Chapter Text
I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.
- Haruki Murakami
It's almost a relief.
He smiles, and it's not false. Everything has snapped into place with a beautiful clarity. He knows now, which path to take. The agonizing coil of doubt that has been chewing him up from the inside out is silent.
It's so easy. The screams of the village fill his ears, and all he can think is, It's so easy.
He doesn't feel a thing.
*
Mimiko and Nanako wait until he tells them it's safe to come out. They creep forward, clinging to each other, unwilling to let go long enough to take his hand.
"You did all this for us?" Nanako asks, voice wavering.
"Yes," he says. "For you, and all sorcerors."
She looks up at him, confusion and doubt in her eyes, which look overlarge in her too-thin face. She doesn't understand yet. But she will.
"Come," he says, more gently. "Let's go somewhere better."
*
The thing is, he didn't plan to kill his parents. It just - happens.
He needed somewhere safe to go. Somewhere to take the girls, just until he could figure out his next steps. It's not like he can take them to the school; that's where sorcerors go to die. And that horrid little village - well, it was nearer to his hometown than a mission has taken him in a long time.
His parents never hated him, is the thing. They were disappointed in him, sure. Didn't know how to handle him, absolutely. But they never hated him. It would have been easier if they had.
*
"...Those girls. Are they your kind?"
His whole body goes stiff. Behind him, Mimiko and Nanako have started trembling. A thousand memories flash through his mind, a thousand little moments of ostracization. It is not even a conscious decision. Blood splatters across his face. His mother screams once, high and guttural and haunting. Then she dies too.
Their torn and mangled bodies, thumping to the floor. Blood spreading on the floorboards of his childhood home.
This was a mistake. He should not have come here. He forgot, almost let himself forget, that his parents are also monkeys.
The girls aren't trembling anymore, but it's the stillness of a mouse before a hawk. There's blood on their clothes too, now, and that isn't right. It's just not right.
"Girls," he hears himself say, soft and almost unbothered, "let's get cleaned up."
So they do. They get cleaned up and Suguru packs himself a go-bag. Snacks from the pantry, a couple of changes of clothes, the money in his father's wallet. (He had a third-grade curse retrieve it from the pocket of the cooling corpse, unable to bring himself to touch it). They leave out the front door and this time Mimiko surprises him, tucking her doll in the crook of one arm so she can reach out with the other and hold Suguru's hand.
His hand is the one shaking now, he notices.
(His father's death was silent, but there's a part of his mind that hasn't stopped replaying his mother's last scream.)
*
They pile back into the car. He wasn't really conscious of it, until this moment, that he's been driving someone else's car. It's not the window's, anyway. (What happened to the window?) Where did he even get the keys? From some other corpse's pocket?
It's dark out, now. Suguru stares at his hands on the steering wheel. He doesn't see any blood.
His parents had to go. They always would have had to go. He can't go making exceptions, not even for himself. Especially not for himself.
"Um, Getou-sama?" Nanako speaks up. "Where are we going?"
They're depending on him. He's all they have. They're all he has. "Somewhere better," he says again, and really tries to make himself believe it.
They wind up in a run-down hotel room, paid for in cash. Mimiko and Nanako panic when he catches them sneaking snacks out of the go-bag. He has to reassure them they can eat whenever they want, and still they share the bag of chips furtively, cramming handfuls into their mouths like they think he'll take it away from them.
Suguru doesn't eat. He turns off the lights and lies on his back in the bed, and after a bit the girls climb up and curl up with him. They must be exhausted, because they fall asleep quickly, slumped against him and each other like puppies, snuffling softly in their sleep.
Suguru stares at the ceiling. Everything will be different now. He should feel afraid. Of himself, of the future. But his mind keeps snagging on that: everything will be different now. It's the closest thing he's known in a long time to hope.
I wouldn't feel a thing, Satoru said that day.
Suguru lies in the dark with the blood of over a hundred on his hands, and all he can bring himself to feel is relief.
*
His eyes snap open to the ceiling of his dorm in Jujutsu Tech with the familiar queasy feeling of someone who had ingested too many curses the day prior.
What the f*ck. What the f*ck.
The nausea surges and he scrabbles to the bathroom, retching over the sink. There's little to bring up but water and stomach acid; he hasn't eaten in close to 24 hours. He made himself choke down a granola bar before the mission to XX village-
No, he didn't, that didn't happen. It was a dream. A dream. Right?
Suguru has never had such a vivid dream before.
Real or not real?
An old, old hysteria tries to rear its head.
Suguru slides down the cabinet, slumped on the bathroom floor, and stares at his hands. He vividly remembers cleaning blood out from under his fingernails. Which is stupid, because when would blood have gotten under his fingernails anyway? He had his curses do all the killing.
Even -
God. Dreaming about killing his parents? Why would his mind come up with that? Suguru doesn't hate them. It would be easier if he did. He's not close with them - (and the ache of that has lessened over the years) - but he doesn't hate them.
