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It’s raining when Satoru first sees the Blank Spot. Maybe that’s why he notices it.
A dreary downpour that darkens the late afternoon sky. Amidst a cacophony of white noise, cursed energy signatures, rain, curses themselves, there is a sort of…wrinkle. He can see it behind the wall that separates his dorm from Suguru’s. He can see this thing, a sort of folding collapse.
Making his way to the dorm next door, Satoru distantly notes the fog that seems to cover the dorms. A mental haze—a non-tangible thing that seems to sweep over memories like sandpaper, dull them so smooth they slip right through your hands. Where had Suguru gone off too again?
Traces of his cursed energy still remain (burning infinitely bright in his wake, of course), but more importantly is the hollowed-out shell, a black hole of sorts. It’s right under Suguru’s bed, this warping. He bends down, knees to the dusty floor to look underneath, and that’s when he hears Suguru approaching. A sigh, as he gets up and turns to the door. No need to feign innocence with him (as much as he sometimes wants to, more out of convenience than malice).
“Satoru.” His greeting is short and tired. There is this ever-present weight of exhaustion that rings around Suguru’s eyes. “What are you doing?”
“Thought I saw something.” A passing glance towards the floor says that he knows, rather than thinks.
“Is Satoru scared of monsters under the bed?” Suguru’s tired expression stretches into a grin, ever teasing as he bends to look under the bed. “There’s nothing there, promise.”
Satoru huffs, then throws himself onto the bed. It's too late for a nap, too early to go to sleep, but the haze of exhaustion catches up to the two sorcerers so early these days. They rarely sleep alone as of late, but there’s no asking, no telling, just the need for a brushing knee, or a passive, steady hand.
-
It’s dark and still when Satoru wakes. Suguru’s breaths are almost undetectable next to him, and their world is unmoving, save the gentle thumping of what he mistakes as his heart.
However, it grows louder, more intense. It pounds in his ears, the horrifyingly intense sound of something distinctly not his. It grows, amplifies, filling up his body and with a sharp dread he tries to wake the sleeping body next to him.
Can he not hear it? He wonders, but knows what is true. Suguru shakes with it, a warping and fading figure, he is a part of the background.
It goes on for what feels like hours. It rattles him down to the bone marrow, his synapses. He is no longer moving, waves still against the pull, the racking and racing of that damn spot. He is planted in his spot, completely still against the sheets as time and space whip around him and pull the breath from his lungs.
It builds pressure in every vessel until its abrupt stop. This is more startling than anything, the sudden absence of the pseudo migraine. He knows time has been passing but it had to have been some sort of warp, with the way sunlight peeked through the curtains.
He turns to Suguru, who’s eyes appear to remain unrested, even closed, even in sleep. They begin to flutter open, dark and unaware.
“Suguru, do you ever wake up and feel like something is different? Like when you have a bad dream?” an attempt to make him understand.
“No, Satoru, I don’t.” His response is distant. The world does not change for him. Hasn’t changed.
-
The uneasiness, like the thrumming and pounding of prior nights, builds and grows. Accumulates like snow on a ledge. Everyone around him is an apparition, floating unaware of the changes taking place. There are periods of shaking and stillness that ebb and flow like a tide that only he can feel.
He sleeps in his room alone after the incident, distantly aware of that spot on the dust-collecting floor of Suguru’s room. There is a space that grows between them, something that builds itself from lunches skipped and classroom glances. He suspects it has something to do with what he now refers to (and knows as) the Blank Spot. It can’t be him, can’t be them. They are unshakable, growing stronger as the burden of curse usage—of their very nature, catches up with them.
Curse after curse, the higher ups continue to spin stories of heroics that simply aren’t true. He has become intimately acquainted with the feeling of a curses’ blood on his skin, with missions alone, with distance from everyone. Loneliness becomes a thing he circles back to again and again, its coldness settles in his chest and he must return to that feeling, no matter how far he dreams to be away from it. His technique leaves his eyes dry and begging for rest, his bones ache from pains too frequent for Shoko to consistently heal. The same curses pop up, first twice, then 3 times, then he’s too exhausted to count but he’s sure this is all some big orchestration from someone or something choosing to leave him to his loneliness, to exacerbate it until he is far removed and untouchable. He tries to ignore this feeling. Suguru seems to grow paler with each passing day, more brittle in a way that isn’t apparent–or of concern–to Yaga.
