Archive of Our Own

Megumi can’t stop staring at the scar on Yuji’s cheek. He wishes he could look at anything else, any other part of him. On a good day, he would meet Yuji’s sparkling, honey-warm eyes, and on late nights, he would appreciate the dip of his shoulder, and the shadows that settled there. He could spend hours tracing the outline of Yuji’s skin and bones with his eyes.

But if he looks away now, tears his attention from the cruel mark they chose to call a scar (because it’s a wound, they tell themselves, and a painful reminder), he would have to look at everything else.

Around them, the city flies by in hues of silver and green.

“‘S different in the daylight,” Yuji hums, the knuckles of one hand folded over and pressed into his chin as he leans on the centre console. His other hand has the wheel in a death grip, and his knuckles there go white each time he squeezes it to ease the car back to centre.

They’ve been driving for what must be hours at this point. Megumi swears Yuji’s taking them in circles. To drive them both crazy, or to try to make sense of it all, perhaps. Megumi took the passenger seat, claimed he felt too shaky, and slid into his bubble of forced ignorance when he entered the car. If they stay inside, what happened outside can’t reach them. It can’t crawl down their throats and make its home in their stomachs like it once did. In their souls.

Megumi shudders, but he covers it quickly when Yuji turns to glance at him. There are no other cars around, so it’s safe enough for him to take his eyes off the road, as long as he’s mindful of the debris scattered about.

Just below his eye, the scar crinkles with the patience of his gaze. The other comes into view when he turns.

Yuji offers him a soft tilt of the head and prompts again, “Don’t you think, Megumi?”

It remains unclear when he stopped calling him Fushiguro and started treating him like something delicate, instead. Someone to care for.

“Think what?” Megumi blinks at him. He can’t seem to meet Yuji’s eyes now. Not like in the times they sit facing one another and just stare and stare, Yuji’s hands on his cheeks and draped over the back of his neck, Megumi’s hands in Yuji’s hair and on his hips and his collarbone. The times they trace each other with touch to remember what it’s like for the other to feel real.

Yuji doesn’t respond. He studies Megumi for a fragment of a second more, and his lips crease downward at the edges. Then he fixes his attention back on the road and sighs after dodging a smattering of shattered glass on the pavement.

He doesn’t want it to, but Megumi’s gaze drifts after that glass. It could have been a window, or just a loose collection of bottles set down at the wrong place at the wrong time. A lot of people must have felt like that, he thinks, when the buildings came down.

“This is some fucked up road trip,” he mutters to Yuji. Next thing he knows, they’ll be visiting Shinjuku.

But once he loses track of the scar the first time, he can’t seem to stop looking out the window. Pieces of a place he used to know flash by like camera stills. Film reels in a dark room, and their car is the viewing booth, the windshield their lens. Megumi thinks about what type of camera he would use to capture the folds and crevices of the city. What he would do with twenty-seven photographs. What he would choose to remember.

Shaky as ever in the new car that runs like it’s old, Yuji takes a right, and a flicker of dawn greets him at the edge of a highrise that didn’t collapse all the way. A rooftop garden is alive at what is now its peak, lush leaves and flowers spilling over the damage.

Yuji was right, he realises. Shibuya does look different in the daylight.

In countless places, he can see the remnants of the battle. Road signs bent out of place, doors smashed in, and dark stains on the pavement; patches of blood no road worker or rain could wash away. Money and old food spill into the streets out of raided businesses and convienience stores. Cars are left behind, some of their roofs crushed, keys still in the ignition. People could have been trapped in their vehicles as the curses descended upon them. Trapped in the buildings. Or they could have stumbled through the dark with death on their heels. Now only the aftermath remains left behind. Tradegy smears itself across the desolated landscape, and not a single sign of human life lingers among the damage, like a shipwreck wiped clean of all souls. Everyone was either killed or evacuated. Shibuya is abandoned.

But Megumi blinks, and the sunlight kisses the wings of a bird that breaks free of one of the partially-collapsed buildings. It wouldn’t be able to do that if the windows hadn’t been blown out. His heart crawls up to his throat and settles there, but the trees have grown taller and lusher than they would have otherwise, their branches hanging low over the streets. Leaves hit the top of the car as they drive by.

Near the heart of the city, Yuji slows the car down, and Megumi turns to watch him again, carefully, as Yuji clicks his tongue and eyes a few of the crumpled signs. An overpass. An opening in the ground. The station.

He sees grafitti too, though, beyond Yuji’s head. Handcrafted stickers are plastered to metal railings and the sides of brick walls. Someone put them there and didn’t forget.