And the little girls? Where had that come from? They felt so real. He could almost feel a pang of grief that they're not real (it was the first time he hadn't felt alone since Satoru died), but he should just be grateful that no real child was suffering like that. It was like - some horribly amplified version of childhood fears plucked from his psyche. It's been so long since he's had a nightmare about being driven out of his hometown - of their distrustful, ignorant faces- he almost forgot he used to.
It takes some time for Suguru to get himself off that bathroom floor. He keeps thinking of all those screams, paralyzed with guilt and shame. Not even for the killing, but for how relieved he felt in the dream. For how his chest is clenching with despair to wake up and find himself not a murderer on the run from jujutsu society, but simply a student who has to get up and do his job.
He didn't escape anything. He's still going to have to go out there and choke down curse after curse for monkeysthe ungrateful masses. Achingly alone, because Satoru is never around anymore, because Suguru can no longer keep up. Because Shoko is unreachable in her studies and it’d be unthinkable to taint her with his struggle, and Nanami is bitter and distant in his grief. Because Suguru may be second best now but he's still the second best and the missions they shove down his gullet are unending. And so he will trudge through hell, unprotesting, because - because -
Don't think about it. Nothing good happens when he thinks about it. He just has to get through the day.
He doesn't notice until twenty minutes into the car ride, the 'Village XX' stamped at the top of the file.
*
It's with a growing sense of surrealism and dread that he watches the countryside change as they approach the village. It doesn't mean anything, he tells himself. Coincidences exist. Deja vu is common, even strong deja vu. Just the mind playing tricks.
(Real or not real?)
The coincidences keep piling up. Suguru feels like he's in a daze by the time he gets out of the car to greet the detestable man who was the first to die yesterday.
It's deja vu, he insists to himself. Just deja vu. He keeps telling himself that right up until he's led into the room where he locks eyes with the two little girls in the cage. A strange sound comes out of Suguru, then. Something like a wheeze. It takes him a long moment to realize it's a laugh. That he's still laughing. Doubled over, palms on his knees.
"I see," he says, pleasantly. "Then die!"
It seems to take longer, the second time. It seems to go on forever. He doesn't remember this many details from the first massacre. But this doesn't feel dreamlike, or even surreal. It's almost hyperreal. Technicolor splashes of blood, a skull split open like a melon, fat and muscle peeling away from bone. He's no stranger to gruesome sights, but it's usually after the fact. A group of children runs shrieking in terror across the dirt path, and Suguru's stomach lurches, his arm whipping out, but he's too slow to tell the curses to stop. The little bodies crunch and twist like insects under a heel. Monkeys, they were just monkeys. No reason to spare them. They'll all have to be purged.
This is necessary. This is good.
Still, he drags the bodies of the children out of the way so Nanako and Mimiko won't have to see them on the way to the car. Thinks, ah. That's where the blood under my fingernails came from.
"You're safe now," he tells the girls, and they creep out after him, wide-eyed in wonder. Trusting him implicitly, just because he's the same as them, because now they know they're not alone. (The same feeling he once found in a pair of blue eyes.)
He pries the keys from a man’s cooling, stiffening fingers; he’d been running for the car in some vain hope of escape. Mimiko and Nanako squeeze into the passenger seat, small enough they can both fit if they don't mind being cramped, not wanting even to be as far away from him as the back row. Suguru doesn't have the heart to make them move. He puts his hands on the steering wheel and realizes, there in the car, that he's going to have to kill his parents again.
It almost undoes him right then. Somehow he manages to pull himself together enough to drive the car without getting in an accident. He rehearses it in his heart the whole way there: nothing for it. There's really nothing for it. They're monkeys, so they have to die.
What is he losing, really. They never understood him. They never truly listened to him. (They tried, they tried so hard to help him, but they could never understand what he needed. How could they have understood?)
They get to the house and the girls follow him in nervously.
"Suguru," his mother says, "we weren't expecting you. Are you alright?"
Each step feels like thousand-ton weights are on his ankles. He sits down heavily at the kitchen table.
"Who are these girls?" his father asks. "Are they... your kind?"
Mimiko and Nanako stiffen. Suguru realizes that he killed his parents right in front of them last time. They didn't make a sound. God, what a mess. "Girls, go upstairs," he says, and they only hesitate for a moment before obeying[, scurrying out of sight].
"Suguru," his father says, more sternly. "Are you in some kind of trouble? Something gone wrong at that school?"
Suguru's head drops into his hands, shoulders shaking in a silent, hysterical laugh. He has to do this. He knows he can do this. He knows that because he's already done it.
There will be so many more people civilians monkeys to purge after this. He has to prove to himself he can do it. He can't be a hypocrite about this; Getou Suguru never, ever does anything halfway.
There are reasons. Old bitternesses to remember like reopening old wounds. None of them worth killing over- but it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, because none of that is why he's doing this. They're monkeys. They have to die. That's all. If he can't prove to himself that he can do this - that he can harden his heart enough to do what it takes - his mission is dead in the water before it starts. He may as well turn himself in to Jujutsu Tech right now.
