Chapter Text
Fushiguro Tsumiki intimately knows the unique horrors of eldest-daughter-hood.
Sometimes, it’s something she can be proud of, but more often than not, it fucking sucks. Hell, it’s probably one of the reasons she’s in a coma right now.
And she knows she’s not special or unique. Everyone knows how to complain.
So she does her best to suck it up.
But that is not the end, nor is it the beginning of this story.
It starts like this:
She is alone for the first five and a half years of her life.
Okay, no. Not entirely true.
Five year old Tsumiki has a mom, this she knows. There was a dad for… maybe a year? But he’s hazy. She’s not sure about the timeline there.
But, anyway, she has a mom, briefly, a dad, and then, before her sixth birthday, SURPRISE!
There is a dad (albeit, a different one, spiky looking) AND he’s got a baby!
And the baby insists he is not a baby, in the limited words that he knows, which Tsumiki enjoys very much. She really is delighted with this baby, even if he isn’t with her. She has lots of baby dolls that she pushes around in strollers, but the real thing is just so much better.
She loves to pinch his chubby cheeks. He frowns, and it’s only cuter.
And even if the baby pretends he is not, they all are happy. Tsumiki loves her little baby, and she loves her mom and her weird spiky dad.
Then, all of a sudden, there is no mom, and there is no dad, spiky or not.
She waits for them to come home, but they don’t.
She doesn’t know where they went.
She tearfully informs the baby of their precarious circumstance. He is a baby, so of course he does not understand, but he pretends to. The spiky baby nods solemnly.
Then he gets mad at her for calling him a baby again.
“My name is Megumi!” he says angrily.
She giggles at him, but really, there is nothing they should be giggling about, because she is six now, and he is four and a half, and they are alone.
They spend a day or two crying, but they are hungry. Eventually, they get up. (Not because they want to, but because they have to)
Time moves faster after that. Or she learns to make it move faster. She learns a lot of things at age six. The first being that mommy and daddy are not coming back.
They go to school every day, and Tsumiki learns, (and teaches her baby) how to not freak the adults out with their living situation, because really, her and Megumi are okay. They’re fine. (And anyway, what if mommy and new daddy come back and Tsumiki and Megumi have moved out or are in the foster care system?)
The apartment falls apart around them, and Tsumiki learns to patch things and rig them so that they’ll be okay as long as no one touches them.
She learns to set up pots and pans to catch the water leaking from god knows where.
She learns (not to pay the bills, because how is a six year old supposed to know that), but to huddle under a blanket with her little baby when the angry grown ups turn the heat off.
She learns how to swipe food from the convenience store, which she feels really bad about. But this is non-negotiable. She throws up behind the store, throws up her guilt, and then comes home.
She learns how to cook. Not well, but at least she knows how to turn the stove on.
And, as it turns out, Megumi cries a lot for someone who insists he’s not a baby.
So Tsumiki decides maybe babies aren’t so nice, sometimes babies are annoying as shit, and they run out of pull-ups, and she has to learn how to clean up the wet spots he leaves sometimes.
Megumi eventually potty trains himself. He learns more words on his own, and she is silently relieved.
At seven, she is sick of learning things. It’s frustrating.
Sometimes she goes to the park and stomps around and jumps up and down and pulls the grass out of the earth and kicks the trees, because it’s not fair. None of it’s fair. She doesn’t want to have to teach herself anything else.
Then she goes home and teaches herself things anyway.
Injustice is the only higher power she knows. She makes no prayers, because she knows they will not be answered. In her dreams, she is sacrificed to this faceless god so that the world may spin another day.
She wakes up.
The world spins another day.
And this year, Santa does not come for her and Megumi like she was hoping he would, even though she spent all that time setting up a Christmas tree.
Then she turns eight. She bakes herself a birthday cake and blows out the candles. Megumi is the only one that sings for her. She pretends she’s okay with it.
The two of them realize they don’t know Megumi’s birthday. Only that it’s in late December. She lets him pick a random day.
She starts to try to pick up little jobs. She saves money. For what, she is not sure.
Tsumiki and Megumi cannot afford to think about the future. They can afford to think perhaps a day in advance, but nothing more.
This is the case until Gojo shows his weird pale face.
He says something about Fushiguro Toji (spiky dad?) being dead, and Megumi and her being his responsibility now.
Tsumiki doesn’t really get why they’re moving in with him specifically, and he doesn’t really explain it, but it happens. She nods politely and does what he says, because she knows that’s what you’re supposed to do. Or at least, that’s what she thinks you’re supposed to do.
She is ambivalent towards him, she decides, but she will humor him.
If she was better, nicer, maybe she’d love him and accept him as a dad. But she’s already done that, and it didn’t go that great. So she doesn’t, and watches cautiously. She is hesitant to depend on him. Especially because she’s noticed Gojo is a little bit of a hot mess.
And anyway, dependency is a dangerous thing. The other shoe dangles, and she can tell it’s about to drop.
