CHAPTER TWO | i often have the same dream
pairing: getou suguru x reader tags: childhood friends au, slowburn, like a coming of age but infinitely worse, toxic codependency, implied daddy issues, angst wc: 4.8k
series m.list | read on ao3
There is a strange man that comes into town in the summer of 2004.
It's near the end of the wet season, when droplets of rain still cling onto the tips of the leaves just enough to last till the early morning, that you peer at him from just outside the convenience store. His figure looms over the convenience store aisles, black jacket and slacks a predictably sweltering choice for the unbearable July heat.
Strange outfit aside, there was something about him that didn’t sit right with you. Six years was long enough for you to know everyone in the village like the back of your hand, and, more importantly, was enough time for you to know when someone is here that shouldn’t be.
You crane your neck further in, cheek almost pressed against the glass, trying to get a close glimpse of his face turned away from you. A closely shaven head. a deep voice, rumbling underneath the humming of the air conditioning inside.
“Thank—if…” a drop of water into a dwindling puddle. “—Unusual—” the buzz of cicadas. “—Anything—” a thunk, a hiss, a twelve note jingle “—contact me—”
“What are you doing?”
You startle, barely catching yourself from clutching your chest. Suguru looks at you quizzically, holding up his acquired Papico flavor of choice. Shine muscat today. He's already taken off the wrapper, leaving only the two bottle-shaped ice creams in his hands. Even in the shade, the ice cream has already started melting, judging from the sheen of condensation already forming on the plastic.
“Nothing,” you rush out, flushing. If you're lucky, maybe you can blame it on the heat and he’ll believe you. “You were in there for a long time, I got…curious.”
“Curious,” Suguru repeats, bemused. “About me? or about the man inside the konbini right now?”
“What?” you scrunch your face, the toe of your shoe rubbing a small indent into the dirt. “What man?”
“Right,” he teases, smiling as he pops apart the twin bottles and presses the bottom of the Papico to your cheek. You yelp, the shiver traveling from your skin down to the base of your spine. “I’ll let it go because summer break just started and you aced your exams.”
Snatching the ice cream from him, you rip off the cap and suck on the leftover ice cream inside. Plastic between your teeth as you gnaw on it for good measure, you let the churning in your stomach win out for a few seconds, rolling onto the balls of your feet to take a second glance inside the store. Just the cashier inside; the man must have left from the other side when you weren’t looking.
Suguru hums. “‘What man,’ indeed.”
“You said you would let it go,” you pout.
“That was before you made it so obvious that you cared,” Suguru counters easily.
Your toe digs a deeper hole in the dirt. You've moved past the cap now, biting out the first section of the ice cream inside the bottle. The humidity today is suffocating, sticky and cloying. You resist the urge to take the ice cream and lay it on the back of your neck instead to fight away the sweat; instead, you bite down harder on the ice cream feeling the plastic bend to the ridges of your teeth as you try to practice nonchalance. And then, between gnashing your molars against plastic and ruining your right shoe, you pull the question out of you like a long-rooted tooth. “So what were you talking about with him?”
And there it was, the true source of your ire.
There were always the occasional tourists, trickling in and out to find some respite from the ruthless summer heat up in the mountains. They would stay for one, maybe two nights, boost the town’s economy by a few decimal points buying the upcharged tourist attractions and souvenirs, before they grew tired of the monotony of the trees and the river and the village and returned to where they came from. There was always an air of harmlessness around them, but even so, you would see them once, and you knew you would never see them again.
But this man was different. He had a reason to be here, a purpose. People with motives were dangerous, unpredictable, and what frayed your nerves the most was—he seemed to have a vested interest in Suguru. It had been quiet, but you could have never missed it. The light timbre of Suguru’s voice, weaving in beneath and between his. What did he want from you?
Suguru tilts his head, pondering. a bead of water trickles down his barely-eaten Papico, dripping into the ground. The cicadas roar in your ears.
“He asked me if I was interested in going to school in Tokyo."
.
There is a dream you have, sometimes.
Not enough to call it often, but not rare enough to forget. It's different each time it appears, though, in little ways.
The first time you have it, you’re a dog on the porch, bone nestled in your mouth. You'd carried it from miles and miles and miles away, bringing it here, waiting to drop it at someone’s feet. a gift. Your paw scratches at the wood, again and again. You used to be loved; maybe it is only a memory now.
The next few times, you’re a bird. a pigeon, picking up scraps on the sides of the street, flinching at a raised voice, a shooing hand. You have wings, but you’re not sure how to use them—if you even wanted to. You think it might be better like this, to toddle here and there, close to the ground and coo at the crumbs you find along the way. To be noticed for a short moment, even if it means to be forgotten after.
