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"I should've killed him."
Shoko doesn't choke on her drink, she holds her breath and swallows with the control of a prostitute who only gets paid at the end of the night, then she drags the back of her sleeve across her mouth and looks up squinting and thinks: god, what fucking date is it.
There are the obvious ones: birthdays, holidays, star vessel mission, defection day. Shoko doesn't exactly remember them so much as feel them in the back of her skull like shift in atmospheric pressure. Which could also be a literal shift in atmospheric pressure, if she is unfortunate enough to wake up within a hundred miles of Satoru that morning.
Maybe Satoru doesn't remember them either, because they already had D-day this year and today is just a normal ass Tuesday night, as far as she can tell through the growing pile of empty glasses. Not enough to be drunk yet, which is the first unfortunate consequence of putting every night on Satoru's tab for the last ten years.
The other one is sitting right next to her, a flop of white hair on the counter, sticking his fingers in a glass of liquor to make a whirlpool.
Her glass of liquor, as it had been for all of two seconds when the bartender set it down. First anomaly of the night. Satoru doesn't drink because it takes at least five hundred grams of sugar and a vow of seppuku if he doesn't like it to make anything stay in his mouth, and thank god because he's not only an absolutely ridiculous lightweight (Shoko won 0 yen off this because no one was betting), but also the saddest fucking drunk in the whole damn world. Shoko doesn't care what kind of sugar high Satoru gets himself into as long as he's not expressing a single iota of meaningful emotion at her while she's trying to spend the night with the devil between the fifth and seventh glass.
"I should've killed him," Satoru repeats, but it sounds more like I'shnmv hld hm between the slur and the fabric of his sleeve. He's half a glass in. Fuck you, Shoko thinks mournfully, I want my normal Tuesday night back.
"Who," she says out loud, flat and cruel like a frying pan hitting the counter. Satoru rolls his head twenty degrees to the left to look at her with one big wet pathetic blue eye and she meets it with another swig of alcohol. She doesn't choke on this one even despite the lump in her throat. They should let her take that prostitute's place, at least she'd be getting paid for taking care of sad young men.
God I need a smoke, she thinks. Which is an annoying thing to think because she doesn't actually like the feeling of taking multiple drugs at once.
"Okay," she says instead. "You did. Bam. Right through the fuckin' heart." She folds three fingers and performs a crude imitation of gun recoil. "Feel better?"
Satoru makes a whine like she had just killed his puppy in front of him. Which she didn't. Suguru is more like a cat— you think you know him until he leaves you bleeding from all the places you tried to love him with.
Shoko doesn't love very many things. A lesbian in bum-fuck nowhere-ville keeps her hands to herself and her dreams until the girl is gasping the name of god into her mouth in the back of the church. It was the only time they've ever spoke, then her boyfriend drove by with a fury and an empty glass bottle.
A lesbian fresh out of bum-fuck nowhere-ville finds a gay guy pining after a lost cause, traces the scar on her thigh, and thinks, cruelly, stupidly, morbidly curious, let's see if it ends the same wherever we go.
She was such a fucking moron for that one.
"Okay," she says again. "So why—" Satoru is not finishing that drink. His eyes are already glassy in that way that means he's not so much seeing her as he is seeing everything around and in and relative to her and inferring the shape of her words from the flow of blood to her lips. "Why." She swallows the rest of her glass and slides it across the bar with a flick of her wrist, it bumps against Satoru's, making a cheerful little clink sound. "Why should you."
Satoru furrows his brow like its a question he has to think about. As if he can think at all, probably high on his own cursed technique. Stronger drug than anything Shoko's ever had, probably. She's getting a little jealous. Shoko snaps her fingers under the table and his eye twitches.
"Cause," Satoru slurs. "Would feel worse."
"You're such a fucking moron," she informs him.
Suguru had laughed, hollow and startled and self-deprecating, when she told him the same. Suguru was always wanting things he can't have. Loving things he can't keep. It was bound to get him killed eventually. In the back of an alley with a knife through his throat, if not by curses.
