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Megumi did not grow up to be his father. As a man named after blessings, he considers this his greatest one. He remembers Fushiguro Toji, the reanimated corpse of him shambling athletically through the alleys of Shibuya. Megumi inherited none of his sinew and muscle, and none of his vicious grace. Megumi is willowy—a sorcerer's build. And, as Itadori likes to tell him, he’s shit at hand-to-hand.
But he’s grown up into something else.
Megumi is on an early afternoon train back to the Jujutsu Tech campus, and he's in a mood. A dark, jittery, stuck-in-your-throat mood. He’d had class that morning—he’s pursuing a decent, normal wildlife biology degree at a decent, normal university. He had wanted, when he enrolled, one part of his life that didn’t remind him of—of everything. And with his cursed technique, it’d seemed pretty natural.
But he’d looked out the classroom window that morning while the professor fussed with his Powerpoint slides, and a Grade 2 curse chasing down freshmen on the quad had had him making hasty, feeble excuses on his dash from the classroom.
Now Megumi’s sweaty and bruised, begging notes off of a classmate over text, and it really takes away from his enjoyment of the abundance of seating on the empty, sunny, off-hour train. This is the third time this month. Megumi thinks blackly to himself—that he might as well drop out at this rate for all he’s really learning, and just resign himself to early and unremarkable death in the line of jujutsu duty, and what number should he call to unenroll?, and wasn’t he living on time borrowed and stolen, anyway?—when the realization wracks him with a full-body shudder.
He’s acting like Gojo.
“Fuck.” The word creaks out of him into the rumbling silence of the train.
Mood swings was probably too mild of a term to use for what Gojo experienced (had experienced, when he was alive). He could spend weeks at a time in an untouchable, ever-accelerating whirlwind of action and feeling. He could clear a week of missions off the sorcerers’ docket in a day, if the notion glanced off his mind. If he was happy, he was buying out the candy aisle of a convenience store. If he was angry, he was making gleeful threats of massacre towards the jujutsu elite.
Gojo had once described it, during one of these spells, like this: “I’m running towards the edge of a cliff. I know that I’ll fall off the cliff when I get there, but there’s always the teensy-weensiest chance I’ll sprout wings and fly. And the running feels good, while it lasts.” He had ended the metaphor with a sunny, wild smile, reveling in the preteen Megumi’s scorn for teensy-weensy.
Then, Gojo had disappeared and shown back up three days later, worn thin and conspicuously un-splattered in the sludge that curses leave behind when you brutally eviscerate them. Megumi and Tsumiki, being used to it and not particularly adult-dependent, had accepted the bag of “I’m sorry” groceries hanging from his fingers and steered him in the direction of a bath.
Now, it’s Megumi that’s barreling towards that cliff’s edge. The uncontrollable feeling bubbles up in his throat like bile, and it tastes much less like elation than Gojo made it look like. He wonders—with an expanding, regretful ache—if this is how Gojo felt, all of the time.
He used to resent Gojo for the way that he was. It caused him to take too many risks and aggravate too many people. He nearly died quite often. These were liberties they couldn’t take when the three of them—Megumi the Zen’in fugitive, Tsumiki without jujutsu technique, Gojo the loose cannon—already walked such a thin line. And what was left after the frenzy passed—the hollow, tired Gojo—was almost worse.
Megumi stews in frustration. He's attended the therapy. He’s gotten sick of his sick leave. And he has been told, a hundred times by a hundred different people, that he did not kill the people that he did when Sukuna occupied his body.
But it’s been six years, and the grief still lances through him. When he slips up and falls into happiness, he feels himself grin like Gojo had in the moment before Megumi killed him. When he speaks, he hears the metrical cadence of Tsumiki’s voice.
And now this. The miserable sixty-mile-an-hour feeling that whips his thoughts along into its jetstream. He curses Gojo in his mind, and at the same time his throat constricts.
Time elapsed does not keep Megumi from metamorphosing into the dead, one bad habit at a time. How can he move on when the reminders of what he’s lost are built into him?
His body keeps the grief alive, which will kill him.
