The rain had stopped an hour ago, but the streets of Shinjuku still glistened like something freshly cut open. Satoru stood beneath a dead streetlamp, his hands buried in his pockets, curse energy humming under his skin the way it always did when he had nowhere to put it.
He was supposed to be somewhere. Higuruma had sent word of movement, of Suguru, of the thing wearing Suguru's face parading through the city like a rumor made flesh. Satoru had told himself he was ready. He had told himself that a thousand times over ten years, and every time it had been a lie, and he had known it was a lie, and he had kept telling it anyway.
His phone buzzed.
He almost didn't check it. The buzz felt small against the size of what tonight was going to be. But his hand moved on its own, the way it used to when they were seventeen and the messages were about nothing, about ramen, about how boring the mission briefings were, about whether Shoko had actually laughed at Satoru's joke or just exhaled through her nose.
The screen lit his face blue in the dark.
Suguru Geto.
Two words.
I'm home.
Satoru stopped breathing. Not the theatrical kind of stopped, not the way he pretended to be shocked when a first-year did something clumsy. His lungs simply forgot the instructions. He stared at the letters until they stopped looking like letters, until they were only shapes, only a ghost tapping on glass from the wrong side.
He was talking to a dead man. He had seen the body. He had held it, actually, though he never told anyone that. He had knelt in the cold and closed the eyes and said the only thing he could think to say, which was nothing, because there had been nothing left to say to a corpse.
His thumb hovered. Then, before the wiser part of him could stop it:
Who is this.
The reply came fast, too fast, like whoever it was had been waiting.
It's me. I know you don't believe it. You never believed anything you couldn't hit.
Satoru's mouth went dry. That was the kind of thing Suguru would say. But the thing in Suguru's body would know that too. It had his memories. It wore them like a stolen coat.
Prove it, Satoru typed. His hands were shaking. He noticed this from very far away.
The reply was longer this time. He watched the little dots appear and vanish and appear again, and he hated that he was leaning toward the screen like a child at a window.
The night before graduation you cried and told me you were scared of being the strongest because it meant being alone at the top. You made me promise I'd stay. You said, you promise you'd come back, Suguru. I promised. I broke it. I've spent every second since trying to figure out how to keep it anyway.
Satoru read it three times.
He had never told anyone about that night. Not Shoko. Not Yaga. Not the hollow years of drinking that came after. That was a room with one door, and only two people had ever been inside it, and one of them was dead.
Where are you, he sent.
The answer was an address he knew. A cheap noodle place near the station, the one with the crooked lantern, the one they'd gone to when they were students because it was the only thing open after curfew and the owner never asked questions. It had been years. He assumed it was gone.
Satoru moved before he decided to.
He did not teleport. He could have crossed the distance in the space between two heartbeats, but he walked, fast, then faster, past the shuttered pachinko parlors and the drunk salarymen and the puddles that held pieces of the sky. He walked because some animal part of him understood that if he arrived too suddenly, whatever this was would vanish, would be revealed as a trap or a curse or the last cruel joke of a man who had made a career out of them.
The lantern was still crooked. The light inside was warm and yellow. Through the fogged glass he saw a figure at the counter, back to the door, long dark hair loose over his shoulders, and Satoru's whole body seized with a grief so old it had grown roots.
He pushed the door open.
The man turned.
It was him. Not the sunken, cursed thing from the news reports, not the false grin stretched over a puppet. Suguru. Tired, thin, older, a scar at his temple that hadn't been there before, eyes clear and human and afraid.
"You're late," Suguru said. His voice cracked on the second word.
Satoru did not have a witty reply. For the first time in as long as he could remember, the space where his cleverness lived was simply empty, swept clean by something too large to name.
"How," he managed.
Suguru looked down at his own hands, turned them over, as if he still wasn't sure they belonged to him. "I don't fully understand it either," he said. "That thing, the one who took my body, it kept me somewhere. Folded up small, in the back of my own skull. I watched everything it did through my own eyes and I couldn't stop it. And then tonight, someone tore it out. I felt it leave, like a hand letting go of my throat." He swallowed. "And I was still here. Whatever's left of me. I was still here."
Satoru thought of Higuruma's report. Of Yuji. Of the war being fought in the dark corners of this city over exactly the thing that had lived behind Suguru's face. He would sort out the how later. He was very good at understanding impossible things. He had built a life out of it.
Right now he crossed the room and he did the thing he had not been able to do to a corpse.
He put his arms around his best friend and he held on.
Suguru went rigid, then broke, then held on back, his fingers knotting in the back of Satoru's jacket. Satoru felt him shaking. He felt the warmth of him, the realness, the ridiculous ordinary heat of a living body, and he pressed his face into his friend's shoulder and made a sound he would deny for the rest of his life.
"I'm sorry," Suguru said, into his hair. "For all of it. For what I chose. For what it did wearing my hands. I'm not asking you to forgive it."
"Shut up," Satoru said. His voice was wrecked. "Just shut up for one second."
So Suguru did.
They stood there in the yellow light while the noodle broth went cold and the crooked lantern swayed and outside the city kept turning, indifferent, alive. Satoru thought of all the years he had spent as the strongest and the loneliest, the tallest tree on a bald hill, and how he had told himself that was simply the shape of his life, that there was no other shape available to a man like him.
He had been wrong. For once in his gilded, terrible, powerful life, he had been beautifully wrong.
When he finally pulled back, he kept one hand fisted in Suguru's sleeve, the way a child holds a balloon he does not intend to lose.
"You broke your promise," Satoru said.
Suguru's mouth curved, uncertain, familiar. "I know."
"So keep it now." Satoru's blindfold was gone; his six eyes were red and raw and endlessly blue and fixed on the only person who had ever looked back at them without flinching. "Come back. All the way this time. And don't you dare do it again."
"I'm home," Suguru said.
And this time Satoru believed him.