He approaches Suguru once, on a nameless and sweltering afternoon. Asks him what’s wrong because he cares more than he can find the words to admit. And Suguru, his friend who he seems to know less and less as of late, tells him in a bout of honesty. His words are weary, and all the more bitter for it. An impossible coldness takes his tone.
“Curses could be eradicated if we-” a sickly pause, an unsureness. “If we killed all non-sorcerers.”
“What?”
“Nothing, I just-”
“Why would you say something like that?”
“It was just an observation. Observation doesn’t always compel action.” Suguru takes a belated breath and looks up. Dark eyes meet bright blue, and there is a thought of waves crashing on a cliff, of weathering, salt, erosion.
“I think you’re full of shit.”
Then they are both walking away from each other, and it's not the last time this will happen, but it’s the first time it's been put out. There, between them, lies a distance waxing and waning. The Blank Spot thrums.
-
Suguru is burning up from the inside out. That much, Satoru has been aware of since the day they met. His cursed energy tells of his nature, his destruction, his inevitability. It burns the brightest he’s ever seen, consumes, rekindles, consumes. He longs to put it out. In equal measure he yearns to move towards it, to admire, let it warm him, let it consume. But this is a selfish desire, and while Satoru is selfish, he isn’t cruel. So during a rare breakfast, he breaks the silence, one that falls more often, between them
“You know-” he pauses. The words press against the back of his teeth, sit heavy on his tongue. “–what happened with Amanai…” Satoru takes a second to breathe, slightly unsteady.
“Who?”
He freezes. Days on the beach flash across his vision. Sand is continually meeting shore in his mind, the way those days are relived. His memories are all washed over with a calm blue light, a sense of nostalgia that passes in the way of glimpses of aquariums and wind on the beach. Something as significant as that, the monotonous roar of their clapping hands, the weight of her bled body, all sanded down to nothing.
“Nothing.” Nothing. Insignificant as their summer days roll on and on, stagnant with heat. Somewhere between one of these days, he realizes Suguru was always doomed to burn, catalyst or not. The tinder doesn’t matter, the fire is inherent, self sustaining. Consuming curses has doomed him to a life of internal secrecy. And for all Satoru’s six eyes can see, for all the loops he knows he's been through, his struggle is one he cannot see, one that is manifested again and again by the simple act of living. The best he can do is pad it. Strength held for the both of them. This is a thought he holds onto, even as erosion takes its course on rocks and stone.
-
For all the banging and rattling that overcomes his mind these days, Satoru doesn’t always notice when the blank spot takes effect. He wakes, and things are the same, always the same, until they aren’t. It's a week until the next, and the next week the same as the previous and prior. The curses blend together in his mind, and he wonders briefly if this is what Suguru feels. What he felt, where the resentment comes from. Exorcise, repeat, exorcise, repeat.
He crawls into Suguru’s bed sometimes, trying to understand. At first he reaches out tentatively, hesitant, with care and concern. But like everything else, all options are reduced to monotony. It’s a form of enlightenment, the way he had come to know this sort of samsara so intimately. Some days, some stretches of time, Suguru doesn’t know him fully. Isn’t used to this Satoru in his bed. Other times, he is welcoming, clingy, and the intimacy of these simple touches nearly scares him away, at least the first, second, and fifth times. This he spends more awareness on. Commits these times to memory. He has a thousand chances to reciprocate, the gentleness and courage to take only a quarter of them.
One such night of cowardice is this; a slow moving moonlit night. Satoru is ground raw and unreceptive. Suguru is too giving in this iteration.
“Satoru,” he says in that purring, gentle way. He chants it like a mantra, a prayer to some forgotten god. But Satoru is not forgotten, he is here and he is there, body inbetween. He is stiff and unmoving as reassuring hands trail up his back and scratch into his hair.
“Satoru…why are you so tense?” Why? Why any of it? How does he explain to the person holding him in his arms, his best friend, that he has seen a thousand lifetimes without him. Separate from him, only because his blessing of heritage allows it. How does he explain that this night has happened before, slightly different, largely the same, being held and unable to reciprocate. Holding something else close to your chest, that is hot and dangerous and prevents the intimacy of it all.
He wants to tell Suguru as much as he wants to keep it all to himself. It’s the selfishness built into him, the heir mentality that wants to keep all the special moments and do overs to himself.
“Do you feel it now? The differences?” Satoru naïvely asks. This time he chooses to share. To attempt to come to understand the undulations of time, at a crossroads he will loop back around to.