"Don't push him," his mother chides, and something in Suguru snaps. He stands, summoning two of his strongest curses. They hover over his shoulders. Ready and waiting for his command. His hand is outstretched. It shakes.
Many non-sorcerors temporarily gain the ability to see curses when their lives are in danger. He knows the instant his parents finally see, for the first time, the monsters that have haunted Suguru all his life. They go all bug-eyed and pale.
"Suguru," his mother quavers, "Is that-"
Suguru sees, a split second before he gives the command, his father realize what is going to happen. His mother doesn't know. She's terrified, but in an abstract way, the same way Suguru was terrified as a child of the low-grade curses that stared at him and never approached. In his father's eyes there is a brief war of betrayal, grief, and acceptance.
But no shock. No rage.
Suguru thinks it might be the worst thing he's ever seen.
It's quick; they don't have time to scream. Their bodies thud to the floor, so much meat. Suguru mechanically walks up the stairs and gathers the girls again. He takes a change of clothes. Some food. They drive to a hotel and check in. Suguru remembered to take some real food this time, not just snacks, but he couldn't remember how to put it together right now if he wanted to. He leaves the girls to their chips and lays down on the bed.
His mind keeps replaying memories. Not his parents' final moments, but moments before that.
Their palpable embarrassment of their strange, unsociable son. Their disappointment in the only child they were likely to ever have after struggling through a difficult pregnancy. The loathing that built in Suguru, toward himself before anything else: I'm trying, I'm trying to be a good son, I don't know how to be anything other than what I am.
He didn’t know. He couldn’t have known then. He could only listen to what they told him, and try to decide whether their world was more real than his own. He could only try to fit in, make them proud, somehow always falling short. Always too late; he’d started seeing curses when he was too young to know how to lie. To know to keep the filth inside where it belonged, to deal with it on his own. Small towns don’t forgive, and they don’t forget.
"I'd be different if I could!" Suguru screamed once, but even then he knew end result was all that really mattered.
Slowly: anger toward others, instead. "You know I love you, right, Suguru?" his mother asked, so exhausted, when he shrugged off her hug.
"Yeah," he said, shortly, and locked himself in his room. He knew. But it didn't fix anything. Not a single thing.
He remembers how he doesn't remember half of middle school. Because he'd been through half a dozen psychiatrists by then, and the medications made the world thick and syrupy. Made him quieter. Easier to manage. But the monsters were still there. Because he wasn't crazy, wasn't crazy, wasn't crazy. But no one believed him, not even his parents, the ones who should believe in him, be there for him through everything-
That's not what his mind keeps circling back around to, though. That's not what he thinks of just before he falls asleep.
He remembers: being very small. Two, perhaps three. It's one of his earliest memories. He's sobbing, clinging to his mother's shirt while she holds and soothes him. Wailing his little heart out over- he's not sure, exactly. A dead cat on the side of the road, maybe. The things that upset him then were things people were still willing to comfort him over.
"Oh, Sugu," she sighed, "You're just too gentle," and it was his first ever failing, before even the curses.
He doesn't know why he's remembering it now.
*
His eyes snap open to the ceiling of his dorm in Jujutsu Tech. Curses roil in his gut.
I'm not crazy, he tells himself. I'm not crazy. I'm not crazy.
He doesn't understand what's happening to him. He can't process a single one of his clashing emotions; eventually, they settle down and coalesce into a simple burning anger.
He pulls his uniform on in sharp, jerky movements. He goes to the village and slaughters his way through it faster than ever before. He doesn't even give the wretched people the chance to lead him to the cage where they're keeping the girls. He doesn't let them open their mouths. He doesn't give them a chance to explain. His cursed spirits react to his agitation, attacking so savagely that the corpses are ripped apart and scattered like prey. Hatred roars in him like a furnace; he has to get rid of them, these monkeys, wipe them so thoroughly off the face of the earth that they cannot return. These monkeys, the source of his suffering, the source of everyone's pain, the reason he has to come here again and again-
There is something sideways in that logic. He's too far gone to care. Finally the cacophony fades out into silence and Suguru stands there, breathing heavily, blood and offal heavy in the air. Compared to the taste of curses it's the sweetest ambrosia.
The village is still. He breathes a little easier. Suguru goes to where he knows the twins are being kept but when he opens the door, light slicing across their battered forms, they cower away from him. A pang siezes him and he hastily scrubs the blood from his face- it soaks easily into the black of his uniform. Shoko had once informed him, blithely, that that's why the color was chosen. Still they flinch when he steps closer and he realizes- They haven't been introduced, this time. He didn't give the villagers the chance.
He kneels down in front of the frightened children, tugs on an ill-fitting smile. "It's okay," he tells them softly, and summons his least threatening-looking curse. "I came here to save you. I'm like you, see?"
They stare, round-eyed. Nanako clutches her sister even tighter. "P-promise you're not gonna hurt us?" she whimpers.
"I promise," he says solemnly. It may as well be a binding vow.
