Chapter Text
Tsumiki cleaned the dishes, he would dry them and put them away when she was all done. The apartment felt relatively empty, but it wasn’t anything new to him. Megumi barely talked most of the time or at least would barely talk to Tsumiki even when she tried. But she tried and a little part of him at the time was thankful for that.
Sometimes that weird white haired man would come around and pay the bills, bring groceries, it seemed like he was trying to pick up where Tsumiki’s mom left off. But at the end of the day, it was him and Tsumiki and Tsumiki and him. Frankly, he liked it that way. Life wasn't the best, but it was still a happy home when he knew he wasn't alone.
Through his primary years and junior year of school, he stuck to that routine and sometimes would question that white haired man. Even Tsumiki seemed to worry what he was getting into and he often brushed her off about it. But he missed being worried about and he missed her pestering, Megumi missed how much she cared and he realized what he had lost when she fell into that deep sleep.
A coma, how obtuse and undeserving. She didn’t deserve that at all and yet it happened to her, of all people. He wanted her to wake up, he wanted to see her again and apologize. But first she needed to wake up and so did he.
Shooting pain cracked at his side, his skin felt a little warmer than usual, and there was a smell he wasn't used to permeating through the air. It also felt like his fingers had gone through rigor mortis as it nearly hurt a little when he tried to curl them into a fist.
Cold air filled his lungs, he licked his dry lips as a terrible murmur seemed to hang above. Megumi dragged his forearm over his closed eyes as he tried to remember what happened to him. Shibuya. The sheer thought of the location suddenly made his features scrunch out of distaste and mild grief. With how things were going down, he was expecting the worst news.
“You’re awake.” It was a female voice who he soon recognized as Shoko. His lips parted and a confused reply was all he could muster, “Hah?” There was a shuffling that could be heard, Megumi could tell that she was picking something up. It was probably a clipboard on his patient chart.
“How long?” His voice sounded hoarse and rough, coarse like sandpaper and seemingly strangled almost. “It’s been four days since Shibuya.” The teen chewed on his lower lip, keeping his arm over his eyes as he was still trying to get a hold of his bearings. He couldn’t think of anything else to say and swallowed what little bit of spit he had in his mouth.
“The others?” he eventually asked. Yet when he delivered the question, he sounded almost scared and already worried. Names swam in his head as he hoped Shoko would just pick one and give him the details.
“Itadori is gone, we don’t know where he went. Panda is fine and Maki is in critical condition, but she’s recovering. Inumaki is too, he lost an arm during that fight.” His lips quivered slightly as she reported them in a tone he wasn’t used to, as if she was trying to soften something he wasn’t ready for yet.
“Kugisaki is … gone, she was confirmed dead by Arata Nitta. We haven’t had the chance to recover her body yet.” Silence followed shortly after, she could tell he was processing the information from the way his hand balled up.
Megumi sharply inhaled as he painfully pressed the arm against his face, nodding quietly as he felt anger and grief slowly take a hold of him. Shoko was probably still there, he didn’t hear her moving as he was trying his best to not shed a single tear in her presence.
Nobara was gone, Itadori was nowhere to be found, and Maki was hanging on by a thread it seemed. Death wasn’t uncommon for a sorcerer, it hurt and some people say that it gets easier. But Megumi hated that notion, he hated the thought of growing cold to death as that was when people stopped caring.
Yet he cared and he cared so much for these people that the state they were in just hurt as much as the wounds he carried from that previous fight. “Thank you.” It was all he could muster right now and he knew he should say more, Shoko healed so many sorcerers and saved his own, perhaps even Maki’s.
But it was all he could give right now as the weight of their failure seemed to bear down on him. Shoko seemingly left as her footsteps receded from his bedside and he was left alone, he felt so terribly alone. Megumi slowly got up with his eyes still closed and took his arm away from his face; why did it feel so terrible to open his eyes?
Reality swelled and crashed into him, Gojo was sealed and the ones he cared so much for were hurt. Kugisaki died. His blue hued gaze tore through the window of that infirmary, brimmed with crystalline tears that felt so hot against his cheeks when her image seared itself into his already fragile mind.
A strangled noise so foreign came from the sorcerer that sounded so pained that Shoko seemingly doubled back to check on him, only to see Megumi curled over himself. His shoulders shook and his digits held a white knuckled grip on the sheets that laid on his lap that it felt like it would tear.
Shoko watched silently before she held a quiet sigh to herself, she could relate to some degree. It was sad to see that her old friend had done this, someone she used to think was a good person. She had just turned on her heels when his voice broke above the noise he was trying to suppress.
“What happened when I went out cold?” The healer was a little surprised that he was so persistent in knowing the awful truth she was about to give him; maybe he was ready for it. Megumi himself felt like he was missing something, it seemed like there was a huge missing piece to what was going on. The doctor looked out the window, she looked more tired than usual and even uncharacteristically distant for a split second.
“Fushiguro, whether it was him or that curse inside of him, he killed nearly every civilian who was there that night.” She came over to his curtains and pulled them apart, letting the dim light of the new day come into his room.
“How many?” He pushed his hand up to run through his hair, the tears only seemed to flow faster this time. “Numbers don’t really matter now, do they?” Shoko lightly mused. The clipboard was placed back onto a chair and her fingers found the knob of the door. “Japan has been rocked, we're now in the dark and we can only move on from here.”
Megumi closed his eyes, brows furrowing from the light and from the news of what Itadori had done to Shibuya. Not only that, the curses that killed people too. Who did they even save at this point? He felt sick and he pressed his face into his hands and managed to only exhale.
“When you’re ready, tell me, I’ll be tending to the others.” She implied that he'd be moving, it was a nudge towards the fact that he might want to take action from this point out. But in contrast, the teen sort of wanted to sleep for a while and think. The tears were drying up when he silently tried to bury it under the situation at hand.
'Shibuya is lost, the people are lost, and I lost them.' It sounded pathetic, what good was this going to do him? The doctor noticed that he didn't say anything more and she reminded herself that there were other patients she had to deal with.
Shoko left this time, the door was closed and he was left in a silence that he had begun to dislike. Megumi felt a creeping cold embrace him, he even became a little nauseated as his thoughts came and went using what little energy he had left to spare. He was in conflict and he could only fathom thinking about what he was going to do in the next minute or even second.
He closed his eyes and wondered for a moment, 'but what are you going to do when someone you saved kills someone else in the future?' It was a tragic irony, this wasn't how it was supposed to go.