Chapter Text
In the midst of everything thus far, Suguru had to admit that they were, somehow in a good way.
Satoru was fat pocketed, banging through the front batwing doors of a saloon with the most forgettable name yet. His wide blue eyes took in the scene wantonly, like a man surfacing for air. When they landed on Suguru, comfortably slouched in the back with a hand of cards, he smirked broadly and made his way over.
The saloon was shrouded in dingy shadow even though the windows were wide open, caked in a layer of dust that had changed the grit of the outside layer no doubt. There are a few floorboards that creak as he makes his way over, lining up with the spectators to watch the game unfold.
It was the slightest change, a subtle shift in the atmosphere, but it set Suguru on edge. Satoru could tell everything about what he was thinking just in a passing glance. He’d know the bluff for what it was, and depending on his mood, he would shatter all the careful work Suguru had put in.
Satoru grins big at the four other men gathered around the table. “Howdy fellas! Everybody gettin’ on alright?”
Stone cold eyes finally drift away from Suguru’s hand to narrow matching tarlike glares.
“Keep him quiet,” a gruff voice grunts, and Suguru looks up expectantly.
“Takin’ orders now, are we?” Satoru teases, but chooses to leave it at that.
Suguru schools his expression, flicks two coins in at the growing pile at the center, seeing and raising. He breaths in the stale air, allowing his eyelids to flutter shut as the hands drop round the table one by one. The toothpick nestled neatly between his teeth is growing a raw edge, and he rolls his tongue along the splintering end over and over, waiting.
When Suguru opens his eyes again, the only one in with him is the dealer.
“Call,” he murmurs, his voice low before fanning out the cards he’s been holding, “Jacks over threes.”
Satoru whistles at that, Suguru knows it’s all he can do not to laugh out loud. The dealer stares at the cards for a long moment, a dark cloud of disbelief hanging off his brows in their low crinkle.
“You’re real good, ain’t ya?” He spread his hand down onto the table, revealing his 3 queens. Usually it would have been good enough.
Suguru shrugs with one shoulder, sliding his hands forward to gather up the mix of silver coins laid out before them
“You wanna know how I can tell?” The man raised his voice a bit, over the chatter of the bar, “Cause I've been doin’ this a good while, and even I can’t tell how you’re cheatin’.”
Everyone in the vicinity bristled at that, and Suguru stopped with his hands just barely embracing the pile. Men had been shot dead for less than what was lying in the center of their circle. And it seemed the other players had realized it as well, each of them seated with at least one hand resolutely under the table.
He let his breath out slowly, and when he looked up, he was wearing his winning smile. It was as sincere as he could conjure up given the circumstance.
“Hell, no need for that kind of talk, we don’t wanna end it on a down note, do--”
“Cheatin'?” Satoru cut in, and it took everything for Suguru not to hiss out a breath through his teeth.
“Who said anything about any cheating?” He asked politely, blinking blankly up at his partner, who has stepped closer to the table to scan the men in a very different sentiment. “Let’s go.”
“You go,” the dealer nods, “The money stays. Everybody lives.” His words were directed at Suguru, but his eyes were locked in with Satoru’s. It was fruitless, he’d have had as much luck trying to scare a lake.
“You make a good case,” Suguru obliges diplomatically, standing empty handed and pushing his chair in after himself. Naturally, his gaze flits from the remaining players to the exits, even as Satoru's hand lands on his shoulder.
“You won that money fair and square, Suguru.”
“And we know what they say about fools and money,” he snips back.
“Soon enough they are dearly departed,” a man from the circle quiped, and Suguru gestures with a hand in that direction,
“You can die,” The dealer sighed, as though it is with a heavy heart he delivers, “Both of ya. Ain’t no man immune.”
His partner is once again rearing up to say something, and Suguru pins him with a stare. “Careful, Satoru.”
They were being watched by the entire saloon at this point, and yet this is something that makes several avert their eyes, pointedly.
Not the dealer, however, who’s eye’s widened. Motion stopped, breathing stopped it seems like, and a cigar hit the floor somewhere behind them.
“Satoru?” he repreated, his sinister undertone suddenly missing, “Gojo Satoru?”
“Look Suguru, he knows us.”
The mirth had never left his voice in all of it, and yet only now Satoru seemed to be enjoying himself. Suguru watched as shoulders slackened, hands came up to rest on the table, mouths that had been drawn in hard lines fell open.
