Archive of Our Own ^beta

When Gojo Satoru woke up, he was still inside the prison realm. That had been Wrong Thing Number One. 

Wrong Thing Number Two was that he opened his eyes to his best friend, staring at him and smiling just a tiny bit, as if all was right with the world. 

It took him a beat to remember that said best friend has been dead for a while now and that absolutely nothing has been right with the world since his imprisonment.

He blinked a few times, even pinched himself on the arm. Geto Suguru was still there.

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it, Satoru?”

Satoru stopped trying to wake himself and faced the man in front of him properly. 

“Are you that weird brain thing trying to fuck with me right now?”

“What? No. Look,” Suguru took his hand—Satoru jolted at that—and ran it along his forehead. No stitches, no scars: just like how Satoru remembered it. He tried not to think about how easy this came to the other boy still, how this was all familiar and yet strange all the same, how this is the first time his skin met his friend’s in almost a decade. 

He swallowed it all down. “Okay, well, what do you want?”

A beat. Suguru moved to sit beside him. Almost instinctively, he made room.

“Nothing. Just a talk, I guess.”

Satoru scoffed. “That’s suspicious. You’re suspicious.”

“I’m the one that’s suspicious?” 

“I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you were a wanted criminal. Definitely makes you more suspicious than me.” Saying that made him feel like he was doing a gross misstep, but he was gauging the conversation. It was better to look for the barbs now than to accidentally impale himself on them later. 

Thankfully, Suguru only made a face. Satoru made one right back at him. 

Not that much of a fence, then. Easily leapable.

“What are we even supposed to talk about? Been a long time since we spoke.” Satoru said, fidgeting with his sleeve. 

“I wonder why.” Suguru deadpanned.

He stopped fidgeting, fingers hovering a little above the unfortunate sleeve he was picking on. “Am I supposed to apologize?”

Suguru turned to face him properly, his face unreadable. “I told you before, no? If you really wanted to kill me, I’d be okay with it.” 

There’s a meaning to that. 

A sigh. Satoru ran his fingers through his hair. 

Suguru pressed on. “You alone had the right to do that. I’m glad it was you.”

So they were talking. More than that, they were being honest. All of this was oddly new to him; sure, they talked a lot before, but not about the things that mattered. It was strange that he was asking questions now, even stranger that Suguru was actually answering. 

Maybe death did make you a different person.  

“Why are you coming back now, then?”

“Because I woke up.” The answer was simple enough, but gutting all the same. 

Hope came to him in the shape of a knife in his throat, lodging itself just enough in his insides to make him ask— “Can you come back, then?” 

Beside him, he saw Suguru looking at his hands, regarding his fingers in the way one would inspect glass for scratches. He stretched them one way then another. Satoru wondered if he didn’t hear him.

Once, those hands had held Satoru like the passing seasons: cold and clammy in the winter frost, warm and reverent at the break of spring. In the fall, they were sure and steady in the same way gravity brought golden leaves to the ground, and across short summers, they were gentle, strong, and caring—much like Satoru’s Suguru. Those hands had known his for the better part of his youth; they’d shown him what his friend couldn’t say in words, and near the end of the short supercut in which his version of Suguru resided, those hands had been the only ones Satoru allowed to actually touch him. 

“I don’t know,” Suguru finally answered, turning a hand. The one that wasn’t even supposed to be there. “There’s nothing left for me to come back for anyway, I think.”

“Suguru…” You do, Satoru thought. Your girls are still here. Your family. 

Doubt, and then, me.

As if he heard these thoughts, Suguru said, “There’s no place for me anywhere anymore.” He closed his eyes as if he’d confessed and was only waiting for his sentence. Satoru held his breath in expectation. 

“There hasn’t been, even when I was alive.” 

There it was. 

Honesty, destruction, and then peace—that was the order of the world.

“But you made one.”