“No, Satoru, I don’t.” The world does not change for him.
-
However, this is not his preferred memory. Tangled legs and arms will remain in his thoughts, gentle whispers and reassurances, futile attempts to console and promise safety and forever (an inconceivable concept for them).
“I love you.” Suguru had said once, and it was so quiet it nearly dissipated into the night. Satoru catches it and holds it dearly, closer than anything else he’s ever cared about (and was there ever really anything else before this?)
Another night, another iteration; this time Satoru is holding Suguru as they half sit, half lay in Satoru’s bed. He doesn’t remember how they got here, like this.
“Sometimes I think I’m no better than them,” Suguru whispers sleepily on one such night as they lay together, legs interlocked. He says it like he is confessing pressed up against the pew, confessing some sin.
Nobody’s perfect. Satoru thinks. He thinks Suguru is almost perfect, his morals nearly suffocating in their righteousness, his need for good. For all the times Suguru thinks himself to be evil, Satoru thinks he may just be an angel. Haloed in moonlight, forlorn, wings trailing behind him as he thinks he has fallen. But for each version of Suguru that is bad, is bitter and vengeful, there are a thousand iterations where he is good. Versions where he is nothing but light, even if he does stray slightly from the path (the path now being long forgotten as the “original version”). He knows this is the wrong thing to say, knows he’ll have infinite other chances to get it right. But he wants this moment to be a good one, a pure one to keep and hold, so he swallows these thoughts down.
“You’re better than them, I know that.” A swallow. “I know you.”
“You know me,” he echoes back, and it’s a private little thing. It’s just them, knowing each other, into the next morning. (Not the next week, never the next week.)
-
One time he enters the other’s room and is startled by the dust and emptiness of it. He feels a sharp loneliness, and it is the first time he thinks of the Blank Spot to be malicious. It’s the first time he’s been startled in a while, and he spends that night in Suguru’s bed upright, needing for it to happen closer, faster. He takes in what is left of the room, and it’s like looking at the tomb of someone that is still alive. The space isn’t being lived in, but there are traces of cursed energy, traces of a boy he knows. There’s a letter addressed to him on the desk, one that he will not read. Satoru will see him later, and it won’t be the same Suguru that wrote it. He doesn’t want it to be, doesn’t want to walk away for the nth time. He won’t have to, if that spot would just do what it does, what it has been doing. He is waiting for a familiar booming in his skull that comes infinitely too late.
-
Once he enters the room (and he has come to know it as the room, his room, the center of all of this, of everything) to find two girls, no older than 7 or 8. Battered and bruised, he questions Suguru warily, mindful of the kids that had come into their bubble.
“I found them in a village. My old village. They were being held captive. The elders believed they were the cause of every catastrophe, every bad thing that happened in that village. They were blamed for crops dying, for God’s sake. Do you find that fair?” An edge overtook his voice. A bitterness, a rhetorical question filled with anger.
“Of course it isn’t fair.” Hardly anything is. As sorcerers, it’s their job to balance the score, save those they can.
“Why is it always our job, our burden, our weight? Don’t you wish things were different?” The heaviness of this question is a tangible thing.
But things had been different, had been changing rapidly and undetected.
Of course he dreams of having the weight, the burden of name lifted, as one does. Or had Atlas ever learned to reconcile with the heaviness upon his shoulders?
The question goes unanswered. The world does not change for Suguru. Hasn’t changed.
-
“Where are the girls?” Satoru asks, although he should know better by now to not hold on to any sense of permanence. The Blank Spot, he knows, is cruel in its randomness. They had grown on him, the two children he came to know as Nanako and Mimiko. Their school was hardly the place to raise children, but some circumstances will always be better than others. Though he knew he would not watch them grow, that the passage of time wasn’t even in the same room with them, let alone on their side. But fondness has a way of creeping into the hearts of the lonely.
“What?”
“Nevermind.” It seems that’s all he ever says. Questions should remain unasked, unanswered. This is the only thing he can be sure of.
-
This time, they are in Shinjuku, on the sidewalk in front of indistinct shops. It's always them—Suguru and Satoru, always the rest of the world that is indistinct. The haze roots itself internally, the Blank Spot follows them wherever they end up. Suguru walks away, has walked away, will continue to walk away. No matter the extent to which Satoru reaches out, he is walking away and this is done so many times over that the moment is dulled into a reality of what they do. Exorcising, unrooting evil, walking away from the collateral. It’s all collateral.
