Chapter Text
Writing happy endings was so hard.
"I just don't know how."
Megumi sniffed, wiping his face with his sleeve in a vain attempt to look less pathetic in front of him. The fan beside him made the window curtains flutter and his hair sway gently to one side, but he couldn't stop sweating. The heat clinging to his body didn't belong to the summer, but to his own guts.
He rested his elbows on the table, wiping away his tears. When he felt a gentle, compassionate hand on his back, he almost stood up and threw everything to the floor, but he didn't have the strength, and the scene remained only in his memory. It made him feel sick.
"Don't look at me," he pleaded, dragging his chair forward. The edge of the table dug into his ribs.
Itadori didn't touch him again, nor did he leave. Other people would have done exactly that; he was already used to facing those moments when Megumi felt more like a bottomless pit than a whole person.
"I'm not looking at you," Itadori assured.
Megumi hunched his shoulders, not bothering to check if that was true or not. He remained still, anchored to his chair with his laptop on in front of him and a blank document. The document's history was so full of contradictions and deleted paragraphs that the system would surely doubt it was him writing it.
He had written happy endings before, why couldn't he do it now?
"I'm stupid," he spat, shaking his head to himself.
Sometimes the agony transformed into rage, which then turned back into sadness and later into anger. Megumi covered his face with his hands, letting a convulsion shake his chest, squeezing out all the tears, as if they were being thrown up.
"Don't say those things," Itadori said from behind him. The mattress had sagged beneath his weight, his hand reaching for the water bottle on the nightstand. "You know you're talented, you can pull off that ending without any problem."
He squeezed his eyes shut, his nails digging into the contours of his face, wanting to tear it off. He sniffed loudly, grinding his teeth in an attempt to avoid making a sound.
Happy endings were terrible when he wrote about himself. And unfortunately, Megumi did far too many of that. He'd been publishing novels for over a decade and had never hidden what they stood for, even though being vulnerable proved to be a double-edged sword in the end. Everyone knew who he was and could imagine the things he'd been through; it made him feel watched, especially by those who insisted it was all a lie, a charade to gain people's pity.
The ending of a story was one of the most important parts, and he'd already been able to give his characters happy endings in other novels. Pain would always be pain, no matter how many scars there were to show, or if there were any at all—he knew that. So his happy endings weren't necessarily about showing how miserable they were, but about finding a way out and having hope. That was enough.
However, there was something different about this story, though he didn't know if that was entirely true or if he was just going through a rough patch. This time he wanted to protest, to show that these characters would never recover and that they would always be insignificant human beings incapable of living a normal life, one they deserved. It reminded him of his early novels and the stressful revisions with his editors.
He had promised a happy ending. Every chapter, every hundreds of thousands of words, showed a structured development of recovery and evolution. It would be so anticlimactic to throw all that work away.
"But what's the point if they're happy? What was the point, then?" he sighed, his voice rasping. "I need to show how bad it was for them. That they never recovered."
When silence greeted his words, he felt so sorry for Itadori. Sometimes he had the impression that he was trapping him in a suffocating relationship, that none of this was worth it because it must be terrible to see someone you loved suffering like this.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. His hands were damp, his face flushed. He still didn't dare turn over; even the mere sound of the bedsprings creaking sent shivers down his spine. "I'm so annoying when I'm writing, I know."
"Of course you're not. It's your job, and it's normal to be stressed about it."
He swallowed, exhausted. Suddenly, his whole body felt incredibly heavy, as if lead instead of blood coursed through his veins. His breathing slowed for a few seconds as he blew his nose with a tissue and lay still, very still.
Megumi had many problems. The first of them was that he couldn't help being jealous of the characters he himself had brought to life. He would never admit it out loud, but it was destroying him.
He no longer knew what to do. He felt like abandoning this project for the second or third time, make the publisher's deadlines to go to hell, and retreating into his dark hole for all eternity. However, something compelled him to continue torturing himself with this, in the same way he delved into his own insides to write. He was a writer; he didn't abandon projects just because they were difficult. He had to continue even if it was tearing him apart.
He was a writer, the only thing he could be because there was no other way to live; otherwise, he would be dead. And there was something beautiful in letting the very thing that had saved him countless times be the thing breaking him down piece by piece, exposing his worst desires, resentments, and fears. Bleeding because he write and writing because he bled, seeing himself reflected in his own words, bright ink, pitch black.
He sat up carefully, taking a ragged breath.
"I need time."
Itadori had a few words of encouragement that, to tell the truth, he wasn't able to hear. A sharp, precise, painful migraine shot through his skull. It made him bend over and curse under his breath, trying to stop crying. A tear fell onto his computer keyboard.
He was trapped in front of a screen, forcing himself to watch as the representation of his insecurities and all the things that made him miserable would have the ending he could never have. He had to find the way out.