“It was tiring.” Beneath his thin veneer of nonchalance, Suguru’s honesty was almost devastating. He looked at Satoru now and smiled. “For a while, I was content with the fact that we both existed once, side by side. I had you to live with—and to live for, I guess. Then that got tiring too, so I tried to make a world that was kinder to me and you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

Satoru had tried to make sense of why Suguru was doing what he did despite the knowledge that he’d only get concrete answers from the man himself. Some days, he’d drop it, but other days he’d try to run his brain empty until the morning came and it was time to forget. 

He knew he was only a liar and a coward tacking reminders onto the rising of the sun. In his head, it was always time to forget; the morning made no difference. 

“Because for years I was under the impression that you were angry, but before I died,” Suguru sucked in a breath. “You said you still trusted me. Why couldn’t you have wavered at least once, Satoru?” 

At least curse me a little at the very end.

Something utterly wonderful and horrifyingly terrible struck Satoru at that question. As he looked at Suguru—his best friend, his equal, his but never truly his—he realized that most people loved in shades of black and white, in hard-lined compromises and things set firmly into stone. He and Suguru never had a chance to have any of that. Their lives ran parallel to each other after all: they existed side by side, as Suguru had put it, but they had always been somewhere in the middle of nothing and everything, never meeting. It was almost laughable how poetic their destruction was. What did it matter anyway? Beyond the thick veil that their suffocating shades of gray had formed, Satoru was always there, steadfast and unwavering. 

In a way, Suguru was, too—he was here now, in the kind of gray the rotting dead donned on their skin, telling him things he wasn’t able to say when he had the chance to because Satoru still mattered.

The only tragedy was that Satoru was also trying to make a better world for Suguru. Graduating from that damned school made him want to kill all the higher-ups for stealing his youth away and turning him into a weapon, expecting him to be a mindless soldier in the face of their unchecked tyranny. At the end of the day, who was he serving? Not the people, that’s for fucking sure. There was no justice to be had in a world like theirs. 

Anger flared up inside him. If he got out of this box, he swore to every single god—existing or not—that he’d wreak havoc. 

“Look at this,” Satoru began. “Try to fall on me.”

“I already know what’s going to happen.” Suguru didn’t even look up from his book. 

Said book was snatched away. “Come on.”

He looked up at the boy standing in front of him, unperturbed.

“Please?”

“Would you give that back if I did?”

“Depends.”

“I’m not up for this shit today.”

“Suguru.” 

Silence, and then, slowly, defeat. Suguru sighed and stood up. “How should I do it?”

“Like a trust fall, but facing forward.”

“I swear if I hit the ground—”

“Trust me, hm?”

He looked at Satoru with uncertainty. “Okay. I’m going to look really stupid.” 

“When have you not?”

“Shut up.” He breathed in and closed his eyes, steeling himself for hard impact.

He started falling from where he stood, letting gravity take hold of him. If he got hurt, if Satoru wasn’t there—

Satoru caught him in his embrace, wrapping his arms around him, laughing. He walked a little forward to straighten Suguru's form and nuzzled his face into his hair. “I told you to trust me.”

Suguru was looking at him. It dawned upon him that he was expecting a reply. Quiet down, he thought, anger could wait. During that little flash of emotion, his mind had betrayed him and left him bereft of words. He could only ask, a little hesitantly, “Are you happy now?” 

Suguru looked away and tapped his chin in thought. “Mm. I don’t know. Do I even exist? Can I feel?”

“Stop the shit, Suguru.”

He was only met with a chuckle. “I really don’t know for real this time.” 

“Well, what do you feel? Right now?”

Suguru didn’t reply. He was fixated on something on the ground, brows furrowed just a tiny bit. 

“Anger...disappointment,” and after a few moments, “A little peace, I guess.”

Satoru nodded sagely. “Exactly like a bag of Skittles.”

“Nice to know you’d still be interested in having me as a meal after all this time.” 

Familiarity, loss, then pain: this was another order of the world. 

Still, Satoru kept the mood up. “You said that, not me.”

“You didn’t deny it though.”

Satoru shrugged. “Not like I can lie to you now, out of all the times I could have. So,” he said, trying to steer the conversation back, “why the assorted flavors?”

