2000s, and not the curse user Satoru Gojo would have killed.
“Cursed Technique Reversal: Red.”
The world lit up as his former light died down, when, after a decade, Gojo finally executed modern history’s most dangerous curse user.
The strongest sorcerer stood alone and all he could think about was how easy it had been to kill the one he had once considered both his equal and his best friend.