—
There aren't enough teachers to go around these days, which is why both he and Itadori are teaching at the grand old age of twenty-two. They teach in the way that is now customary at a Jujutsu Technical College: coming and going as missions demand, tag-teaming curricula around their transitory lifestyles. Instead of one teacher per year, it’s multiple, who each have their own specialization. Almost every remaining sorcerer in the Greater Tokyo area is drafted—teaching a generation of sorcerers takes a village, and keeping them alive takes even more. Even Maki, who acts like a leashed tiger in the classroom, has to instruct cursed weapons combat once a month or so. Students have made it to fourth-year mostly unscathed since Megumi’s class graduated—and that’s a lot more than they can say for all the previous.
By the time Megumi gets to Tokyo Jujutsu Tech for the afternoon class session, he’s shelved the dropping-out-of-university thing, and the new order of business is simple. He pictures the Tokyo sorcerers’ mission docket in his mind. There’s a grade 1 in Shinagawa. He’d normally take a partner, but there’s no time. Megumi should be fine alone. He’ll exorcise the aching overflow of energy from his veins like Gojo always had: by letting it out in huge deadly bursts of power and adrenaline. Or he’ll die trying, but he feels good about his chances.
All Megumi has to do is ask Itadori to cover the class he’s supposed to teach this afternoon. He stopped on the way from the train station to buy box lunches (eel for Itadori, chashu for himself). The bribe is less necessary than his ability to appear persuasively stable, but it can’t hurt.
He inserts himself into the widening afternoon shadows outside Itadori's classroom and listens to him dismiss students. "Remember, Fushiguro-sensei has you guys after lunch. Don't be late, or he’ll turn you into a shikigami chew-toy.” Itadori is so corny. He is, of course, the students’ favorite.
The man himself jumps a foot in the air when he comes out and Megumi dispels his technique to materialize back out of the gloom.
“I’m never going to get used to that, you know.” Itadori scrubs the back of his head sheepishly.
It’s hard to look at Itadori Yuuji, because it’s like he stands in a beam of everlasting sunlight. That's Megumi’s flawed vision, erecting a halo around the boy he owes his life to. Megumi does his best to look anyway. Itadori was powerful at sixteen, and now his shoulders hold up a cheerfully muscular frame. The roots of his pink hair are growing in brown—he needs to ask Kugisaki for a touch-up. He is burnished with unfaded scars. He looks every inch the war hero the jujutsu world scrambled to accept, after months of baying for his blood.
Itadori peers at him.
“Is that lunch?”
—
They sit down at a picnic table under the oak in the courtyard, where Megumi watches acorns rain down at intervals.
"You didn't have to get me anything," Itadori says, even as he splits his chopsticks.
“I did, actually, if I wanted you to eat something genuinely edible today,” Megumi deadpans. Humor is good, humor will keep them both distracted. “It’s so hard, having a boyfriend who will put anything in his mouth.”
Itadori wiggles his eyebrows lecherously at him. "Anything, Fushiguro?" Megumi slaps a hand to his face—Itadori's, not his own.
They’re in that awkward early-relationship stage—you know, the one where they’ve saved each other’s lives a couple times and had sex at some point, but aren’t out of the habit of calling each other by surname. The devotion is hard to say out loud.
Or, maybe it’s just Megumi. Itadori wears his heart on his sleeve, while Megumi has to extract his like a vestigial organ with problems. The hand Itadori's not using to eat with wanders out to lay over his own.
The tense ache in Megumi’s knuckles warns him back to the task at hand.
“Can you cover my class today?” He puts on his best face for this, the aloof straight-mouthed one that Tsumiki hated when he perfected it at fourteen. He needs it to be convincing.
“What?”
He can’t seem to focus his gaze—he darts from Itadori's guileless brown eyes to the fleck of sunlight wavering through the canopy on the table-top to the briny glint of the pickled vegetables in the bottom right compartment of his bento to a scar-divot in Itadori's brow. He suspects it shows.
Megumi keeps going anyway. “If you can’t, I’ll ask Kugisaki. Don’t worry about it.” He deeply does not want to ask Kugisaki. She’ll be much harder to convince.
