— insatiable. geto suguru. word count: 1.4k.
this is my first time actually posting on tumblr instead of just lurking so i figured i might as well open up with this older work i didn't want to waste away in my notes app. this is different from my current writing style but i hope y'all walkin w me anyways lmao.
cw: hunger as a literary device, nod to disordered eating as present in the manga
suguru has never known a time where he wasn’t hungry.
he was never a picky child, which served to both benefit and aggravate his parents. he’d pick every plate clean with no complaints, but he’d pick the fridge clean too if he got the chance. after dying a thousand deaths thinking about their next grocery bill, his mother would pat his head and tell him not to worry. his appetite meant he was going to be strong, anyways. let the boy eat, what the hell!
that was music to suguru’s little ears. he loved zaru soba and onigiri and the frozen melon bars his dad could never successfully hide. he was going to grow up to be strong and powerful, and his hunger reflected his desire.
there gets to be a point where a bottomless pit of a stomach becomes a concern, though. he realized when he was closing in on double digits and his parents started whispering about tapeworms that he needed to change something. the last thing he wanted was to worry them when he was supposed to be a good son.
suguru didn’t run to them for help when he saw a monster under his bed for the first time. he threw things at it, cursed at it, poked it with a meter stick until it finally lunged; he didn’t expect it to start swirling up into his hands when he threw them out to block the attack. he definitely didn’t expect to swallow the weird, glowy orb it turned into, and he absolutely didn’t expect it to taste like rotten soil soufflé.
suguru welcomed his tenth birthday by puking his guts into the kitchen sink.
from then on, he could see all the disgusting creatures that lingered everywhere, especially around his school. creeping over shoulders, lurking in mirrors, peaking out of backpacks. he got rid of them all, traded people’s worries for bags of chips and juice boxes. he’d try to wash away the taste of the glowy-orb-ball things with them. it never worked, and he gave up after a few weeks. it took suguru ages to learn to swallow them without throwing up until he saw stars. he got over it when he registered just how strong he felt.
this is what he was hungry for all this time. this power. it all tasted like shit and it made him feel horrible and he sometimes resented the people around him for making him suffer in such a way, but above all else? he felt satiated for the first time in forever.
and as life goes, all things fall apart.
his grades started slipping as he progressed through middle school. he began having nightmares so horrific he couldn’t put them into words. he suspected that somewhere down the line his parents got ahold of a journal of his.
he was helping people and it was making him miserable.
one night after spilling his guts into a bush (because why the fuck are these weird ass monsters everywhere and it’s fine because the more he kills the more powerful he gets but why can’t he just kill them regularly and they taste so bad he could die), suguru blacked out on the sidewalk. he woke up on a bench with a pamphlet for some high school in tokyo taped to his forehead.
he didn’t get home until one in the morning. that was the first time he remembered truly seeing disappointment cover his mother’s face.
life goes.
suguru kept getting stronger as everything else crumbled more and more. he brought up the high school to his parents. he figured it was for the best despite its distance. because of its distance, honestly. he was stressing them out, worrying them with every passing day. he wanted to be good for them, desperately so, and this was the way.
his father was more than open, on board before suguru finished making his case. his mother was wary. he was her only child, her pride and joy, a boy she couldn’t fathom sending away without trying to figure out what was going so wrong.
untouched lunches and missed dinners. arguments, apologies, prayers. screaming matches, appointments and diagnoses, medication after medication, broken bottles, bruised knees, bloody fingers—
you are a greedy child, suguru. you never know when to stop. all you do is consume, you consume everything around you. that’s all you know, isn’t it? you just suck the life out of everyone until there’s nothing left for you to take.
—and then he was off to tokyo.
high school was different. there were barely any students, everyone could see the same terrible things he could, and no one cared that there was something in him that was fundamentally… different. it was encouraged, actually.
the label of special grade gave him what he couldn’t get at home. it gave him a focus, a reason, a confirmation that he was strong. it also gave him some friends, and a particularly good friend, something he realized he previously lacked. he basked in it all.
he did everything he was told (on paper). he went on the missions, didn’t cause more than three problems a week with satoru, didn’t ask questions, didn’t make himself a threat. he went on the missions he was assigned, the ones he wasn’t, took on twice as much as he probably should have because it was his responsibility as a special grade and it’s not like he really had a choice anyways—
but he was good. so good that he knew the taste of a dying man’s blood before he could legally know the taste of alcohol. so good that he was trusted to walk a middle schooler to her death.
he tried not to let it phase him too much. riko spent her entire life preparing to die, and the ethics of it all wasn’t his concern. she was half his height and carried twice his responsibility; he just needed to keep her alive for a few days and not think too deeply about leading her straight to her death. a girl closer to primary school than college was set to die for the “greater good and stability of jujutsu society” to blah blah whatever the fuck, and swallowing curses meant suguru could choke down his disgust with ease and pretend that all was well.
and then riko died.
shot dead in front of him, left to bleed out like the broken bodies he stepped over during missions. it was pure comedy that she was only taken after deciding she did, in fact, want to live.
and then satoru died. cut up with ragged lines etched into his body like the curses they toyed with to drag out missions. of course, suguru only got the details when they were filling out the incident reports. he dissociated through most of the process, but he could never ignore anything regarding satoru.
the whole incident left him fucked up. learning of his friend’s horror show of a resurrection was salt in his wounds—not so invincible to reach immortality, yet strong enough to come back—satoru was now stronger than suguru could ever be.
for the first time in years, suguru felt weak. and above all else, he was hungry. so incredibly hungry.
hungry when he closed riko’s lifeless eyes, hungry when he swallowed affirmations to satoru’s inquiry of mass homicide, hungry when he realized his other half no longer needed him, hungry when he accepted he was never needed, hungry when he chose to starve over choking down meals that made him sick.
sick of being used, used to being tired, tired of being hungry for something his tasteless food would never provide.
he needed a sign. a sense of direction to tell him what he needed to find, what he needed to do to fill the abyss inside his stomach.
yuki came and went.
haibara died.
it was supposed to be a grade three, so why wasn’t it a grade three, yaga, why do you keep sending us to die? and as he watched his junior get dragged out of the medbay, listened to his cries echo down the halls, grappled with the fact that no one cared:
suguru got what he was looking for.
he finally found the source of his hunger, and he would make sure he never felt it again.
a/n: the ending was a bit abrupt because this was originally a scrapped piece, but i'm considering circling back to this in the future so. let me know what you think! thanks for readinggg !