In the rarest version, the longest version, you’re in the forest. You’re inside the shed. The you from that day stares back at you, like an infinite mirror you’re not sure even has a beginning or end. Dirty sandals, mussed hair, the faintest whiff of zaru-soba mixed with the scent of the sun-soaked grass of the clearing. Rotting wood. You try to speak. A broken croak distorts in your ears, a strange noise you can’t quite place. You think it might be the sound of you crying.
Oddly enough, each time it happens, Suguru is always the one you wake up next to.
.
For the first time since you were 10, Suguru asks you for something and you almost consider telling him no.
On Saturday, he greets you at the front door around noon and tells you that he’s spending the rest of the day shopping around for supplies to bring to Tokyo—suitcases and backpacks and the like—and needs you to come with him.
“Why?” you blurt out, not catching it before it leaves your mouth, and Suguru blinks. Tilts his head, 10 degrees to the left.
“Why not?”
In the time from when you were outside the konbini to Suguru showing up at your doorstep, you’ve started to think that perhaps you should begin to start getting used to letting go. After all, the 184 kilometer trek to Tokyo feels planets apart when the furthest you’ve ever been apart is the 100-or-so meter distance between your houses. You'd be walking a lot more than the two steps you’re used to taking behind him, and despite whatever anyone may say, there was no telling when or if he would come back. People who leave rarely do.
A part of you thinks Suguru is being a little mean, asking you to do this with him, dragging you along while he rubbed salt in the wound and showed off all the ways he was ready to leave you. You didn’t want to think of Suguru as a mean person in any capacity, but Suguru was also the most thoughtful person you knew, which meant this could only be done on purpose. The leftover taste of the tuna onigiri you had for lunch grows a little stale in your mouth.
“Suguru, I don’t think I—”
“Let’s go,” he interrupts, holding out his hand before you have the chance to finish your protest. “Come on, I need you with me.”
Your bones sing, vibrations seeping into your organs deep and ache-y and resonant. Need—an idea you’d rolled over in your mind over and over again until it became a smooth stone. you know need. everything about you needs, but the concept of it turns foreign when you’re placed at the receiving end. You wonder if it carries the same weight for him as it does for you, that it’ll last as long for him as it’s been a weaved thread in you for as long as you remember.
“Ok,” you relent. Suguru’s eyes crinkle upwards, taking your hand and tugging you forward. You suppose some habits can never die.
.
Suguru’s hair brushes the nape of his neck, strands inky black and swallowing light. He prefers to save cutting it for the summer when he really needs it, in other words, when miyuki has the time to sit him down in the bathroom and trim his hair herself. Nothing new, really, just a sign of the season, but it’s all you find yourself looking at, the gentle sweep of his hair as Suguru looks back and forth between the row of suitcases lined up in front of you at the market stall.
"I think,” he starts out, and you’re only half-listening between the neighborhood dog barking at the mailman down the street and the cicadas blaring in the trees, “We should do the deal for the smaller suitcases. It'll be cheaper to buy two of them than to buy a bigger one. right?”
Realistically, it makes sense, but it makes you worry. It would be a lot of luggage to carry with him to Tokyo, all by himself.
(The mailman has decided today to be the day to finally face off against the Shiba Inu terrorizing him at 4:00PM every day. Reversely, it seems today is also the day where Shinobu-san forgot to lock the door to the backyard before leaving for work.)
“Hey,” Suguru calls again. His amber eyes narrow. “Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“Hey,” he repeats, palm resting on top of your head, tilting your head up. “Don't lie.”
Suppressing a scowl, you avert your eyes back down to your feet, embarrassment flooding your cheeks.
If you were a better person, you’d be happy to spend whatever remaining time you have with Suguru until he leaves. You'd be thinking of what other things he would need on his trip there, things that would be cheaper here than they would be in Tokyo, things you know he would miss if he didn’t bring them along with him. If it was a matter of distraction, you would have done it in a heartbeat, but instead all you can think about is the empty spot next to you on the rooftop; the long stretch of afternoon to evening to night; the vacant house; the lone walks; your single shadow, splayed on the hillside.
“Pay attention,” Suguru chides. “You should be looking for stuff too.”
You scrunch your face. “Me? why?”
He looks back at you quizzically. “What do you mean ‘why?’ You’re coming to Tokyo with me,” a pause, “aren’t you?”
You blink once at him. Then twice. And slowly, the hand reaching up to take his hand off your head drops to your side. A drop of water, stilling a rippling pond. “What?”