“Well I,” the dealer stammered, opening his arms in some kind of apologetic gesture, “If I’d’ve known—I never woulda—Who said you were cheatin’?” He wheezes out a humorless laugh, looking around the table and crowd in a way that struck Suguru as looking for help.
“An apt apology,” Suguru humed, ever the peacekeeper, even as the air remained stale and tense.
Satoru set his jaw though, shook his head, drilled holes into the dealer with a heavy look. “Do you think Gojo Satoru runs with cheaters?”
The dealer forced a laugh again, looking around at the many stages of mortification, before throwing his hands up again, “We know your buddy here wasn’t cheatin’.” He says, as though correcting a friendly misunderstanding.
Satoru nods then, taking the discarded pot and gathering the silver that has spilled out back inside. It was overfull, leaving coins to trickle down onto the floor, where they stayed.
“Goddamn right,” he mutters, before slowly, casually, making his war over the bar counter to exchange the coins for paper bills. Satoru remained relaxed, but Suguru didn’t leave his back to the men from the table. He listened in on the false busy chatter and watched the shadowy corners where a person could go unnoticed, until they made their way out of the shade and into the sunlight. Back a few paces from the entrance stood their horses, and while Suguru adds the bills to their growing stash, Satoru climbs up onto his horse.
“Headed west,” He called with a head nod down the pathway opposite of how they’d come, and Suguru nodded, tying his hair back and saddling up as well.
Satoru had gone the entire day without looking at him directly.
It was an odd realization, one he hardly knew what to do with aside the from twist it sent through his chest. It makes him falter, just as everything did now.
They’d set off from nearly a month ago now on horseback, and yet the fury that burned through Satoru resolutely remained. 27 days. Suguru had counted, with nothing better to do. 27 Days since everything had changed.
The buildings grew few and further between, but they made no move to abide by the signs suggesting the town’s curfew. This was the first place they’d felt comfortable stopping, but they both knew there would be no booking an inn. Their wounds were still too fresh.
Or Suguru’s wounds were still too fresh. Satoru was entirely unscathed, now.
They rode for only an hour, just long enough to be out of the bounds of the city. From here, they would receive at least a half mile’s warning if someone made their way out, while remaining close enough to rush to a doctor should anything go wrong. Setting up camp was a silent affair, with Satoru rolling out the tent and staking it into the muddy ground, while Suguru stalked small game for them. The fire was kept low and eventually, between chews and swigs, Satoru murmured something Suguru couldn’t catch, before making his way into their tent.
They slept in shifts now.
One would take the tent, which used to only be Suguru’s, and fitfully toss and turn while the other sat by the fire until the moon reached it’s apex in the sky. Then they would knock a water canteen on one of the metal stakes, lift the cover, and trade places. Suguru was usually on second watch, but tonight Satoru had crawled inside, and as the darkness grew, it seemed he had no intention of coming out.
Suguru took a breath, setting his back against a tree and idly tracing his fingers over his holster. His eyes were heavy. They’d ridden the whole night before arriving at Coalgate, and admittedly he was dreading the night spent tossing over his thoughts. The tent was a nice development though. When Satoru mentioned that they would be downsizing to only one, Suguru has insisted upon keeping his, under the guise that its new construction would lead to better longevity.
It reality, it was the front cover.
Satoru’s tent had been lined with pins, little buttons to link together that kept the entrance shut until opened from the inside. Suguru’s utilized only a single lynch that could be soundlessly undone in one motion, lifted, and closed back without ceremony. It was deathly important. He’d insisted because while asleep Satoru’s breathing would even out to almost nothing, silent and faint enough that Suguru would have to stare, until at last his chest rose, and the entrance could fall shut again.
Here, in the stillness and the quiet, he couldn’t help but to think back on That Night.
They had been staying in an inn, and Suguru sat in the center of the creaky wooden floor, teeth clenched around a scrap of fabric folded over while he dug a bullet out of his shoulder. He was alone with a bottle of whiskey, the heady smell permeating through the space like a presence of its own. It was on his breath, his lips, the scraps of shirt, soaking into his clothes. It was around him and it had become him, and it had filled him with what he needed to gather himself and push everything else aside. Long enough to abide, at least.
