Chapter Text
Breathlessness. A deep-seated calm. Bitterness, in the loosest of senses. This pain is a noose that he can’t scramble out of. Death can be a gentle thing, when it is warranted, expected. Megumi isn’t convinced that tenderness is anything he deserves, not after everything (every failure, every unmeasured tumble, every imbalanced scale he has tipped in his favor at the cost of everything), but he is also used to not having a say in inherently pivotal matters such as this one.
To be given the chance to live and to choose it willingly is a luxury he has long gone without. Subjective happiness has never been an option for him.
“Start by saving me,” he had pleaded foolishly, as though the words of a dying man could be heard over the rushing of a newly beating heart. Fushiguro Megumi is not selfish in nature, neither is he selfless in action. There is no way he could have known that the simple act of wanting to live would bring about this disgusting darkness around him. Given the circumstances, he should have known there was no coming back from this.
Given his history, he should have known that he was always meant to die alone.
Death, gentle as it is, tastes bitter when it tears him from the ones he himself begged to live.
He hears Yuuji calling, once and a while, and he hears him screaming, too. It’s a tense sort of sound that swaddles him, cocooning his misery into the very heart of himself. The shallow darkness of Sukuna’s innate malevolence sways around him like a gentle, ocean tide, but the motion only makes him seasick. Persistent discomfort presses into his skin like Six Eyes tearing into him, and Megumi wonders if he’ll ever be able to look at water the same again.
Fushiguro Megumi was born with fear in his throat and a grimace to keep it from pouring out of him.
With this treasure, I summon– Nothing about him is normal. He’s hardly even human anymore. Or perhaps, with all his faults and all his foolishness, he’s the most human sorcerer of them all.
His technique, an ancient and archaic thing, swings like a rusted blade given new life in the hands of a greater evil than his depression, than the fleeting acceptance of death as a constant, a bounty, a boon. The feeling of losing all control isn’t one he ever wants to feel again. But if this slow and sinking death is what it takes to rid the world of the graceless failing of a boy incapable of doing anything right, he can accept the sickness that swells within him. (On the off chance that his death brings more grief than relief, Megumi isn’t sure he’ll be able to even rest easily.)
He swallows water like a useful pastime and curses when it parts from him forcefully. Despite all his yearning, he simply cannot die. His body won’t allow it. Sukuna won’t allow it.
To be nothing at all would be a far kinder fate than this.
“I’ve had enough,” he whispers helplessly, the words like a church-pew confession spilling from his tongue, lolling through his veins, ripping his lips to shreds that numb and fall away from him completely.
The water (it’s blood; do not feign ignorance for the red you have spilt and spit and wished and willed away) swells in a wave around him, thrashing side-to-side. The darkness of his misery is a sweating thing, a blackness that eats away at his skin and pulls out every straining breath in a rueful shudder. His extremities go numb at the weight of it all; hatred and despair fill him like a sudden and surmountable surrender of every aching, creaky part of him.
Something within him breaks when Yuuji’s cursed energy appears before him; a visage of all he could never become, a brightness unachievable, a happiness always left splayed and unsung. Nobody could make him smile anything close to the way Yuuji could have.
But now, and especially here, he has no joy left to share. No fleeting smile to release on the exhale. No unshaking hands reaching outwards for a clasp of brotherhood and the common mourning of losing life too soon; a heart monitor cannot trill without the proclaiming of life to which it attaches itself.
Fushiguro Megumi’s soul and any will to live have already been extinguished.
A muffled sob. A soul that reaches and trembles; one that frays and bends and rips at the edges.
“I’ll be lonely without you around, Fushiguro.”
He thinks he grins, although he isn’t too sure how that could happen. There is no strength left within any part of him to muster; lethargy clings to him like a second skin, weighing him down and pulling his hypodermis from muscle tissue gently, soothingly, like the internal flaying of flesh is a kind thing when the hands that command it tear slowly.