When he opens the cage door, they don't rush out to him immediately. Instead, they approach skittishly, like a pair of stray kittens. They follow a step or two behind as he leads them through the destruction. A little ways into the village they stumble and freeze-
Oh. Suguru forgot to move the bodies of the children this time. The twins clutch each other, faces pale. It hurts, reverberating all through him, to have the twins afraid of him, like a violin string vibrating out of tune.
"They were monkeys," Suguru says. "Not like us."
Nanako blinks hard but it's Mimiko who takes the first step to keep following him, and her usually bolder sister has to stumble to keep up.
They find the car again. Nanako and Mimiko slide into the back seat and Suguru sits down heavily, hands on the steering wheel, all the manic energy seeming to suddenly drain out of him.
His parents' house. That's where he goes next. To his parents.
The problem with living the same day three times over is it starts to give you time to think. It starts to give you time to process the reality of your actions, even as you scrabble through them like a rat in a maze.
He keeps on driving but he's unable to stop himself from thinking. He's never been able to stop himself from thinking. In the past few days it seemed he was suspended above it all, a creature almost of instinct, but the haze of bloodlust and numbness and grim determination is receding, a little, and in its place is a nervous tension like anxiety, or dread, or hastily deferred grief.
Oh, Sugu. You're just too gentle. It was the first thing he got teased for, before the other children discovered much stronger reasons. Everybody knew everybody's business in that town, which meant everybody knew the Getou kid was crazy. Suguru remembers his mother baking him cookies to take to class, once, hoping it would help the other kids overcome their aversion to him. It didn't, but the thought was sweet.
It wasn't always bad. They tried. They did. It would've hurt less if they hadn't.
He remembers - his mother holding his hair back as he threw up, tending him even if she didn't understand why he got sick so often when he was first exploring his technique. There was a period of time when he was almost diagnosed as bulimic; it was one of the few times they listened to Suguru over the therapist. How they took note of his interests and would buy him the newest Pokemon game for his birthday. How his father argued with his mother over getting Suguru self-defense lessons, how he drove him to the city every weekend, as if that would finally rid him of his irrational fears. It didn't, but it was probably still the most thoughtful gift anyone has ever given him.
There was a brief period of time - he had to have been five, maybe six - when he couldn't tell the difference between low-grade curses and half-decomposed animals. They both smelled bad, after all, and both vaguely resembled living creatures, and both were staunchly ignored by all the adults he knew. He brought one to his mother - a sparrow, he thinks - and it dripped through his fingers and he tried to say See, the monsters are real, but she screamed and slapped it out of his hands, and when it hit the ground the little body burst, maggots writhing from the site of impact.
She didn't comfort his tears that time. She was too disturbed by the incident. Perhaps she couldn't understand the difference between three-year-old Suguru, who cried inconsolably over a dead cat on the side of the road, and five-year-old Suguru, who brought her a rotting animal in his bare hands. It was the first time he can remember her looking at him like he was a stranger.
Oh, Sugu. You're just too gentle.
*
Suguru sends the girls upstairs. He resists the urge to sit down at the kitchen table and just rest a little. If he does he won't be able to go through with it.
He remembers: their bodies, torn apart. Falling to the ground, limbs akimbo. His mother's piercing scream. Blood pouring out, lapping at his hem, a crimson tide.
He doesn't want to see them like that again. He wants to keep them intact, lay them down gently. It doesn't occur to him that he could simply look away. Getou Suguru has never known how to look away.
If he wasn't such a coward, he'd do it with his own two hands. But he is, so he doesn't.
He summons a pair of curses directly behind them, malformed and hulking. His parents don't notice; they're too busy staring at him with worry and confusion, waiting for an explanation that will not be coming. He gives the order, and-
His father's neck twists and snaps in the cursed spirit's hands. He dies instantly, soundless except for the sick crack of bone. No chance this time for horrible recognition. But his mother-
Some preternatural instinct has her turn and stumble away. Its talons close on empty air. Her eyes go wide with horror, mouth opening to scream and Suguru panics, the blaring need to finish it the only thing on his mind. The curse reacts to it, lunges forward and-
The scream never leaves her mouth, only a terrible wet burbling because the curse has torn out her throat and that isn't what he wanted, isn't what he intended at all- her body sways and Suguru lunges forward, catching her as she starts to fall. His knees hit the ground and he dismisses the curses, frantically searching her face as if he could undo what he has done. His father's body thumps softly down beside them, clean and dead and cooling and his mother spits up blood, red froth at the corners of her lips, red crater sunk into her throat, red tide staining her front, staining her apron, staining his hands as he presses them fruitlessly at the wound. Red. Red. Red.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. He never really wanted his parents dead. God, he tried to convince himself. He tried. He feels something in him rending, like he's awake for the first time since he saw those two girls in the cage.
Her face is rapidly losing its color, her eyes going hazy. Does she even know it's him who did it? Does she think this was all some horrible accident? Hysterically, he realizes he can't even remember whether he ever told her about his technique. Certainly he tried to, when he was a child, but later? After being approached by sorcerors, invited to the school? He doesn't remember. Can't remember. They didn't talk.
