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It is an emotional rather than logical equation,
an earthly rather than heavenly one,
which posits that a boy's supplications
and a father's love add up to silence.
— Li-Young Lee, “A Story”
-/-
“Not Zen’in, huh?”
Fushiguro Toji lets the blade fall with a clang, smiling as he studies the boy before him. “I’m glad.”
In the darkness of the alley, Toji can make out the boy’s confused expression, the tautness of his hands as they unclench and lower to his sides.
“You…” the boy murmurs. His lips are parted, beads of sweat rolling down his face as he struggles to catch his breath. The quickness of his heartbeat punctuates the silence between them as Toji continues to watch him calmly.
With a sigh, Toji puts his hands in his pockets, turning and walking away.
“Wait!” he hears from behind him. “Who… Where are you going?” the boy asks.
“Don’t know.” Toji keeps his gaze focused ahead. “Say, are you hungry?”
“What?”
“M’starving after all that fighting. You?”
The boy is at a loss for words.
“Well, I think I’ll head to the nearest konbini for something to eat.” Toji continues to walk, exiting the alley onto the main street. Noticing the lack of footsteps behind him, he glances over his shoulder and adds, “If you want to come.”
Toji hears the boy catch up to him soon after, his footsteps heavy and unbalanced with fatigue. “Wait,” he says, stopping in his tracks. Toji turns to see him looking down at the ground beneath them, his hands tense at his sides. “Just… wait.”
Where there was only the instinct to kill moments earlier, overwhelming in its intensity as his consciousness was returned to the plane of the living, Toji feels only a faint sense of peace and pride as he observes the boy up close, strong enough to hold his ground against him and referring to himself by his chosen rather than inherited name. In doing so, he had made it clear that he too had disavowed the Zen’ins: a clan that had brought him nothing but hardship and weariness until his death twelve years prior.
“Sure,” he muses. He presses his heels into the ground as he watches the boy regain his composure, meeting his gaze with a level yet apprehensive expression before looking away.
“I need to find my teachers, my friends,” he says quietly.
Toji snorts. “You look like shit. If I were you, I’d go sit down and have something to eat first.”
The boy frowns, thinking to himself. Several moments pass before his eyes return to meet his. “I’ll go with you,” he says. “There should be a store on the way.”
“Great.” Toji turns around and resumes his walk, the boy following wordlessly behind him.
Toji had come to Shibuya a few times while on contract and was left each time with headaches from the constant din of pedestrians and traffic on its crossings. Tonight, however, is different. The street they are on is deserted, quiet save for the clamors he can make out in the distance—cursed techniques, smashed glass, and the disjointed yells of bodies slammed into concrete. Beneath a starless sky, the stores around them continue to shine, their signs jutting out like fluorescent bookmarks of every shape and color.
Here were the contradictions—his body resurrected, a boy he’d once forgotten walking behind him on a street that was supposed to be crowded with people and curses at each hour of the day—and it seemed to Toji that everything about this night was surreal, covered by a sheet that creased at the edges and glimmered in its center. He finds his earlier sense of peace growing stronger, letting his steps fall heavier as if he were a phantom roaming the earth, invisible no matter if it wished to be heard. In this space that existed in violation of both his logic and the world’s, he listens to the soft breaths behind him and allows himself to imagine, fleetingly, that this was how it had always been. For a moment, he entertains the thought of there being no curses or cursed energy, no people to murder for money; he and the boy free from the legacies of power-hungry sorcerers.
They found a konbini before long, devoid of staff and customers. Hit with a blast of cool air as its automatic doors open, Toji makes his way to the snack aisle, ripping open a bag of chips and pouring them into his mouth with a pleased sigh. The boy, meanwhile, lingers by the entrance, watching him warily.
“Something the matter?” Toji says while chewing.
The boy shakes his head, moving to the refrigerator aisle and taking out a bottle of cold tea. He continues to hold the door open, staring at the bottle in his hand before asking, “Do you want anything?”