Suguru let out a bit of a chuckle, and Satoru felt his chest constrict. He remembered, of course he did—it was the exact kind Suguru used to do when he would say something a little less questionable, a little more lovingly. He remembered how he’d been so full of words on softer days, how all of those had been given to his best friend.

“Anger and disappointment because...I heard what you said. I didn’t want to be used like that.” He inhaled. “And peace because I couldn’t do anything if I tried.” A small exhale.

Satoru wanted to bump their shoulders but decided against it. “Bullshit. You tried to strangle him.”

“Yeah, there’s that. But I wasn’t able to do anything, was I?”

“What you did was enough.”

“What if the mission doesn’t go according to plan?” Suguru said as he and Satoru were walking back to the dorms, about to pack for yet another gruelling task. He’d only gotten a week of rest, and he was going alone again. Satoru had been given a mission of his own. 

“You’ll do your best, won’t you? It’s not like you haven’t done individual missions before.” Satoru replied. Suguru produced another candy from his pocket upon seeing his friend finish his last one. At this rate, the boy would die of diabetes, but it was Suguru’s own bad habit to indulge him.  

Satoru cheered at the treat. “This is why you’re my only best friend in the world.” He said, unwrapping the candy and popping it in his mouth. “Shoko would never take care of me like this. She hates me, Suguru.”

Suguru paid no heed to the remark. “I feel uneasy about it though,” he said, trying to continue the prior conversation. He’d stopped wanting to go on missions a few weeks back; he was tired, and he felt like he was dragging his own corpse along with him only to kill it further with every curse he exorcised. More than that, he was angry. He didn’t have to do this for those fucking ungrateful—monkeys—

Satoru looked at him. Suguru thought it was pathetic how fast he tethered him back to reality. 

“You’d be enough. We’re the strongest after all.”

“Will you save me then, Satoru?” He asked, smiling. That bastard. As if he didn’t know that once upon a time, Satoru would have done anything to get him to come back, would have risked so many things—maybe even his life—to save his best friend. His one and only. 

Youth was wicked; it had a way to make everything look brighter than it really was. It washed everything in rose tint and colored even the darkest of things in warm, sunset hues, and Gojo Satoru knew this more than anyone. He had clung onto youth more fervently than anyone ever could a prayer. 

In the few years that followed Suguru’s first string of murders, Satoru was earnest in his efforts to save his friend. He’d told Shoko that he could still be back, that if everything else fails, they’d be able to get through it because of the simple fact that it was them. They would have found a way and nobody would have been able to get to them (except maybe Shoko but Satoru had assumed that she’d be on board if they ever became runaways). 

For the longest time, it was him and Suguru against the world. He stopped believing in that at some point; youth had let him go from its clutches then.

Little by little, he started to accept that Suguru was like sand that cannot remain in the confines of his fingers—and he realized, rather belatedly, that his friend did not need saving; he was the only one who could save himself. He only needed somebody. 

In Suguru’s presence now, Satoru wondered dimly if he’d been able to change things had he found that out a few years sooner. He couldn’t even defend himself by saying he was there when it happened; he was, but not in the way that mattered. 

He looked at the face beside him. There was nothing on it—unexpectant, unpained. Untouched by the world. 

The question hung heavier in the air the longer it went unanswered. Satoru felt it sour with all the weight of the past condensed in a question asked in future tense. If he could taste it now, it would probably have been acid in his mouth. 

“I don’t know, Suguru,” he smiled back, almost mockingly but not quite. “Do you want me to?” 

The bastard laughed. “If I said yes, would you?”

“Of course.” A definite reply, not even half a heartbeat after the question was asked. 

There had never been a doubt about that from the start; Satoru had accepted it long ago as the hard truth that he would fight tooth and nail for Geto Suguru. There was always going to be a place in his world for him, for them. 

It seems that even in death and demise, that statement rang true.

“There’s a difference between you and me,” Shoko said one day when they were both sitting in the morgue, her legs swinging from one of the metal slabs in the middle of the room. “I save everyone because it’s my duty to, and you save everyone because you think it’s the right thing to do. But who would you fight for?” 