Her lips are moving soundlessly, like she's trying to speak. She gurgles through her ruined throat, reaches a trembling hand up to his face. Touching him so softly, brushing her thumb against his cheek. He thinks at first that she is wiping a smudge of blood away, but it is, if possible, even worse: Suguru is crying, and she is thumbing his tears away.
He can't actually remember the last time she comforted him in his tears. Suguru cried easily and often when he was little, until he learned that no one would be sympathetic if they couldn't comprehend what was upsetting him. When they thought he was lying, they were tantrums to be punished; when they thought he was insane, they were outbursts to be pitied. And when he got a little older, he closed himself off to her; when she tried to bridge that gap, he rejected her.
And now, he has killed her, and she is brushing away his tears. It's sick. It's unbelievably sick.
Her hand falls limp and her eyes glaze over. It's done with. But Suguru clutches her cooling hand in his for a long time before he can convince himself to get up. He stands. Turns around. Is able to muster only a vague surprise to see the twins crouching at the top of the stairs, watching. They shuffle back as he starts toward them.
He hasn't done much to earn their trust this time. He is too exhausted to feel more than a distant regret. Certainly far too exhausted to drive them to the hotel they have been crashing at the last couple of nights. "We're going to stay the night here," he tells them, and his voice comes out rough, far from the floating, serene thing it had been after the first time he killed his parents. Remembering their skittishness around food, he adds, "There's food in the kitchen. You can have as much as you need."
He ghosts around them on the stairwell and then he finds himself in his childhood bedroom, laying down on top of the covers, a scant layer of dust covering everything. The blood is tacky on his skin. They will be found by the authorities here, if they linger long. Suguru's lids are too heavy to keep open. He falls into a fitful sleep, and-
*
He wakes up and grief is a hand on his throat. Half-digested curses squirm and unsettle his stomach. Insanity, he recalls reading, is doing the same thing over and over and hoping for different results.
But if that is the case he should have been declared insane long before now.
Exorcise. Ingest. Exorcise. Ingest. Exorcise. Ingest.
The truth is, if this wasn't such an eventful day he keeps repeating, it could have been ages before he noticed the days were repeating at all. All the missions blur together anyway. Often, he feels like he's living in a daze.
But now, something has him in its grip. Something has the corkscrews and is turning.
A curse. It has to be a curse. Anything strange and unexplained in the jujutsu world is usually the work of a curse.
He dresses mechanically, braces over the sink, tries to convince himself to eat the stupid f*cking granola bar. Only makes his way through half of it. He should be strategizing. Trying to figure a way out of this.
But Suguru is so tired.
Finally he makes it out to the pickup spot, where the window gives him an odd look. Suguru only figures out why when he lets his head loll against the car door and feels his hair feathering across his cheek - he's forgotten to do it up. He normally never lets anyone see him without the mask of composure he clings to by the skin of his f*cking teeth.
Oh well. Doesn't matter.
They get to the village and he approaches the representatives but stops too many paces away from them to be polite, hands flexing, skin crawling.
He should... kill them. Shouldn't he? Right? They'll be alive again the next day. What's the f*cking point?
The question settles like a stone in his gut. What's the f*cking point?
He ponders it as he stumbles along, following to the cage and the two little girls that await. The sight of them, bruised and cowering, does not evoke the towering rage it has until now. On the fourth day of this, it is almost mundane.
If he kills the villagers, at least they will not leak curse energy or hurt anyone else for the rest of the day. When he gets out of the loop - if he gets out - His thoughts stutter.
"Sir. Sir? Are you even listening?"
Suguru has stood on a precipice for the past four days, and on the first three he leapt off it without hesitation. Do you really want to move forward, the thought rises up in him suddenly, with all this blood on your hands-
The problem with living the same day three or four times over is it starts to give you time to think. It starts to give you time to process the reality of your actions.
Do you really want to be on the run with two kids? Does that sound smart to you Suguru? The voice in his head, for some reason, sounds like Satoru, which is stupid because Satoru has never been anyone’s voice of reason in his life.
Do you really think you can do it? Remake the world? You think you have that kind of power?
"Shut up," he growls. Yes, yes, he does, he has to, because the alternative is intolerable, because living like this is eating him alive, because he has seen the end he has seen what this leads to and it is death and despair and losing the war it is a sea of faces clapping for the carnage and everyone knows it but no one else will face the truth of it in its starkness because that way madness lies so they all keep lying, lying to themselves, lying to each other, only Suguru can't do it anymore he can't keep swallowing the poison but he cannot spit it out-
Oh. He's panicking.
He can't get enough air in, his throat feels like it's collapsing, and one of the villagers is even reaching out to him in concern, mouth moving but he can't hear the words. Not over the din roaring in his ears, the bray of his own thoughts insisting Yes I'll do it I'll do it I have to and that's almost more comforting than anything else because what is Getou Suguru good at but putting one foot in front of the other and doing what he has to-
Really? asks the voice in his head, and it distinctly is not Satoru's this time, You think you can do it? Even though you with all your blessings lost to me, a monkey who can't even use jujutsu?