Suguru stares at you for a lingering moment, scanning your face. His hand lifts from your head, and patiently, he repeats. "Aren't you coming with me to Tokyo?"
Everything that had seemed far too loud moments ago quiets to a hush. You can only really focus on a few things at once: the buzzing in your ears; the crow, perched on the power line a couple meters away; the rumble of a motorbike whizzing past you on the road; the ugly feeling worming its way around in your stomach and creeping its way up to your chest; Suguru, watching you look at him like a stranger. Like he hasn’t been your one and only friend.
“The school that Yaga-san wants me to go to,” he starts carefully, “he said they teach you something called jujutsu.” You must look like you’re about to bolt at any moment, with how slowly Suguru is choosing his words. “It’s for people who can see cursed energy—people like us.”
You’re crazy, you want to say. Cursed energy? Jujutsu? If Suguru had wanted to make something up as an excuse, he could at least have the decency to think of something more believable. But Suguru has never been one to lie—least of all to you. There are a lot of things you don’t know, a lot of things that if you thought about, you’d be mad at him for. But this isn’t one of them.
Us. It sits in your brain like a piece of candy, stuck in your molar and rotting sickly sweet. “He wants you to go to Tokyo," you repeat. “Not me.”
“Of course, you too.”
“You don’t know that,” you counter. “He only talked to you, didn’t he? He only offered it to you?”
"I do know that,” Suguru says, eyebrow twitching slightly the way it does when he’s irked. You push down the panic bubbling up in your throat and the urge to press it smooth at the sight and replace it with a matching annoyance. You should be the one angry, not him. “Remember that thing we saw in the woods when we were 10? That wasn’t just some animal, that was a curse. We both saw it that day—that means something.”
“That doesn’t…” you trail off, shaking your head. that man (Yaga, your brain supplies) still never said anything to you, even when you were standing right there. That meant something too, didn’t it?
“Anyone who can see curses can be a sorcerer,” Suguru insists. “that’s you. That's us.”
Again, with us. The toothache seems a bit more familiar, the second time around. You sweep your gaze to the side, muttering under your breath. “You could have told me.”
Suguru rubs his neck, looking to the side. "I thought you would have known.”
“How could I have…” you start, but the confession strikes you too speechless to keep the spark of anger burning. Bringing your fingers together, you wring your fingers tightly together before you confess quietly. "I thought you were leaving.” And he is—he still is, but Suguru can hear what you leave unspoken. I thought you were leaving me.
He stares at you for a moment, as if trying to solve a complicated problem. As if you were the thing that was so difficult and hard to please. But easily, earnestly, Suguru’s amber eyes search for you within your own, reaching in and pulling you out. “Why would I go anywhere without you?”
Sometimes when you look at Suguru, it’s like looking into still water. Clear and reflective and endless. Maybe that’s why in those moments, you’re not quite sure where Suguru ends and you begin.
.
The moon shines through the window, light scattering onto the wooden kitchen floors. The clock on the wall blinks 2:43 in a dull white sheen. You shift your weight a little, the chair creaking a little with the movement.
2:44. You hold your breath.
2:45. The sound of wood sliding against wood. A bag thumping to the ground. Your fingers pick at the peeling tab of paint on the edge of the table.
“Welcome home,” you call softly. The syllables feel strange on your tongue, and you ghost over the memory of the words in your chest. O-ka-e-ri.
You’d left a lamp on, so he wouldn’t be surprised when you greeted him in the kitchen. Even so, you hear the brisk beginning of a crude exclamation and the rattling of a body against the front door before the room stills. A brief silence, where you stare at each other from across the hall, and then, awkwardly:
“I’m back,” your father replies, shuffling off his shoes. He ducks his head away from you, reaching down to grab his house slippers. Ta-dai-ma. You try to attach it to the end of your sentence, sanding it down and smoothing it over like two clumsy, mismatched pieces of a wooden block puzzle.
“It’s late.” He walks towards you, eyeing the saran-wrapped plate of fried rice and miso soup you’d made for dinner. Your father eats so late that the food made should more accurately constitute as leftovers rather than anything purposeful, but you made it for him. You always make it for him. “Why are you still awake?”
"I thought we could have dinner together,” you start, hesitant. “It’s been a while.”
He eyes you suspiciously, but pulls out the chair across from you and sits down anyway. You tried to fit in meals together when you could, but between his work and your school schedules, they came few and far between. ‘Dinner together’ was just a way of saying he would eat and you would watch him in silence to pretend to have some semblance of ‘family’ in this house, but it was better than nothing. It was certainly better than the days after your mother had packed up all her bags and left in the middle of the night, when he couldn’t even look at you for a full week.
Anything was better than that.
