Work Text:
Sugar Sugar The Junpei Cut: Theme Week Day 1 ( Comedy / Romance ) --
NO BETA AND SUPER LATE
There is a firm, audible smack as Yoshino Nagi slaps Toji’s passing ass.
All at once there is an uproar in the room, drinks spit, clothes dirtied, teens startle, laughing, howling in outrage as the building chaos finally breaks free. All the while The Sorcerer Slayer clicks his tongue and winks at the woman, laughter on his tongue.
Megumi and Junpei sink lower into their seats, mortified.
This was a terrible idea.
“How shameless!” Gojo cackles, having the time of his life as the gathered teens lose their minds.
“Hahaha! Why would we be? Even with those baggy pants anyone can see his ass is like a taiko drum! Don’t you want to hit it with a DON!?”
“MOM!”
“HAHAHA-” Toji howls, sauntering out of the room for another pack of beer.
They’ve been dating for ten years.
“T-ten?!”
“Ten wild years! It’s our paper anniversy!”
“Wouldn’t that be your tin-anniversy?”
“What’s he gonna do with diamonds? Sell them? Throwing bills at him is sooo much more fun!”
“Yoshino-san, please.”
“She’s right you know,” Megumi’s father returns, equally shameless and enjoying the student’s suffering.
“I don’t get it.” Nobara speaks her mind, the rudeness of the potluck dinner already popping any sense of discression. “How did a mom like yours end up with someone called The Sorcerer Killer? No offense Junpei"
“I wish I could take some.” The second year bemoans, having given up any saving of his sanity tonight. He knows Megumi is paralyzed beside him, and Tsumiki is far too busy chatting with Maki to care.
Or so Junpei had hoped.
“Oh, that’s easy, Nagi-san was dad’s Sugar Momma.”
Yuji chokes on his food.
“Tsumiki,” Junpei looks at her in her betrayal. “Why?”
Nagi does not allow Junpei’s not-quite-a-step-sibling to answer. “She’s right though~ Toji-kun started out as my little Sugar-Baby, isn’t that right, Baby?”
“Excuse me,” Megumi stands abruptly, “I’m leaving.”
“Sit back down,” Fushiguro chides with his cocky grin. “You’ve heard her flirt worse than this.”
“That doesn’t mean I need to hear more of it.”
“This is dinner with your class. Sit.” Father and son get into a tense stareoff, but after a few brief moments Nagi notices. Leaning over she draps herself on Toji’s shoulder.
“Oh come off him Toji-kun, if he wants to leave, let him leave. We’ll be here to entertain his friends, won’t we?”
Realizing that, indeed, he would be abandoning his class with one less buffer between them and the two shameless adults, Megumi grits his jaw and silently relents.
Yuji, next to Nobara, laughs awkwardly. He doesn’t know what to make of all this.
“Even so…” Maki continues Nobara’s thought and prying, “There’s big money in offing people, isn’t there? Shouldn’t Toji have more money than your Nagi?”
“You’d think that, but he’s awful with money.”
“He loses it on the races.”
“Nagi-san provides the rice and roof. Dad provides the dissapointment.”
“I’m right here.” Toji stares flatly at his step-daughter.
“So much dissapointment~”
“When you risk your life to earn a payday, you get to decide what to do with it.”
“You’re not even pretending to be a good person."
“Like there is such a thing.”
“You’re okay with that?” Yuji wonders innocently to Nagi, curious of how unrepentantly untraditional the family dynamic had come to be. “Toji spending his money, and you paying for everything else?”
“Why wouldn’t I? It’s the money he worked for; he can do what he wants with it.” Even in her giggly stupor, Nagi follows that social topic easily, freely sharing her opinion. “Aaah, but besides that, he’s not entirely bad with money- he made those trusts for- ”
“Nagi-! For god’s sake-”
“Trusts? What trusts?”
“Damnit,” Toji groans and rubs his face, cheeks rosey with beer, and Nagi blinks owlishly.
“Ah? Did I spoil it?”
“You spoiled it.”
“What trusts?”
“Forget about it.”
“No way!”
For as embaressing and wild and insane it could be, this is their patchwork of a family.
Looking back on it, they weren’t as strange a couple as one might think. Timing and chance had led to their first fling. Nagi was just the type Toji wanted; wallet full of money and a cheerful, impulsive drunk. It helped that she was smoking hot. She doesn’t care that he’s a cheapskate and obvious womanizer. Blunt as a board to the head, she tells him all wants is a good time, and that she’ll treat him right.
Jackpot.
After a night of gambling and drinks and a love hotel, Toji expects the woman to get all lovey-dovy, to disclose some hardships or heartaches, to try and use him as a crutch even though his heart has long been shattered by a dead wife and a runaway one. Yoshino Nagi doesn’t. Early in the morning she wakes in a rush, washing and tidying herself for work. She thanks him for the good time, and leaves him with a bet-slip for today’s race, and her number. Laughing to himself, he pockets both and keeps her in mind. She may be a good ‘Sugar Momma’ for a while.