Amused, Toji shakes his head. “No thanks,” he says, grabbing two cups of instant ramen and walking to the cooking machine at the back of the store. He feels the boy’s eyes on him as he prepares the ramen, looking away as he walks over and offers him a cup.
The store begins to fill with the sound of falling rain. The boy is silent as he takes the cup, watching curls of steam rise from a gap in the plastic lid. He turns and motions to the table and chairs by the store’s front window. The two of them move to sit, a spare seat between them as they wait for the ramen to cook, listening to the rain.
Resting a cheek against his knuckle, Toji watches the boy sit uncomfortably still from the corner of his eye. His gaze is distant and troubled as he observes droplets of rain pelting their reflections in the window, reflecting the light of the konbini’s store sign as they slide down the glass. It is this sight, and the particular setting it occurs in, that leads Toji to believe he may have once watched him sitting just like this as it rained, the ghost of a memory rearing its head from a forgotten place. With the surreal quality of the night, a smile finds its way to his lips as he lets himself dwell, detached, on the faint impressions accompanying this image: vestiges of a concern he’d felt and words they’d exchanged that he could neither say were remembered nor pulled from thin air.
“Hey.”
The boy turns to face him.
“Do you know who I am?”
The boy stiffens, his expression contorting into one of unease before smoothing over.
Toji shrugs. “Well, whether you know or not, I can’t say it matters much.” He lifts his head from his arm to peel the lid off his ramen, stirring the noodles briefly before digging in, his loud slurps joining the patter of rain outside.
The boy looks at him a while longer before turning back to the window, his eyes following a drop of rain as it runs into another.
The truth was that Fushiguro Megumi had had the question in his mind ever since the man appeared in Dagon’s domain. Yet alongside this question was the nagging suspicion that this man was someone he once knew. That to ask his identity, as he was about to in the alley, would be to open a box he had long sealed away, telling himself he did not want nor need to remember its contents. Megumi trusted the intuition that came from his observations, and the man before him—the green of his eyes, the timbre of his voice—felt familiar in such a way that there was only one conclusion his mind came to. To have asked him who he was and chanced getting his answer right would be to acknowledge the man as the same one who’d left him years ago. To bleed the ghost of a wound long covered by new skin.
“Why does it not matter?” he asks.
The man continues to chew thoughtfully, his eyes on the speckled shimmer of the window. “It just doesn’t,” he finally says. “Not anymore.”
Megumi is still for a moment further, silent again as he peels the lid off his ramen, breaks his chopsticks apart, and begins to eat.
His senses still focused on the man beside him, Megumi lets his thoughts return to his classmates, upperclassmen, and teachers, all currently fighting the onslaught of curses and enemy sorcerers elsewhere in the district. His stomach twists with dread as he thinks of his sensei, now sealed away in the Prison Realm, prompting him to place his chopsticks down and rise from his seat.
“Done?” The man watches him make his way towards the store’s entrance.
“Yes,” Megumi says, a trace of irritation in his voice. “I’ve stayed here too long. I need to go find the others.”
The man nods, placing his hands on his thighs and getting up from his seat. Megumi watches him walk to the frozen aisle and pick out an ice cream cone. “Sorry for holding you up,” he says. He holds out the cone to him. “Here.”
Megumi pauses before reaching to take the ice cream, his fingers closing lightly around the head of the cone. “Thanks,” he murmurs.
The man says nothing in reply.
Megumi had read somewhere, once, that the body could remember what the mind chose to forget. That inside all living beings were sets of memories that complimented each other, one holding on to sensation even as the others let go of image, sound, or emotion. He had thought little of the theory beyond defense instincts and muscle memory at the time, but it is here, standing halfway between the frozen aisle and entrance—looking down at the gift in his hand and feeling a rush of familiarity—that he thinks of it again in relation to the man before him.
In the absence of background music and the chatter of customers, he nonetheless recalls an impression of unhappiness in a store just like this; as if the man had once gotten him an ice cream flavor too sweet for his liking. On the blurred boundary between memory and imagination, a series of recollections approach him as if peering through the slits of boarded-up windows, an outsider in a distant place. He feels a cool gust of air blowing through the automatic doors, a bubbling in his chest as a jacket is draped over his shoulders. He remembers not the hand that’d enveloped his own but the solidness of it; the surprise he’d felt, perhaps, at the rough callouses against his palms.
