OUTCAST ── .✦ satosugu

07 SNAPSHOT

2009-2010, when the flowers bloom at your step and the weight in your chest lessens...

For the last two years, Gojo and Geto tried recovering the poor Fushiguro's family's gleam from the wreckage it had been left in. The air began to feel thinner and easier on their hearts. By the time, they had already fallen in love.

They went on car trips  during the summers and enjoyed the sunsets fusing the air and twirling the spots of light, making everything gently fuzzed, as if someone had patted away the top layer of clarity and left behind something kinder than the eye alone would see. 

Suguru carried on these trips the same camera he spat out his feelings for back in that dreaded motel room, long ago {chapter 3}. He took pictures of his three friends as they moved in their own patterns, unaware that he was trailing them. 

At one point a couple of hours in, at a gas stop, he found them by the window with just one another, Satoru saying something and the other two leaning in close to hear him, and then in the next moment, the three of them leaning back and all laughing.

And although for a moment Suguru felt both wistful and slightly jealous, he was also triumphant, as he had gotten both shots. 

Tonight, I am a camera, he told himself, and tomorrow I will be a curse user again.

The camera wasn't a great one, and it had hazed every picture with a smoky yellow light, which, along with his poor focusing skills, had made everyone warm and rich and slightly soft-edged, as if they had been shot through a tumblerful of whiskey.

The happy years. Suguru remembered one time, around the summer of 09', Satoru sitting in a swing childishly, hanging on by it's loose threads. The kids were out playing.

"I'm so close to creating something so close to myself. Already I have one who heals herself when she is sick... can feed a family of three on one pound of rice..."

"Tsumiki? Yeah she really is incredible."

"But I'm also talking about myself, Suguru. I went from being a kid to having  a kid." he kept swinging; dragging his feet across the muddy grass under him. "And I'm so damn close to giving them that childhood I was promised too once. The stuff you only see in movies."

"You've never really gotten to be the kid you thought you were, you know? You were only trying to be one."

It was true, in a fact, that Satoru had never really been as innocent as he'd painted his own portrait to be. But as disoriented as it may have seemed, he was really fitting for a father. 

It's the three pairs of eyes that fathers need to have. One pair that sees through closed doors when he asks, What are you kids doing in there?  when he already knows.

Another one in the back of his head that sees what he shouldn't but what he has to know.

And of course the ones up in front that can look at a child when he goofs up and say, I understand and I love you  without so much as uttering a word.

The strong father hands starting to wrinkle from stress, but also from the triumph of getting a wild seven year old to stand under a shower. I'm talking about Megumi here, who hadn't really been able at that time to open up at all, only more, seal and sew the hems of his mind.