Megumi cannot feel himself any longer. The body inside his own feels as soullike as it is, twisting and wavering with the water that continues sloshing. Floating is a better word to describe this inescapable melancholy. It is the unnecessary disconnect between spirit and brain that lands him here, in the senseless and endless thrashing of metaphysical waves and all of the blood which strings through them.
But this is somewhere he has remained for quite some time, now, isn’t it? Has it been an eternity already, since he last was the commander of his own body? It feels like it’s been far longer than that.
He curls his fingers against the fuzzy emptiness around him, eyes half-lidded and bloody, and silently picks through his reasons for living like a licked finger flipping through yellow pages. The memories of his sister stick out; Gojo follows suit, although that bridge fell in two too long ago to recall clear enough for grief to settle down beside him and stick there, gum on his shoe.
Yuuji at the detention center–although that had been Sukuna, hadn’t it?–flashes briefly, but the image fizzles into snowy pixels beneath wet lashes. The blood returns to haunt him, to taunt him and tug at his senses, lulling in a fluid semblance of his loathing that whips and calls out with foamy edges. There’s no doubt about it: He really will never be able to look at water the same way again–that is–if he ever gets out of here.
He doubts he will. Megumi curls himself together closer, tugging puzzle pieces into what is left of his aching chest and holding them tightly. His hands shake despite his fizzling spark of dying resolve. Is there even a way out from this hell Sukuna has dropped him into, shoved down his throat with hands that no longer belong to him? Is there even any reason for him to be saved from this? Does he want to get out? He isn’t sure anymore.
Haven’t… haven’t we had enough of Fushiguro Megumi?
He closes his eyes, lids shuddering at the action. And he lays there, and lies there, and tells himself that there is no worth in living anymore because you have nothing left to offer; to stay with them is to burden them, and the only thing worse than a man who causes grief is a boy too blind to see he is the reason for it.
This quiet, empty nothing will become his tomb if he lets it. And he lets it.
I want to be more than the burden that I bear, he pleads, begs, prays, and it is so.
Fushiguro Megumi gives up on life, and then he gives up on himself. In refusing to be saved, in refusing to save others, he dooms them. But this dying-breath wish to be less than he ever was, the swansong of a boy with much potential (perhaps too much) and the mind of a painter, wrenches him from death; this grief in his heart is a fourth-day-Lazarus, a John 11:35 rescue story that comes to life and is born again.
Water into wine. Five plus two to five thousand. Like the doubting mind, he ceases.
Fushiguro Megumi takes his final breath in the darkness of the two-faced tyrant’s bloody sea.
And when he next opens his eyes, moonlight is all he sees.
Megumi’s fingers clutch to his sleeves not out of necessity, but out of petrification. That all-encompassing dullness, the evanescent remnants of a darkness crafted just for him, falls to lifeless tethers at his back, around his freezing extremities, against the gaping remnants of foreign irises upon his face. It gives up its fight with no trouble, circling him before dying at his feet.
His first breath leaves him in a shudder. The second, a sob. Soon thereafter, Megumi’s dorm room becomes a hollow steeple, echoing his misery right back in his face like he’s laughed and cried and curled himself into a well without a bucket.
The blinds are open and the moon still shines; but the light feels like it is one or two million miles away from him, and his arms are too preoccupied with holding himself together on his sheets to reach out and touch that soft and cool glow.
(Like he deserves the comfort anyway; because he doesn’t and he knows it, not after all he has left everyone to accomplish on their own, all of the evil he has given opposable thumbs and shadow puppets that go bump in the night to. Is this how Yuuji always felt whenever his parasite could muster enough presence to punish the public for his reanimation? If so, he might owe the boy a few hugs and hands to hold; that is, if he still has the strength to hold on loosely; that is, if the vessel–sorry, former vessel–is actually out there somewhere to be held to; that is, if he is able to get out of here or even out of bed at all.)
Despite his petrification, the moon remains bright. He considers it often that God is too forgiving. If he were Him, he would never let his bitterness and hate see the light of day or even of night again; but those aren’t thin and simple things that he can always tuck beneath his skin when the blinds are open (no matter how much he wishes it were so).