Discomfort pricks his fingers as he picks at the cover of the ice cream. Against the warmth he could claim to remember, there was the indisputable fact of the man’s absence, cold and solid in the back of his mind.
“Why did you leave?” he hears himself ask.
For the first time that night, Megumi looks directly into the man’s eyes, glimpsing the leaden weight within them at his question.
“Pride,” Toji answers.
He remembers his fight with Gojo Satoru: the final words he’d spoken as the memory of a child, averting his gaze and lowering his head in disappointment, had found its way back to him. He’d told the sorcerer of the boy’s fate with the Zen’ins, leaving the final choice to him because to ask that the boy be spared from the clan was to admit and accept his failure as a father. That the death of his wife had made him realize that his freedom from destiny was nonetheless in the shadow of history. That he had gone back to the only life he’d known before her like a fish to a running stream, living his days haunted by the people he told himself were no longer part of his life—killing sorcerers to prove to them that he was the strongest even without cursed energy.
In his lifelong desire to be respected and feared by the clan that had shunned him from birth, to leave them behind and raze them to ashes for the suffering they’d caused him, he could not learn to protect nor care for his son—a son he could not stand to be around for a cursed technique that reminded him acutely of the Zen’ins’ cruelty. He had gambled on the chance that Gojo, whether from interest in the boy’s technique or sympathy, would hear the request beneath his disaffected air; making sure that the boy would live a life that, while still marked by the burden of inheritance, would not give the Zen’ins an upper hand.
To his last breath, Toji had wanted only to see his heritage subjugated, its hierarchy destroyed.
The rain outside grows heavier as he studies the boy’s face. The frustration in his breathing, now stilled by his answer, betrayed the careful mask of nonchalance he’d worn as he asked the question. “I see,” he eventually says, looking down at the floortiles between them.
For every impression of warmth, clearer still was the starless night of Megumi’s childhood: a wall of conviction, of knowing with certainty that there was no point in dwelling on impossible things. Forming each brick in this wall was a memory he had buried but not forgotten. The coldness of his fingers as the rough, calloused hand around them let go. The fear in his chest as he smelled blood in the shower. The heaviness of his eyelids as he willed himself to stay awake, long enough to hear footsteps at the front door. Woven through these memories was the realization that the broad back in front of him would walk without bothering to glance back—that it would grow smaller in the distance until it was only him for good. By the time this realization came to fruition, Megumi had long ceased to expect anything other than absence. The man had long been a stranger even before he disappeared.
“What happened to her?” he asks.
“Your mother?”
“No. The woman you married after.”
The man looks away, thinking to himself. “Don’t know,” he says. “I left her too.”
Megumi does not recall the wedding, if there was even a wedding at all. What he remembers is the man returning home one day with Tsumiki and her mother, the two introducing themselves politely and asking for his name. The four of them had lived briefly under the same roof, and in that window of time, he remembers having felt the falter of his conviction. The ease with which his stepsister and her mother had cared for him, making sure he would eat—the way his father, too, had seemed to come home earlier and more often, the image of them having dinner together now waning unclearly in the corner of his mind—was one he could not get used to, scaring him even if he refused to acknowledge the fear. Megumi could no longer avoid the topic of family—could no longer pretend that it was only him in the solitude he had known his entire life. For once, he had been given reason to think otherwise, and for all the discomfort it caused him, it insisted gently upon a hope that this was perhaps how it would be, even as he doubted that Tsumiki and her mother would stick around.
The thought made him ache from a place deeper than he could see. As if the wall he’d built, cracking in places where the possibility of proximity glimmered faintly, had concealed this ache all along.
The man hums, placing a hand on his hip as his eyes roam the ceiling, catching the squares of light above them. “We came to this chain once,” he says. “Back in Saitama.”
Megumi looks at him.