Or maybe not. Maybe they’d gotten it to share a hundred towns back and still had yet to crack it open, so it rested on a dresser, unpacked and untouched. Maybe Suguru had been holding onto it so long that the label was peeling, the sticker was scratched. Maybe it had been the one Satoru had scraped his initials into on behalf of the both of them because it had become a part of their world. Maybe he’d taken it in one hand and all the fury and hatred and agony and sadness building inside him had hurdled it into the wall. Maybe his voice had gone hoarse as whiskey soaked into the ground, sealed shut and yet spilling out all at once.
These were the details he couldn’t spare the space in his mind. He wasn’t to say where the smell came from. He wasn’t to say where Fushiguro Toji had come from. He wasn’t to say where Satoru went.
He sat outside of his own body that night, watching from afar the events as they happened. Everything felt a world away, as though life itself had become cocooned in a pale white film, like the coating in his mouth after chewing tobacco. He went about the motions of cleaning up his wounds in the way he knew it needed to be done, nothing more. The grazes were shallow, laughable honestly. In the moment they’d felt like pins, training him in place against the wall behind him. No longer.
Straightening the room, gathering his pack, and dressing in a new clean shirt came to him as more an idea than a sequence of events. He went through their things facelessly right up until the moment he got to the white hat.
It was such an important delegation, a symbol of more than just an intention. Satoru would have resented the distinction of himself as some virtuous hero in any context. They were not much of lawmen, and yet not much of outlaws either. They had friends and enemies, those who would celebrate their deaths and those that would mourn them. He wore the white hat out of nothing more than a slight preference. A superficial and fleeting interest, like admiring a tavern lady.
He’d probably wanted Suguru to believe that. And maybe in another world where they never come here, where the only difference is that their fears are lesser and their joys are greater he might fall for that guise. Maybe in another life. In this life, the one of them still residing in it, it’s nothing of the sort. He drops the white hat down on top of everything else he plans to take.
And when the door creaked open, his hands had drawn his gun sooner than his mind could decide on it. Icy cold hands were enveloping his own before the trigger could be pulled.
Satoru stood wide eyed and shell shocked and yet smiling, clothing bloodied and back straight. Suguru held his breath, thinking almost in the first instance that he was seeing a ghost before Satoru stepped further into the room. Their room. A room that Suguru had briefly thought only his own. It was theirs again. Satoru grinned big and took the colt from him, opting to toss it aside onto a dresser.
Suguru had seen his body, lying on the red sand and leaking black from far too many wounds. His neck, a trail down his side, three in the upper leg, and one right in the center of his chest. It was assured death, even in the face of the unstoppable force that Satoru had always been. His heart had stopped, Suguru had checked. Satoru’s blue eyes, which often seemed to glow in the night, were dull and lifeless. He’d seen it, everyone had.
And yet, here he was. In the flesh. It seemed even Satoru’s own body had forgotten all that he was. Suguru hoped, in light of that, he could be forgiven.
He didn’t think twice about it. In one instant he was planted, unable to move from where he stood, and in the next he was on Satoru. Searing pain decorated his shoulder where he had hastily patched it and they ignored it, first in a clumsy kiss and grim embrace, and then in so much more.
Suguru led them back to his cot, pausing briefly to fall onto his back in it before Satoru was on him, and the room was filled once again with the wet sounds of their kiss. The sanctity of it didn’t last long once the shuffling of clothing began. It was brief, far too brief, of Satoru holding both of them in one hand, their thrusts offset from one another. Suguru was unable to keep quiet, unfortunately unrehearsed, pleading sighs and needy gasps directly into Satoru’s mouth.
It felt like if he pulled away Satoru would cease to be. He was the steam of an apparition that would fall away like smoke if Suguru wasn’t close enough to hold him together. He could do it, he would have to do it, he wouldn’t let him go so easily. The tension bubbled over, with him chanting Satoru’s name in a shattered glass cry and seeing stars. Satoru followed soon after, emitting nothing more than a choked noise, hips jittering and slackjawed and perfect before falling into slight panting.
They only had a moment to lay that way, breathing together and sweltering in the hot summer night. A single moment where what had happened before fell away, the awful intrusion to the freedom they’d grown accustomed to was gone, like a memory. And then Satoru was rolling off of him and shuffling over to his own cot. Suguru was bleary and half awake, and there was a residual cold at his side when he fell asleep. The next day, Suguru awoke alone in their room.