Megumi relishes in the silence of this still and timeless space which surrounds him. He is unaware of where exactly he is, currently; Heaven starts with gates, and his high school dorm room is far too cramped and far less light-filled to hold the Lord of Hosts.
He lifts his head. It hurts like a cinder block to a boot, but he lives to regret it, which is more than he ever could have asked for. His sheets lay crumpled in a fuzzy mess beneath himself, and his pillow doesn’t fare much better. The gray is wrinkled like a T-shirt in need of ironing or the clothes of a backwater baron, and it smells like smoke and ash and the lavender essential oil Gojo liked to rub on his and Tsumiki’s wrists before bedtime back when learning to live was still a major piece of the equation (as it has remained, it seems).
Not much of him has changed since then, he supposes. His spirit remains shaken and creased and folded over like a crumpled pocket square on a breast at a clan head’s formal get-together (No, Megs, they don’t call it a “birthday party” here. Supreme blessings given human stature don’t deserve to have birthdays. They are born to make good on yearning promises and the fading wills of decaying men, not receive gifts that do not matter aside from monetary value– Yes, it is sad, I agree. …What would I want? Well, since it’s you who’s asking, all I really want is a great, big hug, Meg-Meg!), disheveled and grieving and growing like only a spirit can. It feels like, after all this time, the only thing that ever grew with him is his clothes.
Megumi presses his hands into the plushness of his bed and sighs out one final sob. It lodges itself in his throat as though to exit past his lips is to acknowledge that his reprieve of mourning is over, and he nearly chokes on his grief as it sputters out of him. But he simply cannot waste any more time lying here haplessly and hollow; he needs to make sense of things, to pick apart the situation he has been thrust into before picking apart his own listless mind is the only pastime he can grasp onto.
In the next moment, he stands in his room, motionless and pale and looking more like a ghost than the boy he lives to be. Dust spirals in the air around him, settling on his shelved and splayed-out things like a soft and bitter sheet of snow. Megumi latches his gaze onto one singular speck, trailing it around the air as it flutters and sways. He feels the shell of himself quietly echo its motions in a noiseless replication of dancing that pulls at his limbs and tugs questioningly at his neck on a string.
He raises his arms above his head and grins like a dead man should, eyes training themselves on the strange and inhuman sight of fourth grade hypothermia scribbled over the skin of his fingertips and the slit of a joint there. He glances towards the floor where his feet stand unsteadily, regarding the pitch blackness of his toes as a common accessory rather than, seemingly, a physical notation of his death and rebirth and miraculous transcription into the silence of some other Megumi’s half-written story.
Sorry, he thinks, thoughts fleeting and floating as he spins the madness out of him. I’ll be taking care of things here for you from now on. Rest easy, Megumi.
He does not move far until his nonsensical murmuring and twirling wonderment fade into a comfortable buzz beneath his skin. Only then does he reach for his doorknob, skimming over the trash on the floor and the familiar clutter in this liminal space he somehow occupies. Megumi’s fingers gloss over the cold metal of the handle, but the temperature elicits nothing past the permanent etch of hypothermic skin on his fingertips.
Megumi curls the static of his hands around the knob and twists.
Megumi shuts his bedroom door behind him. Beyond the curiosity he allows to distinguish one action from the next, there is less that he would rather forego than courtesy towards himself. He turns towards the hallway beyond his bedroom and ponders its warping and beaten wood paneling with an inquisitive gaze.
The corridor looks just as he last left it: dust-ridden, worn by age, and downright sad to look at. He considers the brown panels and the unevenness where their widths meet the floor with a brow laden in concern. This is the place he’s called a home-away-from-home for as long as he can remember. He’s known it for so long, and yet time continues to treat the structure so cruelly.
Jujutsu High looks a lot less glowy than it appears in his memories, the fading dances of reminiscence that circle his mind. Maybe it’s just because the veil of childhood has waned from his vision, or perhaps this lackluster ambiance is due to the innocence he lost to the thrashing waves of Sukuna’s churning sea.