Suguru’s words are nonsense, and this iteration of the world is crumbling before them. He speaks of strength, of duty and burden, of the mere possibility of his absurdist ideas and its nothing, nothing, nothing. The cultists and curses, none of it should matter, and he would give up all his strength to make Suguru see that. He probably will when the opportunity arises. But right now, the only thing available to him is a growing distance, and the power to level a city block for the man no longer in front of him.
-
All these cycles leave Satoru with a secret. With undisclosed knowledge that gets him odd glances, with a boredom at nearly everything and its predictability. Suguru knows this, knows him—as they have for many nights now. He asks the crux of all questions on an unremarkable summer night (aren’t they all summer nights? Does it even matter anymore?).
“Satoru, is something wrong?”
“Hm.”
“You’ve just been acting different. It’s off putting.”
An attempt (many) to quell the urge to explain. To lay bare and be known. But some things need to be accepted, and a paused lifetime of being the exception has left him an expert. He used to be bad at lying, now he just withholds truths.
“You know about the Six Eyes technique right?” He is looking for understanding where there is none. Where he is always moving with the thrumming and pounding of the epicenter of some self containing time loop. Where he is somehow chasing a boy who is standing still, unsure and contradictorily unmoving in his values. Who holds a bitter sadness that wishes it was angry.
“Yes, I know about your technique,” and the eye roll is audible.
“Well I don’t.” An admission he would’ve struggled with ages ago. He doesn’t know everything, doesn’t even know what he wants to know, except for them knowing each other. “It’s like a personal earthquake when it happens, like a samsara and this cycle of death and rebirth where I'm the only one who remembers anything. It’s everything from your dumb philosophy books and everything worse. It’s a permanent fog that bears heavier everyday and I’m the only one that can sense it.
“And it’s not like I’m holding up the weight of the world or anything, but it’s our world, and doesn’t that just make it the most important one? Everything rotates around that one Spot, and it’s under your bed Suguru. I’m half convinced it’s just you at this point. All your talk of repetition and the monotony of exorcism, it’s brought us to a time looping haze that I want to get out of, and I don’t know how you don’t.”
A deep, shaky breath, an icicle crashes from a ledge to the floor. Suguru takes his shoulders in a rough grip, his eyes hard and concerned. But first, he is angry.
Suguru is no stranger to the growing disparities between them, even as Satoru desperately tries to repair them, to keep them together, lest they get separated in the violent current that the Blank Spot brings. Satoru is not cold, tries not to be, but in that moment he is no better than the wind that bites some shivering animal out in the snow. For all his callousness (both projected and intrinsic) he tries to be softer with him. It is failing miserably, and even in the heat of an endless summer, there is a chill in his bones, remaining constant in every scenario.
“Of course I want to get out. It’s been this way since I got my technique, the endless consumption.” The statement is slightly bitter, an underripe fruit in the cold. Suguru doesn’t say it, but Satoru knows he is grateful that they feel the same way. He will guilt over it all the same, but for now, that shared sense of haze and helplessness will keep him grounded. It isn’t exactly the same, but it’s enough.
“And hey—” softer this time, gentle because he wants to be, not because of the timeline, “whatever it is that you’re going through, whether it's migraines or actual, honest to God personal seismic events, I’ll help you through it. We’re still the strongest together right?”
-
Satoru comes to a revelation with those words. In the dark of Suguru’s room, in the student dorms they’ve known for nearly 3 years and infinite summers now, he realizes the world has changed for Suguru, has changed for them.
After this, there is a distinct lack of disorientation, of the churning in his stomach that happens with every rotation and movement of the Blank Spot. He seeks Suguru out in every instance, is looked for in return. It’s nearly something scientific, mathematical, like the inner workings of Limitless, the way they chase after each other. It is love, the constants they see in each other, even as the situation changes, as they grow and shrink and distort and the spot adjusts around them
He is learning of these constants rapidly, a consistent line of thinking that remains strong and inexplicably tied to Suguru. He is no longer learning the patterns of the Blank Spot, and instead chooses to analyze him instead. All six eyes, trained on that bright and blinding burning. He learns to love him in every scenario, in an exercise of uncharacteristic patience. When you have all the time in the world, when every opportunity lays itself out in one infinite summer, all at once— things become obvious. They are as innate to him as sorcery when he was a child, as the loneliness that came with blessing. If not Suguru, then who?