But time starts to move slower again. It’s not a conscious thing, but when she notices, it’s shocking. It’s nice, actually. Maybe Tsumiki is allowed to enjoy things again. She won’t be good at it, being out of practice and all, but it’ll come.
They move into his apartment. It’s legitimately laughable. There’s like, three pieces of furniture.
And Gojo gives her his credit card, tells her if she feels that strongly about furnishings, she should do it herself, and Tsumiki is free .
The first thing she buys with real, grown up money is a rug, but it is certainly not the last thing.
Gojo buys her cute clothes that she loves. She styles her cute bangs. She gets taller. Junior high is kind to her. Sometimes, boys even talk to her! She has friends! Her life is cool. Gojo is there sometimes.
There is fantasizing: maybe she could be a CEO! Being in charge of so many people. Wow, that would be important. Maybe she could be a scientist! Could the humble Fushiguro Tsumiki solve climate change? Perhaps.
There are things she starts to want. Things she starts to ask for. Sometimes, she gets them. It really is nice.
She starts to crave Gojo’s validation. It’s not like it’s hard to get, and she’s not sure why she wants it, but she starts to want his care. It is indelicate, but it is care.
But Tsumiki learns she is not good at having fun, or letting other people handle things. Or maybe she worries too much. One of the two.
Because when Megumi starts getting into fights, all the little things like friends and boys don’t matter anymore because he’s her baby and he’s got a black eye.
Accepting things shouldn’t be difficult for her, because she’s been doing it for fourteen years, but she tries to stop him anyway.
She throws a milk carton at his head. (It seemed logical at the time.)
He semi-understands her, which is good enough.
This is what being a sister is like.
And she understands him all the way, she truly, wholly, actually does: Megumi starts the fights because he wants to incite change. He confronts the problem, and attacks it, literally.
But it makes something in her stomach twist, because Tsumiki knows that she doesn’t have that power. It’s not that it doesn’t exist. Maybe Megumi does have the power to incite change. Gojo does, she knows that. But she never has.
And anyway, trying to divert the roaring steam engine that is fate onto a different track feels like a death sentence most times. She sees this attempted, failed death sentence on Megumi’s face. She bandages it. She tries to save him by telling him to stop. (of course, Tsumiki cannot save anyone. She is not important enough for that.)
He tells her she is good to mollify her, but she sometimes wonders how good she really is.
Forgiveness hurts, and so when she starts to get sick, it’s not even anything new to her. It happens fast, unsurprisingly.
Gojo inches closer. He is home more often. They are sort of a family. She tells herself she would try harder and pull them more together if she had energy, which she doesn’t.
On good days, he offers them normalcy.
She watches him struggle in attempts to learn Megumi, and finds a silent satisfaction in that. He really is impossible.
And then it’s scary and bad again. She is a spectator, she fears.
It starts to hurt worse. She starts to think that maybe she’s running out of time. She wishes it would go slow like it used to, but it’s still moving fast.
Tsumiki knows this ache in her bones. It hurts like inability, the crippling lack of impact she’s had her entire life, and the powerlessness she has against this crushing diagnosis. Gojo pays her hospital bills, which is nice. But she can tell he knows what to do about as much as her.
They lie to each other in this way.
They are good at it.
She takes her medicine because she wants to see Megumi live another day beside her, but she knows she is standing on the train tracks of fate’s steam engine.
She is right.
And Megumi is fourteen and he doesn’t care about anything. One time, he tells her he hates her, and she tells him she’s sorry, because she is.
Neither of them asked for it, but she accepted it, and she knows he wouldn’t have.
It’s a random Thursday afternoon when time stops for Tsumiki.
The silence envelops her, and she does what she’s been getting better at lately, been brushing up on it after a brief break between her childhood and now. She accepts it.
Faintly, she hears her baby cry. Still a baby, she thinks, but she can’t smile.
She can’t do anything.
She doesn’t like it.
He tells her he’s sorry, and he talks, a lot, but she’s fading and she really only hears the ‘sorry’ part, which she doesn’t like, because that’s what she is supposed to say, not him.
This is not relief. It’s cold and dark.
There’s always noise just beyond her eyelids, but she can’t quite hear it. Can’t quite weigh in.
She has no voice. It is nothing new.
She can’t move.
She is not there.
And now she doesn’t just not like it, no, now she hates it.
An immeasurable amount of time passes. But there is no slow or fast. There is only nothingness.
To her, it’s been seconds, but to Megumi, it’s been a year and a half.
Tsumiki does nothing for a long time.
She dreams of an easy happiness and a love like the one she offers other people, but it’s tinged with pain, it drips with her own blood.
She cannot rest easy in this hospital, in this country, on this earth, in this lifetime.
Fate’s train speeds across the tracks of her life once more.
But this time, it stops for her, and she gets on.
Tsumiki opens her eyes, and gasps for air.
She breathes it in hard and it hurts.
Now Tsumiki is sure she’s alive.