The horse she bet on wins, and he offers to take her out next time.
They go to the races. They loose most of their budget, but Nagi wins back enough for an early lunch and quick fling. She pays for the room overnight, but leaves before evening.
From there, their casual relationship hit off. No commitments. Fully open with their intentions. They bet, they eat, they drink and smoke and have sex. He thinks it might be what a friend with benefits might be like if she were clingier.
Occasionaly, natually, there are mentions of their personal lives (or what they pretended they were.) He learns she’s a mom, that her husband died suddenly, that she’s rising in her office but the politics are a pain. He doesn’t tell her about his two wives, the one he loved and the one he thought was reliable and would raise Megumi. Toji doesn’t tell her he has two kids and an apartment, that he has hired the neighbor to visit daily to check on them, because he can hardly look at Megumi without seeing his mother’s face.
A couple weeks go by, and each time they meet, he thinks she’ll burst the bubble of privacy and anonmitity, that she’ll try to pry unprompted into his life. She doesn’t, and when he asks why, her answer is so very like her.
“If you wanted to tell me, you would. Whatever reason you keep coming back to me, I don’t have the luxury or time to care because I enjoy it. Whether you think it’s good or bad, it's your choice to make. That kind of freedom… it means we don’t have to stay inside the tiny, maniqured aquarium the world tries to keep.”
Sufficient to say, Fushiguro Toji falls for her first. It’s a slow, creeping and terrifying sensation, made all the worse because he knows what it is, he knows what can and will happen, that all that can happen and how she may reject him, how little of his heart is left to even attempt to show affection or something close to love again.
She invites him over one week when she doesn’t have the time for their usual. He meets her kid, a scrawny seven-year-old that’s quite and timid all until Nagi asks him what movie he’d recommend for Toji.
“For him…? Something with Action! Nothing too serious… Predator or Terminator.”
They end up watching Predator.
He likes it. It’s rediculous and explosive and violent and bloody, and part of him wonders why on earth Nagi let her impressionable young kid watch it once, let along again with them.
He wouldn’t have let Megumi watch it.
“He asked,” She simply shrugs. “Besides, he’s watched all kinds of movies with his dad. I’m not going to deny him something like that.”
This woman really is a carefree, careless person where it doesn’t matter.
He wonders if she’d stay that way, knowing what he does when he wasn’t gambling or goofing off.
Toji makes, then, a renewed effort to visit Megumi and Tsumiki at least once a week. He succeeds.
Things continue to change, little by little.
Eventually, when offered a job that could, theoretically, set him up for life, Toji accepts it. Staking his target for an extended time isnt as easy as it used to be, the girl’s face and smile reminding him too much of the little girl raising his son most days. His step-daughter. It should be his job. His responsibility. He misses her, and him. He realizes he wants to be alive.
The day he follows his target and guards back to Tokyo, he gets a call from the kids. They’re sick, out of food, and the neighbor wasn’t answering.
Toji drops the job.
They introduce their kids to eachother.
Things are normal then, in their abnormal way, until Toji realizes he is up a creek in debt, that he’s going to live, and Megumi’s birthday is coming up- along with the day the Zen’in would come for him. That, and if Megumi developed a curse technique, he wouldn’t be able to help him. He thinks about the guards for the Star Child girl; how they were supposidly the Strongest, how much he wanted to fight the sixeyes and proove he wasn’t a failure, and make the Zenin regret and grovel to him for naming him useless.
Toji finds Gojo Satoru, and kicks his ass.
Then he kicks Geto Suguru’s ass.
Then, he goes to the Zenin Clan and tells them to fuck off and breaks their deal.
That goes over as well as he expected, which is fine, because he had over two decades of spite to take out on the clan heads. He tells them that if they try to fuck with him, he’ll come back and kill all of them.
It’s all very therapudic.
So is the wild, triumphant sex he and (a rather bewildered) Nagi have.
They never marry. They don’t change names. They keep their finances separate.
The Gojo and Geto kid track him down while on a family picnic.
They want to kick his ass.
He makes a deal with them: He’ll fight them, but if they loose, they start mentoring Megumi.
Shortly after Satoru and Geto become a regular part of their lives.
Toji feels like he can breath again. Like he wants to. He wants to wake up every day and hear Nagi being a terror to the kids, and a partner to him. He wants to see the rare smile on Megumi’s face that still hurts Toji because it’s the same as his first wife’s. He wants to sit on the couch as Junpei screens a movie that either bores Toji to sleep, or has him just as engaged as the kid. He wants Tsumiki to ‘help’ him work out or do chores, sitting on his back, swinging on his arms, acting like she’s a monkey and he’s a tree.
It's all stupid things, really, but they’re his mundane moments with a family that is three different puzzles with missing pieces, but somehow still form a picture. And that picture is them.