“I’d gotten you an ice cream flavor you wouldn’t eat. It was your mother’s favorite.” He smiles. “That was the last time we came to a store like this.”
Megumi is silent, a growing fatigue in his limbs.
When the man and Tsumiki’s mother disappeared, leaving behind only a sum of money on the table, he had barely batted an eye. It wasn’t that he’d grown used to waking up to an empty house, the man gone for weeks at a time to unspecified locations across the country; it was that every hope he’d had before their disappearance was reluctant, colored by the damning expectation that he would be alone again eventually. The wall stood firm even as it had faltered, only strengthened as Gojo had found them, telling him that his father had sold him to a clan of sorcerers and that he and Tsumiki would get by if he chose to become a jujutsu sorcerer. In the days that followed, any vulnerability in his earlier conviction was burned away. There was no reason for him to dwell on a man whose face he was already beginning to forget—to lament a fruitless impossibility when there was his sister to keep safe and the looming promise of exorcising curses for a living. From then on, any thought of his father was rare and abstract: pointing toward the outline of a man he felt nothing for.
And yet, here he was standing before him: the bitter hour of a father who had abandoned and sold him, who he’d believed with full certainty he would never see again. The wall he’d built was splintering once again, the memories it comprised spilling into his mind as the ache it hid was bared. Against the continued downpour of rain, Megumi thinks of his sister, lying comatose in a hospital bed, and remembers the nights he’d stood outside her door, listening to her stifled cries at the loss of her mother and stepfather. He knew then that he could never forgive the man.
Megumi did not fault him for leaving so much as he resented his callousness toward Tsumiki, the person who had cared for him in the wake of his absence. He could not blame the man, really, for the neglect of his supposed duties as a father when the title itself held no substance, existing only as a placeholder for something he never had in the first place. The sister he did have nursed a hurt deep inside her—one he had mistook for weakness alongside her kindness—even if she could conceal it nearly perfectly. He knew this hurt would remain even after she awoke.
What angers him now, slightly, is his knowledge that the man would not apologize to her even if given the chance. What angers him more is this expectation of him even with his own undelivered apology. Any frustration Megumi feels in this moment, he had long felt in greater measure toward himself for a callousness lesser in finality yet no less cruel throughout their time in middle school, refracted by his regrets. They had both failed her in their own ways.
And here the man was, regarding him with a calm, almost serene expression on his face as he recalls a past he cannot remember. The store lights flicker and Megumi closes his eyes. The anger was gone as fast as it had come, submerged in the pool of weariness rising past his shoulders as his thoughts go from Tsumiki to the man to the state of the world around them.
He opens his eyes and takes a breath. He could not afford to let this past and his emotions claim control of the present.
“Stay,” he says, looking at the man. “Stay and help us.”
Toji’s eyebrows raise despite himself. He shakes his head. “No. M’not sticking around,” he says.
“But—”
“Kid,” Toji interrupts.
Megumi stiffens.
“I’m glad I got to meet you.”
They hold each other’s gazes before Megumi looks away, knowing it was the only answer he would get. “Likewise,” he says, turning to exit the store.
Toji follows behind him, his steps soundless and steady. The rain falls around them in heavy streaks, casting the road before them in a peppered blur of neon as they reenter the coolness of the night. A stray wind blows dampness onto Megumi’s cheeks as he stops beneath the konbini’s shaded roof. He turns once more to Toji, lifting his gaze.
“Will I see you again?” he asks.
Toji looks at him and smiles. After a pause, he reaches over and ruffles his hair. “Eat the ice cream before it melts,” he says in reply.
Megumi freezes at his touch; Toji’s hand is already gone from his head. Without another word, Toji turns and walks to the right of the store. Megumi watches him leave, unable to look away as his silhouette against the street signs grows fainter in the distance. Now a blot of gray and black against the strain of his eyes, he sees him glance over his shoulder as he reaches the end of the street.
Megumi remains still, arms loose at his sides and mouth parted slightly as he watches the man watch him. For a moment longer, he waits, holding his breath for something he cannot name before he turns and walks in the other direction, thinking of nothing but the night ahead.
He does not look back.