Satoru was out the door already, untethering their horses and securing their packs. Suguru didn’t have the chance to say anything, Satoru was going on about how they were headed to Oklahoma City, that was where they would find the man who’d ambushed them. He’d waved around a newspaper that told of a lawmaker who’d been murdered by a “one man army” down there. The assassin had taken the low roads and if they left soon enough, they could be hot on his trails.
And so they’d set off, waltzing in tandem around the second half of That Night in Denver.
They didn’t talk much, anymore. They made it to Oklahoma faster than they'd anticipated and then gone on from there, following newspaper articles and a ghostly trail of dead bodies. Satoru would work his magic in the casinos and taverns, while Suguru would busy himself around town with their connections in the black market, asking about the whereabouts of the hunter who’d nearly claimed their lives. And then after about of week of this, Satoru would grow bored, and they would switch.
They would ride a ways out from the tiny, no name towns that sometimes hadn’t even been drawn on the map. They would consolidate the money and evaluate the resources without conversation. They would split into their jobs and complete them with little consultation. And then Suguru would crawl into his tent and lie still for longer than he would sleep. And then the tent would flip open, and he’d be awake before Satoru could even knock the canteen with the stakes to signal the switch.
With the thought, he flicked open the entrance, hardly able to see into it with the slight light of the moon. It was quiet, still, warm, the last of the comforts from before. Satoru’s chest rose, and he allowed his eyelids to lower, dropping the entrance and clasping it shut again, head falling back onto the tree.
It was quieter just off the trail than it was deeper in the wooded area. Out here it was like that night again, like they were the only two people to walk the earth and yet they still chose to occupy the same space. And still they could not speak.
It was sensical, perhaps one of the only sensical things Satoru was capable of. In the smoldering heat of vengeance, feeling just as far off as it were grasped in their hands, there was little space for trivialities. He’d since come to know that Satoru’s wounds were healed, scarred over as though the damage had been done years ago. Like falling off a horse in childhood, or running through the brambles just north of a stream.
And perhaps it had. Even though Satoru’s life remained intact, Fushiguro Toji had taken something with him that night. The dredges of childhood that both of them had, for one. Satoru’s smile, for another.
Not the smile he flashed in saloons, the one that charmed and taunted and teased. That was a fixture of their gimmicky ensemble. Satoru knew better than to flash that abomination of an act Suguru’s way. His real smile, slight and subtle and smug and sure of himself, was what had been robbed of him. The one that only Suguru got to see. In kind he'd always resisted the same thing. His characteristic scowl had no place between them.
But after That Night, Satoru’s real smile had gone. And they hadn’t spoken about it. Any conversation out in those wilds felt unright. Simultanously the silence that seemed to have no end between them felt even more so.
He wanted to ask many things, an infinite amount of them. He wanted to ask what god had smiled upon them and restored Satoru, how he’d managed to escape in better condition than Suguru, who had received only one shot in the face of Satoru’s six. He wanted to ask what god had sent Fushiguro Toji in the first place, and what torment they had accidentally warranted. But he also wants peace and coherence, so he drags his fingers through grainy dirt and asks nothing.
When he thinks to the inn, he wants to test those uncertain waters. He wants to explain himself, to excuse his body thanks to the whiskey that was permeating through the air and erase the events on his own behalf. He can understand that Satoru had been out of it, back from the dead and delirious from it as any man deserved to be. And after his mind had cleared, he’d come out of it. Satoru didn’t need to explain the coldness, the distance he’d needed to place between them. It was warranted.
But deep down Suguru knew that he had no alibi. Perhaps the whiskey had been drunk, perhaps it hadn’t. It was irrelevant. The heat coiling in the bottom of his stomach had been there long before then. It didn’t fade with the rising sun and it didn’t wane with the changing moon. And certainly, they were above lying to one another, even as tentative as now. So he didn’t say anything about that either. He wouldn’t be able to end that conversation in a dignified manner.
Instead, he gathers up a handful of the dirt at his side in the fist not holding his gun, and watches it trickle through the gaps in his fingers. It’s cold, the earth that is, and he wants to hold onto it for just a moment longer. Maybe it can borrow a bit of his body heat. He needs a moment longer of what they have there, whatever it may be.
He resolves to let Satoru sleep until the moon is further than halfway across the sky, but if the other man notices, he says nothing about it. Suguru hadn’t expected him to. They trade places easily, quietly. He sleeps about as well in the tent as he had outside of it.