“Do you have school tomorrow?” he asks, to gauge how quickly he should eat so you can go to bed.
You shake your head. “We’re on break, right now.”
“Oh. Okay.”
He peels off the plastic, the condensation from the steam trickling off and landing in droplets on the placemat beneath the plates. You draw in a breath, but it ends somewhere between air and speech before you can fully get the words out. You try again, repeating the words in your head just like you had rehearsed before he came home, before he flicks his eyes over to you.
“What is it?” your father interrupts, scrubbing his hand over his face. He looks so tired that you wonder if it would be better if you asked at another time, a better time. It all makes you feel like you’re 10 again, stomach aching at the thought of asking him for permission to sleep over at Chiyo’s house for the week.
(Just for the week, you had assured him, voice one word away from quivering. And then I'll be back home, I promise.)
He would probably be mad, at first. Maybe he’d walk away, or he’d yell, or he’d tell you to go to your room. But maybe he would be happy for you. Maybe he’d be proud, like the time he’d gone to your school piano recital when you were 5 and stood up to clap even when you couldn’t reach the pedals and played half of the piece wrong.
His miso soup is only half-eaten, the fried rice even less so. Maybe you could wait until he was done, before you potentially ruined his appetite. “No, it’s nothing—”
Your father says your name plainly, without any pretense. You flinch, fists clenched in your lap. “What is it?” he repeats again, frowning. You seem to draw that expression on his face more than any other emotion.
Who will make dinner for him when I'm gone?
“There…” you start, but any rehearsed speech you had prepared all flies away at the stony look on the opposite end of the table. “They offered me a spot in a high school.” You gnaw on your inner cheek. “It’s in Tokyo.”
Your father scoops another spoonful of rice into his mouth. “And?”
“I… I think I’m going to say yes.”
The spoon clangs on the plate. Your body stills. “Why?”
You start tracing the wood grain on the table with your eyes. “They say it’s a good school. And Tokyo is far away but it’ll be a good opportunity, you know? And… and…” You trail off, blinking hard.
“There is high school here,” your father says calmly. “We don’t have money to send you to Tokyo, you know this.”
“They—they said I got a scholarship. With my… with my grades, and stuff,” you finish meekly.
His soup is probably lukewarm now. You haven’t seen steam rise from it for a couple minutes now. “It’s dangerous.”
“Oh um—Suguru will be going with me, so it’s not like I’ll be alone—”
“Oh, I see now.” Your head snaps up. You could hear the sneer in his voice even without seeing it. “Suguru, huh?”
You tilt your head, a chill running down your spine. “Otou-san?”
“Of course. everywhere he goes, you follow right? That’s why you want to leave? to be with some boy?”
“What? No, that’s not—”
“Yes it is,” your father scoffs, thumbs pressed to his temples. “You're always with him anyway. Of course you’d want to run off to Tokyo with him.”
“I'll come back,” you insist, panic rising in your throat. He's never been this angry before. "I promise, it’ll just be gone for the school year, and during breaks I'll come back and—”
“Come back?” he spits. “You promise? You really are your mother’s daughter, aren’t you?”
“Otou-san, that’s not—”
“Don’t fucking lie to me!”
He sweeps the plates to the floor in a big motion, ceramic shattering into pieces with a loud, earsplitting sound. You jump out of your seat, hands flying out to grab towels, grab a broom, do anything to clean up the mess—to fix this.
“Ah, Otou-san, don’t move—”
“You’re all the same,” your father croaks, bracing against the table. “Lying to me, leaving me.”
"I don’t—I—” It’s hard to breathe. There's rice all over the floor, the miso soup needs to be cleaned up before it stains the wood, you need to pick up the broken shards before your father accidentally hurts himself. You knew you should have waited until he’d finished eating before you broke the news. It was your fault, so you needed to… you need to…
He laughs dryly, scrubbing his face with a hand. “If you want to leave so badly, I won’t stop you. Get out.”
Your stomach drops. “What?”
A mirrored pair of shoes at the genkan; a warm meal, waiting for him to come home; hints scribbled in on the margins of the daily crossword, so you could fill it all in before you left for school; all of it, disappearing in front of your eyes.
“You heard me.” He sits back down, looking too tired and too old for someone his age. “Just go.”
.
Some nights, you dream about your father.
A soft dream, a gentle dream. fragments of light, split by a prism. He is gentle in that way too. a warm hand, a tender voice. deep and mellow and warm. there are no bruises on his legs, no calluses on the pads of his fingers. He is happy in this dream, and you are good, and you are loved.
You always wake too early, though. like a roll of film, taken out before the images are ready to be developed fully. too eager, too desperate. You can see it in the way the light leaks.