“Isn’t it the same thing?” Suguru lit up a cigarette and offered one again to Shoko, knowing she wouldn’t take it this time. She had her own pack out anyway.

“Is it? I’ve seen you save yourself repeatedly. And yet,” she looked at him, blowing smoke in his direction. “I’ve never seen you fight for yourself. Not once.”

“Did you have any regrets, then? I was unsaveable after all.” Suguru laughed sarcastically, looking up at the ceiling. (At least, Satoru labelled it as a ceiling for now. His brain would hurt if he tried so much as to think for three seconds about whether or not this place had ceilings. And floors, for that matter; he was in a goddamned cube.)

“Hm, maybe one.” Satoru lied.

“Only one?”

“What, you want me to have a lot? I’m already half-ghost at this point.” He tried to pass it off as a jest; honesty came best coated in sugar after all. 

It didn’t escape him that he’d failed miserably at trying to do that. Well, he wasn’t a baker. 

Suguru was unfazed. “I don’t know, when we were younger you wanted to do all these things.” 

With me, Satoru almost heard him say. He was right. There was a lot of life to be lived back then. 

He shook his head. “I’m starting to have more regrets as we speak, Suguru.” 

“Ah. Well, should we not speak anymore?”

Satoru thought it was pathetic how fast he answered no in his head. He waited for a few moments to answer because—and he stressed this—he was a very calm and composed individual. “That’s not what I meant.”

Suguru leaned back. “Well then what is it?”

“What is what?”

“Your regret.”

“You wouldn’t want to know.”

“I’m dead, Satoru. It literally does not matter.”

“Thanks for telling me! I totally needed to be reminded of that.” 

Suguru only shrugged. This man seriously had to be demoted to something less than “bastard”. How dare he do this to his best friend forever? (Yes, forever, Satoru was going to indulge himself with that much. He was confident enough to say that now anyway after all that has been said.) Satoru exhaled dramatically. 

Turns out it was more than the normal human lung can handle, but he was the greatest, so of course he didn’t cough. He would never! He was only sighing in staccato. 

Suguru said nothing at this and only patted his back as he hacked air out of his lungs. Maybe he didn’t deserve to be demoted to something less than “bastard” after all. 

When that entire debacle was done, Satoru finally cracked it out. “I regret that I didn’t tell you sooner.” 

The mood dampened. 

When Satoru was younger, he believed that the universe hated him as much as it loved him. That was his own kind of heavenly restriction: his power was balanced out by the way he had to suffer at the perversity of the universe’s whims. Over the years, he’d proven that theory again and again to himself, with the most recent evidence being only last year—the universe finally gave him the chance to tell his best friend that he was the only one he’d ever loved and will ever love, and that he had never once thought their friendship had ended. That, of course, had to happen mere minutes before he had to kill him.

At first, he was scared that Suguru wouldn’t understand, but then of course he did. He saw it in the way his face crumpled just a miniscule amount before it returned to whatever neutral setting it was on. 

“Yeah, you should have.” He said softly, and was obviously trying not to look at him. Satoru noted that with humor. Suguru hasn’t changed in that aspect, then—eyes still scared him in the face of pure honesty.

“Would that have changed anything?” Satoru wondered out loud, trying to stop himself from teasing the man beside him. 

“Probably not, but…I think it would have solved one of my regrets too.”

“That being?” Satoru replied, perhaps a little too eagerly. 

Suguru started fiddling with whatever was on the floor. Satoru would be hard-pressed to call that dust. “I wanted to tell you too.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Why didn’t you?”

Satoru really wanted to headbutt him. “Can you stop answering my questions with more questions?”

“Can you stop answering my questions with more questions?” Suguru mocked. “No.”

“Give that back, asshole!” Suguru said in indignation at the removal of his hair tie.

“Foul words at nine in the morning, I see. What put our emo boy in a bad mood?”

“You, probably.” Shoko called out from the neighboring table. 

Satoru stuck out his tongue at her. Suguru swiped in to take the elastic before the gremlin had the chance to reallocate the entirety of his attention to him and further torment him.