Sound rushes back in with a strangled gasp, and he shies away from the monkey- person- monkey- person-
That's what does it in the end. Not the panic. Not even Toji's ghost laughing derisively in his head. It's that the agonizing coil of doubt is back, and Suguru cannot live like that.
He cannot keep going through every day of two minds about everything. Holding his mind together by the seams, struggling just to not split apart, until he's barely a person, until he’s a receptacle for curses and conundrums and not much else, a hollow vessel for impossible questions, echoing and clangoring and drowning out the world. Two dogs fighting to the death every day in his heart, bleeding out with each other's jaws in their throats and starting over again in the morning. His thoughts a corrupted radio broadcast on endless repeat.
He can't. He can't.
When the screaming dies down he is standing in the midst of the destruction, panting for breath like he had done the killing with his own hands.
(He checks. They're clean. He's covered in blood spatter, of course, but his hands are remarkably unscuffed.)
It takes another long few moments to get himself under control. He goes back for the twins, and he even remembers, this time, to check for the bodies of the monkey children, but they must have been somewhere else when they died this time because Suguru doesn't see them. He lets out Mimiko and Nanako, and they're still hesitant, maybe because he can't get his throat working properly to greet them.
"Will you take us away?" Nanako has to ask him instead, her little face screwed up, all brave and bargaining, and Suguru nods. So they follow him through the ashes of their world, tiptoeing quiet as mice, and climb into the passenger seat beside him.
Suguru sits down in the driver's seat and realizes he is not going to be able to kill his parents.
That is all it takes for the panic to squeeze again at his throat.
No, he thinks frantically. No. I made my choice. I decided.
But something splintered in him last time, when his mother died in his arms. When he let her die in his arms. What does it say about him, that he feels himself fracture worse when he realizes he cannot do it again.
He doesn't know where to go. He doesn't know what to f*cking do. The fact that this day is just going to repeat anyway is wiped from his mind by the sheer force of his panic. He has just massacred a village and there is nowhere to go.
Satoru, he thinks, nonsensically. Satoru.
There was a time when, whatever they faced, they faced it together.
Should we kill them, Suguru? Satoru once asked. I probably won’t feel a thing. Satoru would understand. Satoru would help him. He would. He would.
Suguru dives for his cell phone, clutching it like a lifeline. Satoru is on speed-dial for all Suguru has not called for months. The tinny sound of the ringtone cuts through the silence of the car. Suguru holds his breath. He trembles.
Satoru has been so busy lately. They've kept him so busy.
The phone rings and rings.
"Beeeeep," says Satoru's obnoxious pre-recorded voice, "Busy right now! Call back later, loser!"
The operator's voice: "Please leave a message after the-"
Suguru hangs up and calls again.
And again.
...And again.
It's not the tattered scraps of his pride but more the feeling of a noose tightening around his throat that keeps him from begging on voicemail like a jilted girlfriend. The despair twists into anger and he throws his phone violently across the car - something cracks on impact with the window and the twins jump, cringing away from his fury. Suguru looks at their frightened faces and feels his expression crumple entirely without his control. The last of the restraint runs through his fingers like sand, something dark and massive as a tidal wave swelling through him.
A sound tears out of him; it's a sob.
And another, and another.
Suguru can't catch his breath.
He drops his head into his hands; his shoulders quake, his stomach heaves. He can't seem to stop. He sobs like the world's ending; he sobs like it's going to kill him. Gasping, wrenching, choking - it’s so intense he can only describe it with the language of violence.
It's ugly. It hurts.
Everything that's happened in the past 4 days and the thing that breaks him is that Satoru won't deign to look at him anymore; as if he didn't already know that.
He doesn't know how long it goes on, but he flinches when he feels a warm weight on his arm. Something twists in his chest as he blinks blurry eyes to see Mimiko, latching onto him in a spontaneous hug. Nanako hangs back, a complicated expression on her young face.
Suguru tries to get a hold of himself. It's a struggle, like pushing back an undammed sea. More hot tears crinkle involuntarily out of his swollen eyes as he blinks them furiously; his chest keeps hiccupping pitifully but he wrestles his voice back where it belongs. "Thank you," he says, wincing at how much he sounds like a wreck. Using his other arm, he pats Mimiko gently on the head.
She looks up, almost sleepy, and goes "Mm."
"Did someone die?" asks Nanako hesitantly. She's staring intensely at where Suguru's fingers meet Mimiko's hair. He wonders if she wants a headpat, too, but she only seems to tense further when he untangles his fingers.
"Something like that," he allows. He runs a hand through his own hair. It feels greasy. Lank. Even not counting the timeloop, he has no idea how long it's been since he's showered.
"Cause, we didn't really kill her grandson," Nanako blurts. "We, we don't make people die."
Suguru pauses. It takes a long moment to remember. On that first day, some wretched old monkey woman accused them of killing her grandson. "He was the one who-" Nanako had started to protest, and the villagers had interrupted her to hurl more abuse. And then, well, then they didn't say much of anything, because Suguru had killed them.