Itadori responds with cautious disbelief. “Your class starts in, like, twenty minutes. Is there something wrong?”
“I’m taking a mission.”
“That’s—” Megumi watches him use process of elimination for a very effective thirty seconds. “Shinagawa?”
“Yeah. Needs to get done.” Shinagawa needs to get done… at some point. It’s categorized on the list as Complete between sunset and midnight on a weekday and Long-range weaponry ONLY.
“Who’re you going with?” Megumi eats instead of answering, which is all the answer Itadori needs.
If Megumi is Gojo, Itadori is Nanami. Not at the surface-level of demeanor, of course, but where it really matters. It means he is surprisingly wise, and even-keeled. Above all, it means he is too observant for Megumi’s purposes, right now.
“You’re acting weird,” Itadori accuses.
“I’m fine.”
“You never cancel, and especially not last-minute. And you’re going alone. Weird is the word for it.”
They sit in silent impasse for a moment. Megumi feels—feels the urge to get up and run, his mania propelling the long muscles of his legs, where Itadori cannot look at him like how he is looking at him at this moment.
“Look, I’m not—not saying you’re not strong enough,” says Itadori. “But you seem kind of—out of it—right now.”
“What do you mean?” He measures this response carefully.
He thinks Itadori learned how to say hard truths from Nanami, too. He sounds just like him, when he says: “You’re distracted, and it’s going to get you killed.”
“I’m not.” Megumi injects as much sepulchrally cold indifference as he can into his words, and it’s not as if he means to, but he does, because it’s the only thing he can reach for that isn’t an utterly shameful, plaintive denial. The chill of it emboldens him. He throws Yuuji’s hand off his with savage pleasure.
Itadori's mouth bows downward with hurt, and to a small, slow corner of his heart it is devastating. “You’re acting—”
“Like Gojo.”
“I wasn’t going to say that,” says Itadori diplomatically.
“But you meant it.” Megumi’s being so incredibly unreasonable, but he can’t keep these terrible things from spilling out of him in a rush. He wants this fight. He wants to bleed even if it means hurting them both. “You think I’m insane.”
Megumi knows Itadori's still in the habit of policing his thoughts, a leftover from Sukuna. But he’s hitting his limit—he visibly struggles with his anger, his nostrils flaring. His brown eyes blaze, and if only Itadori didn’t look so good when he was mad, Megumi might be able to stop. “No, I don’t. Stop putting words in my mouth just because you can’t stand feeling any type of way.”
It’s an incredibly satisfying hurt, but it’s losing payoff with every second that Megumi’s restlessness builds. “Don’t try to stop me, then. I don’t need your permission.”
He watches Itadori chew on his next words for what seems like eternity. They come out disarmingly spiteful. “But you are acting like Gojo.”
“Fuck you.” He almost doesn’t feel anything but his suffocating momentum. He extricates himself from the bench to leave too fast, bangs his knees on the table on the way up. “I’m asking Kugisaki, don’t wait up.”
Itadori's standing too, though, and has an iron grip on Megumi’s arm.
“Megumi, you’d rather forget?” Itadori glows with anger, and his voice shakes with it, but his grasp is reassuringly still. Megumi can’t or won’t rip himself away. He just stares openly at Itadori, paralyzed.
“You want to forget Gojo, kill yourself off, and be forgotten too. Well, too fucking bad. I hear Nanami every time I open my mouth. That’s just how it works, now.”
It’s hard to tell which of them Itadori's trying to hurt more with those words. It drags Megumi’s raw heart over gravel to hear, and suddenly he can’t do this anymore.
“All I do is remember.” His voice comes out strangled and honest and young. “But it feels—it feels like I’m dying, Yuuji.”
Itadori brings his insistent hands up to Megumi’s shoulders. “You have to live with it,” he says roughly. “You have to.”
“I can’t,” he chokes. Megumi is shaking, shaking so hard he’s afraid that he’ll break free from Itadori's grasp, and he doesn’t know what will happen after that.
“You will,” Itadori says, and embraces Megumi so tightly he’s forced to untense. The pent-up breath is punched out of him into Itadori's scalp, where he smells like ginger. He decelerates, and decelerates, and decelerates.