“I let you get it, you know,” the white-haired boy said, all snooty and shit. 

“I let you get it, you know,” Suguru mocked. “Whatever.” 

From the other end, Shoko massaged her temples.

“Tell me about your other regrets then.” 

“Well, there’s my family. The girls especially. I felt genuine happiness in seeing them grow, and now I won’t be able to…” He closed his eyes, and for the first time, Satoru saw the faintest traces of pain in his face. And then quietly, as if saying it too loud would make it false, Suguru said, “I hope they live long.” 

Satoru nodded. He understood—if they were to switch places, his students would also be part of his regrets. He wanted to see them off as his equals, and he swore to hell that he would have lingered around as a spirit until then if he wasn’t given the chance to see that while he breathed. 

He thought of Megumi and withered at having to leave him without giving the boy something to part by, of Yuuji and Yuuta and what would happen to them if he died. He ached suddenly. Just a miniscule amount, but present nonetheless.

“And I also wanted to tell you back then—” Suguru stopped abruptly.

A few beats passed in silence before Satoru spoke. “I thought you were going to finish that sentence.”

“Decided against it. It doesn’t matter now.” 

Satoru made a face at him, the absolute prick. 

“That would be more effective if you took your blindfold off, you know.”

“What, and have you tantalized right here in the motherfucking prison realm?”

Suguru rolled his eyes at him. “Shut up.”

“You know you love them.” Satoru teased, grinning.  

Suguru made to snatch his blindfold, but he’d predicted that and recoiled just in time. “Why are you so aggressive today? Aren’t you supposed to be well-mannered or something? Stop trying to actively attack me.”

“Ah. I used to do that passively before I died.”

“Did you?”

“Maybe.”

“This is a twist.” Satoru said in half-feigned shock. “This has shaken my world.”

“What does that even mean?”

“I don’t know, I never felt passive attacks from you. Maybe you meant active ones.”

“Perhaps you just didn’t know it was me.”

Satoru looked at him dead-on, and softly said, “I’d know it was you.”

Suguru saw that Zen’in freshman move in his periphery. He was prepared to leave; that was Satoru’s student after all. He had no plans to bother them yet.

“Hey!” Satoru’s voice cut through the air—always so confident, always so uniquely his. Suguru wouldn’t mistake that voice for anyone else in the world even if it were a whisper.

He looked at them properly now, frozen in place. Satoru was dragging his student back and was blabbing about how dreadful it was that they missed something in a shop down the road. He noted the urgency with which Satoru was walking his student away from him and laughed.

Just as he was about to turn back, Satoru looked him dead in the eye (he assumed, that fool was always wearing his blindfold) and smiled. 

“Would you really attack me though?” 

Silence. “Depends.”

Satoru only hummed in reply. What was trust between two friends after all? “How would you have done it?”

“What, attacked you?”

“Yeah?”

“Why would you even ask that?”

“I don’t know, you were always the type of person to be like,” Satoru scrunched his nose. “Polite. How would the most fearsome—but alas! Also the most polite—curse user Geto Suguru attack me?” He perked up, a slow smile spreading across his face. “I bet you killed people politely.”

“Oh, I used to.”

Satoru only nodded, as if in deep thought. “That doesn’t make sense at all, but okay.”

“Does it have to?” Suguru exhaled, not quite a laugh, but the mirth was palpable nonetheless. “You never do anything politely anyway.”

“That’s because I don’t have to.” Satoru put his hands in his pockets. “People give under me, you know.”

“Surely you know how that sounds.”

“Why, you jealous?” Satoru would definitely have been whacked upside the head if this conversation happened in high school. 

“No, and for the record, you were the one giving under me.”

“Fuck you.” He flipped Suguru off.

He was only met with a laugh. “Gladly.”

Silence settled once again. It was a little more comfortable now, but heavy nonetheless.

Suguru still hadn’t answered on how he’d actually attack him but he’s going to let that one slip. He would be a liar if he said he didn’t miss this: banter with his best friend as if there was absolutely nothing worth being serious about in the world, their lightning-fast remarks ricocheting off of each other. If he closed his eyes now he could almost taste the years he’d lost to grief, all fading away in the presence of the one person he’d ever made time for to grieve. It was just them, now, here. This familiarity was a weight on him. 