"I don't mind even if you did," he says. "I would have saved you anyway. No matter what."
Nanako flushes, caught totally off-guard.
After a few moments Mimiko speaks up, voice muffled from where her face is pressed into Suguru's uniform: "Oh good. Because we totally killed that guy."
"MIMIKO!" Nanako shrieks.
Mimiko shuffles back to face her sister, looking honestly confused. "What? He tried to kill us first," she says.
Suguru lets out a long exhale through his nose. Maybe he should feel more unnerved about the idea of a child killer, but all he can think is Good. Good for them. These two, maybe they'll survive.
(He’ll make sure they will.)
Nanako has gone pale, almost white, as she watches for Suguru's reaction. Mimiko turns back to him, still entirely calm as she clarifies: "It was mostly me. My power." Her fingers clench tight into the raggedy stuffed toy she carries around. "I made him look like Mama."
"I'm proud of you," Suguru says, his voice as gentle as he can make it when it's still croaky from crying. "You should do whatever you need to do to keep safe." And then, almost as an afterthought: "Don't feel bad. He was a monkey."
It's Nanako's turn to crumble; for the first time that he's seen she clings to her sister in a clear bid for comfort, rather than the other way around. "Can we stay with you?" she asks, voice quavering- her entire little body braced for rejection as it would for a blow.
"Yes," he says, and he wants to mean it, he means to mean it. Maybe he does mean it.
The twins looks at him like he hung the moon. Suguru drives.
*
He has no idea where he thought he was going. In some distant part of his mind he maybe intended to just drive until sunrise. Until the curse or whatever this is wrenches him out of his body and back to his room in Jujutsu Tech. But he feels the car idle and looks up and realizes he's driven to his parents' house again.
Nanako and Mimiko are almost dozing. It's twilight outside. Suguru could try to drive to a hotel but... he's tired.
He's so f*cking tired.
The exhaustion left in the wake of his breakdown is not the sort that comes from catharsis. It didn't cleanse anything. It didn't fix anything. He feels empty. Scraped-out. No, that's not the right word. Gutted. He feels gutted. For one moment, the dam broke and he doesn't know how to stuff it back inside him anymore. The despair, the exhaustion, the grief. Spilling out, soft and ugly. (If only it really were his guts; he could just scoop them up and wait for Shoko's small hands to smooth the skin back over.)
At Jujutsu Tech they don't know something is wrong with him, or at least they don’t know how wrong it is. But the village knew. His parents always knew.
(No, that's not right. Shoko knows.)
When he gets out of the car Mimiko and Nanako split around him, each taking one of his hands. He walks up to the door and stares. Tries to convince himself he won't find his parents bled out on the kitchen tiles. Tries to convince himself to let go of the girls' hands and knock. Finally Nanako knocks for him, amber eyes darting up to him for approval. He smiles wanly.
His mother answers the door and they all crowd inside. "Suguru," she says, "we weren't expecting you. Are you alright?"
"Who are these girls?" his father asks. "Are they... your kind?"
There's no malice in the question, no contempt. It's neutral. Worried, maybe. The twins stiffen up anyway, letting go of his hands to duck behind him.
"They won't hurt you," Suguru murmurs to the girls. Though it had hurt him, every day, to stay here. "Go upstairs, won't you? To the second room on the right."
They obey without question, hurrying away to the guest room. Suguru sits down at the kitchen table, his parents' questioning gazes burning into him. He can't bring himself to meet their eyes.
"They were being abused there. For being sorcerors." It's vague, inadequate, but his tongue feels too heavy in his mouth to explain further.
The air thickens. His parents always tried to do right by him but they have to know that their approach to his problems were a not insignificant part of the reason why he told his therapist he wanted to drown himself in the pond when he was 11. He wishes they would apologize, just once. That they wouldn't get so defensive, insisting they did the best they could, refusing to see the bald ugly truth: that their best wasn't enough.
But does it even matter, anymore? They are flawed, but no more than he is. Less than he is, probably. Given he killed them. Three times.
"We just need to stay the night," he chokes out. "I promise I'll explain everything in the morning."
"...Alright," his mother says gently. He resents the tone, resents himself for resenting it. It means Suguru is having an episode, be delicate. His eyes are squeezed shut tight; he's trembling. He knows what it looks like.
He doesn't think his reactions have ever been anything but rational, given the reality he lives in.
"Do we need to call that school of yours?" his father asks finally.
"No," says Suguru, more harshly than necessary.
He doesn't know what he's waiting for. He cannot make himself get up from this table. He is afraid of himself, afraid of the way he killed them the first time without even thinking about it. He wishes he could kill them; it's the only way he could make things simple again, bring back that crystal clarity he floated in for those first twelve hours before time began to repeat. There's a dull sawing pain in his chest, something almost physical. As if his heart will simply cleave apart like a pomegranate.
He forgives them. How can he not forgive them? He killed them three times.