"I don't think he's ever going to find out if you don't tell him," she had said. "You gonna live with that?" Her chopsticks had snapped unevenly. She pulled the jutting wood apart in strips and imagined it a human body. Skin, tissue, muscle, bone. By the time she gets to heart there's nothing left.
"Yes," he had replied. "I'm counting on it." The microwave punctuates his sentence like an alarm. Neither of them bothered to heed it.
She wishes miserably that she was having this conversation with Suguru instead. At least Suguru knows what he wants. At least Suguru knows he can't have it.
At least Suguru isn't sitting next to her, sticking his stupid, grimy fingers down a bar glass and having stupid, grimy feelings about a man that should be dead. Isn't kicking her feet under the table and staring at her with all the awareness of a goddamned snail. Isn't following her out at night because he feels like shit and wants them both to feel like shit. Isn't throwing his arm around her shoulder, isn't yelling into her ear, isn't giving her a headache and a heartache and an I-need-a-smoke-ache. Isn't, isn't, isn't. Suguru always isn't.
"Shokooo," Satoru whimpers. Shoko looks at him over the empty bar stool between them.
"You should've killed him. " She says. Cruelly. Shoko likes to think she isn't cruel. She likes to think she's just necessary.
The way a reader is necessary. The way a coward is necessary. The way an ex-girlfriend is necessary.
"How can you be sure," Shoko had said, one night, when it was just them, the heatwave, and a dead rabbit they scraped off the street. "That he's not just straight?"
It was a stupid question. It was like asking are you positive the rabbit's dead? should we ask it? There are tire marks, there are guts and blood and fur. There's a stain on the road that everyone will wrinkle their nose at but no one will care to clean. Suguru paused to wipe the sweat from his brow. A streak of dirt across his forehead like a scar. He gave her a look, and then kept digging.
Shoko rolled her eyes. Prodded the dirt with her shoe in a pitiful imitation at helping. "I hope," she muttered, "for your sake, that he's straight as a ruler. As a telephone pole. As Nanami's spine when Yaga walks in. As Gakuanji's dick when—"
"Shoko," Suguru sighed.
"Why," she snapped back. "Are you doing any of this."
Suguru glanced down at the rabbit. Its white coat is almost impossible to see, covered in blood and grime, steeped in night. "Doesn't it feel bad?"
"I didn't run it over."
"You're not talking about the rabbit."
"I'm talking about the rabbit." Shoko was not talking about the rabbit. "You wanted to talk about the rabbit."
Suguru sighed again. "Everyone at med school must think you're going into nursing, with that bedside manner."
"If I was their nurse they'd wish I was their mortician."
Suguru started digging again. "Guess we're the lucky ones then. We don't just have to wish."
Satoru stares at her uncomprehendingly. Shoko thinks her beside manner is quite good, when her patients can't hear her. "You should've killed him," she says again, each word flat and rising. "You should've thrown a fit in the middle of that goddamn street. You should've leapt at him and demanded an answer. You should've screamed. You should've screamed." She's drunk. "You should've said those magic words, don't you love me? and thrown your heart at him and shouted 'catch motherfucker' and he would've—" She's drunk. "—would've goddamn caught it. Would've gone down without a fight. And even if he took it with him and crushed it to pieces he goddamn deserved to hold it even for a second—" She's drunk. She's drunk. "—because you're a fucking moron." She's drunk, she's drunk, she's drunk, she's— "And so am I."
She reaches for her cup. It's empty.
She buries her head in her hands. "Fuck."
The bar is loud. It's so loud. She breathes in the scent of her own breath, alcohol and cigarette smoke and the hallucination of a dusty church pew. Is it projection if she's right? Is it love if she doesn't give a damn about what it is?
Satoru hums, like a philosophy professor who doesn't know the answer to that question but can't stand to admit it. She feels him take her hand in his. His stupid, alcohol-wet, infinity-free, hand. Something drips down her nose bridge and she doesn't know what it is. Goddammit.
"S'just a normal Tuesday," Satoru sniffs. "What's wrong w'you?"
Goddammit.
"Satoru," she croaks, breathless, hopeless, helpless. Grief-drunk and migraine-dizzy. "I'm going to kill you."