Megumi sighs out his puzzlement and allows his eyes to shut for a moment. Maybe I should take to cleaning, he thinks to himself, raising his arm to press the palm of his hand against his fluttering lashes. Maybe I can make this place shine like it used to. Maybe I can move on peacefully then.
He sighs, and then he shudders. Down the hallway, in the depths of this strange place, beneath the cover of darkness, someone–something–lingers.
Megumi feels him before he sees him, and that fact alone is enough to pull a keening whine out from the back of his throat. Gojo Satoru. The last time he laid eyes on his benefactor—his father—the top half of him had been smiling from amongst the rubble of war. The bottom half of him had remained in a final stand, a petrified attempt at protection that had ripped him apart at the sharpest angle, and Megumi remembers crying. He doesn’t recall much of the world outside Sukuna’s innate darkness, his palpable prison bars of sin left unbending, but he remembers the final glance of Gojo Satoru he was ever gifted, only shown gloatingly.
You did well, Gojo Satoru. I won’t forget you for as long as I live.
The memory makes him want to crawl out of his skin and let it die here, where his innocence still lives and his melancholy is a long-forgotten memory, a distant call to the life of cold mornings and cold every-times and Tsumiki’s disgusting breakfasts and the steadfast notion that nobody loves you enough to stick around clinging tightly to hunched shoulders. To utter such a statement after slashing his world in two is to call the smile of his father (his father) a damned reprise to the peace-call of bloodlessness Sukuna would forever deny the acceptance of. For what reason is the killing of those who are strong a more suitable pastime than drinking tea?
How can someone even live that way? Does he even want to know? Who is left to tell him why, to help him see how flooding the streets with chaos and dredging the lives of millions into an endless game of longsuffering senselessness has any merit at all? What is the use in slaughtering all? In the pursuit of happiness, of peacetime, of hope, where is the place of endless torment? When there is no one left to murder, nor any martyrs left to be slain, what will become of those who fan the flames of indifference, the masterminds placing pieces and snipping strings just behind the lidded eyes of everyone down below who dies purely for the act of sleeping soundly?
How can anybody live when each breath they take reveals the darkness they hold tightly, deep within? What’s the point in killing everyone? What is the point in killing anyone? Don’t all good schemers understand just how scheming works at all? Without any sheep left to garner, does the wolf even have a place left in the shadows?
Haven’t we had enough Gojo Satoru?
He remembers the lingering mournfulness and how it stung. It still stings. To him, Gojo Satoru is still a fresh wound.
But, unexplainably and potentially world-tilting, here he stands, whole and unbroken. In this dream he has stepped wholly into, Gojo Satoru is not a piece of chalk on a blackboard tray or a twig under the red-painted heel of a seductress, or even a deer on the side of the road, a testament of his youth. Megumi tries not to laugh too hard out of shock, but this only semblance of perplexing joy encompasses him so wholly—so suddenly—that he cannot help but laugh through fresh tears.
“You’re here,” he whispers brokenly when his surprise fades to mourning, a familiar thing that corrodes him and smooths out his edges until they warp and curve.
Gojo smiles undisturbed. “‘Course I am, Megs,” he replies easily, Six Eyes left dormant within himself even as his crystal blue eyes bore healthily into him. “Where else would I be?”
Megumi shakes his head, smiling softly. It’s a fond thing, the uptick of chapped and marbled lips. It’s gentler, kinder, than the sandpaper of his disbelief that had been previously ripped out of him, loud and surprising in every right. “Of course,” he replies. “You’re Gojo Satoru.” The strongest.
Gojo hums fondly. “Atta boy.” He steps towards his son, bringing with him the nostalgic scent of amber and mint and a speck of pine. He sets a spindly hand on Megumi’s hair and ruffles it. “What’s got you up so early, kid? Bad dream?”
Megumi smells lavender against Gojo’s wrist and faintly, distantly, wonders if its application is a hopeful game the both of them are losing.
“Yeah,” Megumi croaks. He wills this dream to never end with all of his might. “Something like that.”