And with that realization it's like his head is plunged underwater. He jumps to his feet, chair scraping back. Whatever they say, he doesn't hear it. He doesn't thank them, doesn't make his excuses. He claws his way blindly up the stairs and into his childhood bedroom and then he stands there, shuddering like a spooked horse.
He thought about drowning himself when he was eleven because he just couldn't stand things going on any longer as they were, and it seemed they would go on that way forever. The isolation, the guilt, the shame, the fear, the dread. And then there were his martial arts lessons in the city, and then he started exorcising curses. He'd done so here and there - whenever one was particularly big and threatening - ever since he swallowed his first curse at eight. But it was in the city he first saw a curse kill someone, and it was in the city he discovered a purpose. If his technique could save people, there was a point to it all. It meant he was born this way for a reason. He wasn't pointlessly suffering, he was bearing a necessary burden. When the sorcerors had found him it had seemed too good to be true. He wasn't alone. Not in this world, and not in his mission.
The next time he wanted to die as badly he was lying on his back where Toji left him split open from shoulder to hip, slowly bleeding out onto the stones. Riko's last moments flashed over and over again in his eyes. He couldn't stop imagining what Satoru's last moments must have been. When Shoko finally showed up - approaching at a run and crashing to her knees at his side - he tried to push her hands away. He didn't want to be healed, he wanted to be with Satoru, like he should have been when Toji killed him. But when she grabbed him again more firmly, he found he was too exhausted to resist. The cool peppermint of her reverse cursed energy flowed through him and then he met her eyes and knew he f*cked up. Because he could see on her face that Shoko saw right through him and he wanted to cringe away, curl up and hide. Anyone else but Shoko he could play it off as temporary madness, as panic, as not recognizing her, but Shoko knew. She knew exactly what he had been doing and she knew exactly why. And maybe it pissed her off, that he'd even tried, because it wasn't until his skin finished sealing over and she removed her hands from his body that she told him: "Satoru’s alive."
And now... and now-
Satoru didn't die, but he feels just as out of reach as he did then. And there's no point to anything, there never was at all. If he can't bear to live in the world as it is now, but must accept he can't change it either, where does that leave him? It feels like he's spent his whole life lurching from one hell to another.
Suguru, his mother sighed once, we just want you to be happy, and he knew then that he would always disappoint her.
For the past few years, it was different. With Satoru and Shoko, it was different. It was good. Yes, it was hard using his technique more than ever before, but it was good. He laughed and clowned around and fought and learned and played, trying not to let on that they were the first real friends he'd ever had. It was obvious that Satoru, for all his fame, had never actually been close to anyone before, but Suguru was a lot more socially competent than he was, so he could fake it.
But that blue spring is over, and it won't be returning.
Suguru drifts to the window, floating, floating. Looks out to the scraggly bushes where he first swallowed a curse. He feels that all-consuming sense of clarity return, singing through his veins like a droplet on the rim of a wine glass. Cold and bracing like skinny-dipping on a summer day.
The electric sense of purpose he felt the first time he slaughtered the village was an illusion. He understands that it would be a farce to embark on his own and try to rid the world of monkeys. Gojo Satoru could do it, but Suguru is painfully aware that he is not Satoru. Suguru believed he could do it, these past days, because he had to believe it. There is no person on this planet who can survive without illusions.
But neither can he return to protecting the monkeys like nothing has happened. The string that tethered him to the punishing rhythm of his life at Jujutsu Tech has snapped.
He is not going forward. He is not going back. The only thing he can do is remove himself from the equation.
A massive weight vanishes from his shoulders as soon as the thought strikes him. Suguru sinks into a still and perfect calm. He didn't know it then, but he understands now that this is inevitably what he was going to choose since the moment he realized he couldn't kill his parents. (Since the moment Satoru didn't pick up the phone.)
Satoru and Shoko manifestly do not need him anymore, or even seem to want him. He was always a burden to his parents more than anything. Mimiko and Nanako will be unhappy, but they have only known him for a single day. They will be fine. They'll grow up safe. His parents may not have a perfect track record with sorceror children, but they will at least make sure the girls end up somewhere safe. And Suguru…
He won't have to fight anymore. Won't have to bear this pain with no meaning. It is like that first night in the hotel room. He could weep with relief.
He stands in front of the window and summons the curse that killed his parents. He'll do it the same way. One little joke, a last little irony. An unheard apology for an untold crime, since god knows he'll never say the words out loud. He and his parents are alike that way.
The curse reaches forward and puts its cold claws around his neck. Suguru closes his eyes and lets all fall away but intent.
Somehow, in the intant before the curse tightens its hold and twists, Suguru's thoughts are not of the twins, or his parents, or even himself. His last thought is: I'm sorry, Satoru. I wasn't strong enough.
The world disappears with a snap.
*
Suguru wakes choking on air, clawing at his own throat, in his bed in his dorm room at Jujutsu Tech. He stares wide-eyed at the ceiling, pulse racing like he's run a marathon, grabbing white-knuckled at the sheets.
His chest heaves. He rolls over, smothers his mouth with the pillow, and screams until his voice gives out.