.
You come back home somewhere around 5 to 6AM, when the sky turns a lighter shade of blue just before the sun peeks out from the horizon.
You had left the house in such a rush that you’d accidentally stepped out in your house slippers. There's dirt smudged all over them now, the previously white cotton stained an ugly, uneven shade of brown.
Shuffling around in the cold had done some good, you think. Cleared your head. When you go home, you’ll throw your ruined pair of slippers away, and you’ll replace them with the new pair of slippers you’ll buy from the 24-hour konbini down the block. And then, you’ll get the dustpan and clean up the mess in the kitchen, and you’ll start making your father’s bento for the afternoon with the leftover eggs and sausage in the fridge. You'll leave a note in his bag before he leaves.
I'm sorry, it’ll say. I won’t go to Tokyo. I won’t bring it up again. And then you’ll put his favorite brand of sour dried plum in the bag too, as dessert.
It would take a while, maybe a day or two, but he’d forgive you. It always happens like this—it gets worse before it can get better. You'd just have to hold out until then.
On the other end, there was the problem of telling Suguru that you won’t be going with him. It would be easier than the conversation with your father, surely. He'd pester you and give you a look that would make you want to curl up in a hole and never come out, but he would get over it. Suguru doesn’t need you, not really. Not like your father does.
(You shouldn’t have considered Tokyo in the first place. Not when you had made that promise to your father that night years ago, holding his hand, guilt and worry condensed so tightly in you it left your body hollow. I'll stay with you always. I promise.)
You’d gotten careless. You needed to go back to scrubbing away any parts of your mother’s DNA left inside you.
So when you open the door to your house, the last thing you expect to find is your father, hunched over himself on the kitchen floor. He doesn’t react to the sound of the sliding door, or the shuffling of your slippers on the genkan, but he lets out an almost imperceivable breath when you tiptoe behind him, your hands clasped in front of you.
Tick. Tick. Tick. 5:45.
Your father stares at the mess on the floor, palms resting a centimeter away from the largest shard of ceramic. There's a plastic bag open on the floor, the biggest parts of the bowl lying inside. You crouch next to him, silently, reaching out to take the broken piece.
His hand lifts, guiding yours away. “You should go,” your father says roughly. It pierces through the call of the morning birds. “To Tokyo."
His voice sounds raw, almost like he’d been crying. Surely not, you think. Over you?
“Otou-san, I don’t need to go,” you insist. "I can stay here with you. We said we’d stay together, right?”
He calls your name once. the plastic bag in his hand rustles. “You should go,” he repeats, his voice smoother this time. Practiced. “I’m…” your father trails off, the broken piece held tightly between his two fingers. “You’ll only resent me if you don’t go.”
Your fists clench, heart hammering in your ribs. “That’s not…”
How could you ever resent him? Who else would set aside the umbrella at the doorway for you when it was expected to rain, or quietly leave new shoes on the genkan when he noticed that the soles were starting to peel off of your old ones, or leave notes on the kitchen table every morning, alongside a set of drying plates on the dish rack. (Thank you for the meal. It was delicious.) That was the point, wasn’t it? To take care of each other in the ways that you could—because you were the only ones who could?
Your father says your name again, soft in his mouth, his voice in the space between familiar and unbearably painful. It reminds you of the good summers, the long drives home with his favorite song on the radio and your hand out the passenger window, reaching for fireflies. He would help you tie your shoelaces then; he would tie your hair up every morning, two twintails, one on each side. “Go. I want you to go.”
“What about you?” you ask, searching for his eyes you can never seem to reach. Your father’s jaw is tight, his gaze fixed on the dull moon-gleam of the china at your feet.
"I won’t say it again. Go.” His voice has cooled to a sharper point. This, you know. You’re reaching for fireflies again, grasping, bare fistfuls of midnight in your palm across an endless blackness. He’s always just out of reach. “No one is keeping you chained here.”
You look at the door. Nestled by the tatami, a new, fresh pair of house slippers. That, and a bento, wrapped in a crooked blue scarf. You know this too. Under the knot, likely three plastic-wrapped onigiri and a juice, both from the konbini. He was never the best at doing it himself, but he always knew what was your favorite.
“Otou-san…” you rise to your feet, your voice small in your chest. You watch him clear the floor, shard by shard. “Thank you. I'm sorry.” And, quieter, unfamiliar and weirdly misshapen on your tongue, "I love you.”
Your father looks at you, briefly—too briefly for you to tattoo it into your memory—and then looks back to the floor. “It’s tuna.” And, in the same heartbeat, “The door will be open when you come back.”
