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Nobody can accuse Suguru of having favourites. He works really, really hard to treat everyone equally. All the kids, exactly the same. He gives the same time, the same attention to all of them, the same juice boxes and the same amount of marshmallows when they huddle round the campfire in the evenings.
Nobody can say the same for Gojo Satoru.
It would be funny, if it weren’t so obvious it was painful. It’s not that he doesn’t love all the kids, heart on his sleeve and obnoxiously loud about it. He’s awful at setting boundaries. In their first year, freshly seventeen and taking care of five-year-olds, Suguru had come back to the cabin and found Satoru snoring with a small child in his bed, sleeping off a nightmare.
Satoru swore Suguru to secrecy in return for promising to not tell Yaga that Suguru wasn’t in his cabin for curfew, either. Keeping the score even.
So sure, Satoru will ruffle Yuuji’s hair and pick up Yuuta, and swing Nobara from his hands when he asks, but only one kid gets extra pudding cups and marshmallows and is allowed to sneak around the counsellor’s cabins, and that’s Megumi.
Suguru has no idea where it started. He knows he treats all the kids equally, tries to not get attached or resent any of them, but if he did have favourites, he probably wouldn’t pick Megumi. The kid isn’t always polite, and he’s unnervingly blunt, to the point Suguru thought that he was much older than he was, which is only seven.
There’s three days left of camp when Suguru hears the knock on his cabin door. Everyone else has run off across the lake to go and party, including Satoru and Shoko, and Suguru had agreed to stay in case Yaga wakes up. Or Tengen, God forbid.
So he thinks the knock on his door is Satoru, even though it’s too soft. When he opens it, the seven year old standing there very much is not Satoru.
“Hey, Fushiguro,” Suguru says, a tiny bit baffled because the walk to the counsellors’ cabins isn’t short, and not a lot of the kids will walk by themselves this far in the dark. It’s late, too. Almost midnight.
“Is Gojo there?” Megumi says. And God, Suguru is so badly equipped to deal with this. He shakes his head.
“Not right now. What’d you need?”
“When will he be back?”
Well. The answer to that is soon, and Gojo doesn’t usually drink at those things, so it might be acceptable to let Megumi wait. But on the off-chance he’s decided to tonight, or that Shoko’s finally managed to convince him-
“In the morning,” Suguru lies. He doesn’t think Megumi will rat them out to Yaga, because he barely talks to anyone, but it’s probably best not to risk it. “He had to go into town to grab a couple of things.”
“I can hear them across the lake.” Megumi says, alarmingly perceptive and annoyingly smug about it. “It’s okay,”
“What’d you need Satoru for?”
Megumi shrugs, which says absolutely nothing.
“Shall we walk back, then?”
This time, he gets a response. The boy shakes his head, vehement about it.
“No. Can I stay here?”
And that- that’s strange. Because whilst Megumi is Satoru’s favourite, Satoru is far from Megumi’s. He groans and rolls his eyes when Satoru ruffles his hair. He whines and tries to give the extra marshmallows back around the campfire. He hates being a favourite as much as Suguru hates playing favourites.
“Bad dream?” Suguru says, letting him in. They’re supposed to guide kids back to their own cabins, but Megumi is stubborn, and he also doesn’t get worked up over nothing.
“No.”
And that’s all Suguru gets. Great.
“D’you wanna talk about it?”
There’s a long moment of silence. Megumi purses his lips. He always does this thing when he speaks, like he’s considering his words fully. Which most of the other kids don’t. “I don’t think I’m gonna go home.”
“Why not?”
“My dad isn’t gonna come and get me at the end of camp.”
Megumi says it with certainty. Like it’s just going to happen. Like that isn’t an insane thing to say. He has an older sister, who Suguru isn’t responsible for, but he knows her. She’s always out of trouble, always smiling. Rather the opposite to Megumi.
“What about your mom?”
It’s the wrong question. Megumi clams up, pulling his knees to his chest. “She’s not around.”
It could mean anything. It could mean a messy divorce, or a hospital stay, or a death. Either way, Suguru can’t really wade into that. “I’m sure someone will come and get you. We can call right now, if you want.”
“I don’t.” Megumi whispers. “Gojo said he’d sort something out. For Tsumiki.”
“Do you want to sleep here until he gets back?” Suguru has utter confidence that it’ll be fine. Satoru would happily sleep on the floor for the kid.
Megumi nods, up and down, twice. “Do you think he’s going to be able to find somewhere?”
Suguru smiles and he hopes it’s soft. “We’ll talk about it in the morning,”
Megumi falls asleep clutching his husky plushie in small hands. Suguru watches him until Satoru stumbles in the door half an hour later, looks at his own bed, and raises an eyebrow.
“Bad dream?” He whispers, pulling his hoodie off and clambering right on top of Suguru in his single bed, legs knocking together and bed creaking.
Suguru lets himself be smothered, thinking about their shared apartment falling in on itself back in the city, and the camp bed that Shoko stays on sometimes, and how Satoru is not going to let this go. “We’ll talk about it in the morning,”