Gojo hums again, and the lavender presses onto his head like a crown of lost memory settling into place after all this time. He rounds the back of Megumi’s head with his palm and pulls his son into his chest, sighing out of his nose. The air brushes Megumi’s hair from the point on his head, invisible creepy crawlies slithering amongst dark roots or the sudden downpour of an emotion so heavy, so invasive, there is little he can do but sink into the familial embrace and accept that silent, rested assurance.
“You should try and get some more sleep before class, Megs,” Gojo tells him.
Megumi hums in acknowledgement, rubbing his nose into the amber and mint and pine. His fingertips burn white from the pressure with which he grasps onto Gojo’s shirt. His father’s chest rises and falls like every living, breathing, healthy, unhurt (probably), not sliced-clean-in-two person’s chest should do, and Megumi lets out a shaky exhale at the physical testament to his wellbeing.
Well. The wellbeing of whoever this is, anyway; whichever dream-laden statement of I miss you which has formed into physical being as the final tethers of life fade from Megumi’s body and soul and mind, that is. As if it really makes any difference.
A Gojo by any other name would not accept him for the failure he is and live to see the sun set on this gruesome day.
“You should too,” he replies finally, voice muffled by the proximity of himself to the overwhelming fuzz of Infinity beneath skin, always present but never inhibitory. Not for him, anyway, and certainly not during sentimental times like this. Megumi sighs out from between trembling lips before pulling them up into a shaky grin. “Hypocrite.”
Gojo scoffs. “You’ve always got to get the last word in, don’t you, gremlin?”
Maybe, Megumi thinks softly. Maybe that’s the best I can offer, the relinquishing of complacency in the face of butting heads by stepping in between them and finishing things by myself.
Gojo leads him back to his dorm room and twists the knob with ease, ushering his son inside the dim-lit space. His fingers do not struggle on the upturn like the frantic static in Megumi’s own hands had portrayed semblance of, curling with ease and rotating even smoother. Megumi wonders if his scars will ever fade, if the echoes of his untimely death will ever fade from view, or at all.
Megumi steps forward tentatively. He doesn’t want to wake up from this dream. Strange as it may seem, this familiarity is wholesome, and he likes it. He likes being here, at home, with his father standing beside him and applying extra lavender to his wrists while he sits on the edge of the bed and clings to his wrists and begs him not to go. He doesn’t want to wake up in a world without Gojo Satoru.
That sounds like a literal nightmare, a worst case scenario, a bull without horns.
Gojo smiles and ruffles his hair and beckons him to lie down so he can tuck him in like a real father should. Megumi flushes in embarrassment but settles down easily at the warm expression on his father’s face. Gojo tucks him in with flat hands and cold fingers, and Megumi begins to float.
“Don’t go,” he croaks weakly when Gojo stands to leave, tugging against the sleek swaddle, his arms caught between the sheets. “Please don’t go.”
Something in his voice must concern his benefactor. Gojo returns to his side in an instant, placing a hand on his forehead momentarily before smiling softly. “I’ll see you in the morning, Megumi,” he says, brushing his bangs away from his eyes. “Have some sweet, sweet dreams for me, alright?”
Aren’t I dreaming right now? Isn’t that enough? Megumi sees tears forming in the corners of his vision, a blurry testament to his incomprehensibly emotional state. …Can’t it be enough, just this once? “What if I wake up and you aren’t there?”
Gojo sighs softly. “I’ll always be here for you, do you understand?”
Megumi nods, the action small and unimposing. He sniffs dryly, pressing his eyelids shut as tightly as he can. “I understand,” he says softly, slowly, the words creaking themselves out of his throat like unwilling participants in the psychological experiment of his current situation.
“Good,” Gojo says. The next time Megumi opens his eyes, the only sight he sees is the darkness of the early morning and the broken glow of moonlight through his blinds against the wall.
Megumi isn’t sure how he got here or how long he’ll be able to stay (or where, exactly, here is), but there isn’t anything he knows of that he can do to get back to the place from whence he came (like he’d consciously choose to return to Sukuna’s head and the blood that sloshes loudly there), and as far as he’s aware, he will be stationed here indefinitely.
He plans to make the most of it.