Would it hurt just to add a little more? 

“Can I…?” He said, nodding a little to his friend’s shoulder (The one that isn’t supposed to be there, the back of his mind remarks for the second time. He pushes it away.).

Suguru eased his seat a little bit and scooted closer to Satoru. “Sure. Here.”

He leaned his head. This was something he’d done a million times before; his head still slotted perfectly into place because his body knew exactly how to adjust. It was muscle memory at this point. 

During downtimes when they didn’t have anything to do, they’d looked exactly like this, content in each other’s presence as the sun went down and hid behind the trees that lined the outside of their dorms. Someone could even cut them out from this scene now and paste them in the folds of their memories, and it would have been believable. 

Satoru found it increasingly ironic that what they were doing now was some kind of twisted caricature of what they had been before. It felt like the universe was laughing at him again. It allowed him time to be in his friend’s presence without any sides pulling on them, but on one condition: it had to be with him powerless in a box, his friend beside him just a faint memory of someone long gone. The strongest, together, broken.

“Let’s stay here.” Satoru whined. “Yaga won’t do shit anyway.”

“Satoru.”

“Suguru.” 

“We need to—”

“Nope, we don’t need to do anything. Can’t hear you.” He turned his head a little on Suguru’s shoulder to cover both his ears.

Suguru sighed and removed them gently. “Okay,” he relented, because he didn’t want to do anything either. “Let’s stay here.”

Satoru was feeling a little brave in this little space he had for himself on Suguru’s shoulder, so he said: “You smiled a lot today.”

A faint trace of surprise took hold of Suguru. Satoru could tell by the way he straightened just a little bit. “Did I? Hm.” 

He felt a head on top of his, settling slowly, carefully. “That’s good, then.”

“Your smiles are always nice to see.” He said quietly, trying not to break the fragility of the moment. 

“So are yours.” 

Satoru wanted to cry. 

He’d felt as if he was cursed by the relentless passage of time tormenting him with repetitions he couldn’t escape. The last time he cried was in December, and before that, another December years prior. It was always in that goddamn month, when he was doing his best trying to pick himself up like he perpetually was. 

In December, his insides were always frozen still, and it was never because of the weather. In December, he was reminded of his best friend, gaze cold and distant, slipping away from him to a place Satoru couldn't reach. In December, his best friend had—

“Hey.” Suguru said, snapping him out of his reverie. His breathing had turned erratic. 

“Hm?”

“Are you okay?”

“Just...” He just wanted to stay here for a while. Suguru moved a bit so Satoru wasn’t straining his neck. 

A little while later, “How have you been, Suguru?”

Silence, and then— “Same as before.” 

Would he have received that answer if he had asked him on time? 

“Not happy?”

Above him, he felt Suguru nod, his cheek brushing his hair. 

“Oh.” 

After their fallout, it had been his wish for Suguru to experience as much freedom as he could. Happiness, maybe, and peace, in spite of all he had done. Things he couldn’t afford to have had if he stayed.

“How have you been, Satoru?”

He almost felt sorry that he’d asked that question in the first place, because now it was being returned to him. See, that was the easiest question to lie to—he could say he was fine and that would be the end of it. 

He wouldn’t have to tell him about the sleepless nights turning into mornings following Suguru’s defection: the way the sun’s relentless cycle of yellow, orange, and pink used to be beautiful because they always stared at it together, but now it rotted into aching reminders that the days pressed on with or without him. He wouldn’t have to confess to the way he wasted away with countless missions and tried to succumb to mindlessness until he became numb to everything that came to him, the way he became a little more ruthless, a little angrier despite his supposed loss of feeling. He’d tried to laugh it off many a day because why did it matter? He was still the strongest, and this was what he was meant to do. 

Most of all, he didn’t have to tell him that after he killed the only person who was able to understand him—to see him as someone fully human, not the strongest, not a weapon—he didn’t even have the privilege to feel. All he could think about was how he wanted to be a ghost just to be with him, because he didn’t want him to be alone in death. 

He’s been grasping at nothing since then. He’s been staring at countless reflections in as many mirrors and they all told him he looked like he was doing well but that was all bullshit. Every day he died a little more, and every day he had to remind himself that goddamn, he had to keep it together because the world would fall apart without him. The world was his curse. His memories were his curse. Every taste of the future was stained with the past and he didn’t even have the time to think about any of it. 

The simple truth was that he’s been living. On some days, it was easy. Those were the days he taught Yuuji a trick he could do with his newfound abilities, introduced Nobara to a new place in the city, watched fondly—no, helped—as the two drove Megumi up the wall. But being around them was sometimes a double-edged sword. Sure, it helped him forget but it also reminded him of how they were, how they could’ve been, how they—

It was never up to him anyway. He only had control over whether he died today, or carried on another day. And so, he lived on, and on, and on, because that’s how living is. Because he could, because he had to. Because the only best friend he had once told him that living was the act of stitching yourself back up, so he did, again and again, and look at that, Suguru. Are you proud?

“Same as before,” he answered finally.

He was suddenly so...tired. Is this what Suguru meant when he said it was tiring? He chuckled. Turns out that facing the unbridled truth took more out of you than any special grade curse would. 

He remembered his earlier vow to wreak havoc if he could escape the box, and closed his eyes. No, that wasn’t what he wanted, not really. What he wanted was—

“You know, if I were to be selfish, I could probably just die,” He mused. At least if he died here, now, he’d be buried with half of his soul next to him. 

He’d finally be on time for Suguru. 

I’m sorry it took this long.

“You’re sleepy.” Suguru said, more of a statement than a question. He sensed the mood, probably; he always tried to force Satoru into resting whenever he’d come crashing down on days that sucked the life out of them. 

“Tired,” Satoru corrected, because there was a difference. Sleepy meant you were complete, and ready to rest. Tired meant your body was telling you to rest because you couldn’t do it anymore.

“Mhm, so be selfish now and rest.” 

Suguru was always so good to him. No, he wanted to scream. If I wake up, you might not be here anymore. But he was Gojo Satoru; he was brave, and he was used to his other half not being there. After all, the world only remembered him alone. It had buried what was left of Geto Suguru ages ago. 

“Just one more question, Suguru,” he pleaded, because he really wanted to know, and because he was scared that all of this would be lost if he let himself go just for even a split-second. “Why are you really here?”

A little above him, he heard a soft sigh. “Did my first answer not satisfy you enough?”

“Would I be asking now if it did?”

“You never change, do you?”

Satoru shook his head. A few seconds passed before he was given an answer.

“I’m looking,” Suguru said in the quietest of voices, “to see if...I can save you. You woke me up after all.” 

There was nothing more powerful than someone who had nothing to care for anymore. Satoru had seen this before in a man clad in black, scarred on the mouth—a man who embraced death more willingly than he did life. 

Would he be selfish? Can he be selfish? If Suguru were able to come back and take hold of his body to save him, he’d have to watch his best friend die because of him again. The universe was clearly taunting him, and he was tired; he didn’t want to fight anymore, didn’t want to feel anymore. He just wanted to rot to death in this blasted box so he wouldn’t have to go through that again. But he knew he couldn’t. 

“You don’t have to.” That was all he could say. Someone else was going to save him, he was sure. It didn’t have to be this way.

“I want to.” Suguru answered, ever the righteous.

Satoru understood. He would have done the same.

“Are you happy with my answer?”

He wasn’t happy, not at all. 

“Yeah.”

“Mm. Then will you rest now?” 

He wanted to take his best friend’s hand so much, see their hands intertwined even for just a second. But he couldn’t, not anymore. So he settled for asking—

“Will you stay?” 

Above him, where Satoru couldn’t see, Suguru smiled.

“I already have.” 

Gojo Satoru woke up, still in the prison realm. There were tears in his eyes. One, two—he lost count. He let them fall.