“Let’s keep moving,” Megumi urges softly. His eye catches the glow of a green stoplight illuminated by the sun.

Yuji lingers for just a moment more before he turns back to Megumi and spins the wheel around. He offers a tight, grim smile, and it’s almost more painful than if he’d looked at him with pure despair, hopelessness written all over his face. He takes a shaky breath in and eases them away from the heart of the disaster.

They drive until residental buildings lift their heads from the rubble, some of them still intact, like nothing ever happened. Not everything was destroyed. In one driveway, a child’s pink bike leans against the house. She’ll probably never get it back, never come back here to her childhood home, but the bike still survived. Pictures of people Megumi doesn’t know wait in high-up windows and watch for their loved ones to return. They won’t. But the pictures are still there.

He remembers, vaguely, like the fog at the edges of a dream, what it all used to look like. How life never stopped bustling from one end of the city to the other. Millions of people going about their daily lives; how many of them had Megumi passed on the street before this all happened? How many of those people were dead now? Gojo had taken them shopping here, once, and he wishes he’d paid more attention.

There are fewer curses during the day, though, he realises. And it’s almost like now that the surrounding area is empty, they don’t have as much reason to come out of hiding. They’ve all retreated to their dark corners and don’t bother the wildlife that has taken over.

They pass a garden growing out of a garage when it hits him.

“Pull over,” Megumi instructs calmly.

Yuji, distracted, jerks his head in his direction and tries to get control over the car in the way he wants. The bumper hits some overgrown shrubs, and it’s not a smooth park, but Megumi doesn’t care. He pries the door open and throws himself out as soon as the car is even close to stopped.

He doesn’t wait for Yuji before he stumbles away, arms wrapped around himself, and collapses in a patch of grass. His knees scrape on the ground and dirt covers his skin in an instant. He doesn’t care. He chokes on a sob he didn’t even realise was rising.

“Megumi?” Yuji’s concerned voice chases him down.

Megumi doesn’t listen, or answer. He clutches at his arm with one hand and props himself up with the other. He feels like he’s going to throw up all of a sudden, or pass out, and he’s not quite sure why. He was fine for most of the drive, calm.

But his hands twitch in ways they never have when he has control over himself. One of them forms a fist like it does when he loses his will to carry on a fight, when the darkness creeps in at the edges of his vision and he starts to float in a direction only he knows.

His other hand claws at his arm, long strokes of his nails against skin. Something he deserves.

Oh, gods.

There had been gouges in the metal of that garage.

Yuji’s hands come to rest on his shoulders, and Megumi shakes him off without a second thought, fast and violent. He grits his teeth and squeezes his eyes shut and bends over in the grass.

“Megumi,” Yuji calls, from a great distance, it seems. His voice travels around until he’s crouched in front of Megumi. “What happened? Can you tell me?”

It hurts, but Megumi shakes his head, and hot tears run down his cheeks. Not saying no to Yuji, but to the world around him. He looks up, and through blurry eyes, he takes in the sight of Yuji’s face before him. It’s clear, a scar on his forehead, one by his mouth, but there’s nothing under his eyes. Nothing, not like there used to be. Had Megumi hallucinated them? But the two of them were there, together, not in the right way, but they were. Yuji’s hands. Megumi’s monster. It scares him so bad he feels sick. He swears he feels blood on his fingertips, but Yuji doesn’t grab for his hand to pull it away from him like he does when it gets that bad. Yuji’s hands—

The marks aren’t on Yuji’s cheeks. He knows where they are.

They’re on Megumi’s. He wears the scars now, the memory. The burden.

“Oh,” Megumi chokes out, and he clutches at his stomach with one hand and reaches up to hold Yuji’s face in the other. Yuji complies automatically, his eyes filled with concern as he tilts his head into Megumi’s hold.

Yuji is too good for him. He’s good enough to understand he just needs to be quiet for a little while, let Megumi sit with his emotions, as long as he stays with him. That’s something he seems to have worked out on his own. He never leaves Megumi in these moments, even when all Megumi wants to do sometimes is push him away. To protect Yuji, or himself, save his dignity, let himself drown in whatever it is each time. Right now it’s the overwhelming knowledge that nothing will ever be the same.

The two of them together crouch in the grass in the middle of a garden that wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t destroyed the city of Shibuya.

Dawn spreads through the sky overhead like a flowing river. It touches every cloud and turns them all to gold dust. The birds rise with it, and then it wakes the bears, and deer and rabbits trek from their grazing spots back to their burrows and nests. A crow cries somewhere from the top of an old office construct. Flowers sprout around the tires of trucks and turn their faces to the sun.

Megumi sucks in oxygen produced by the trees through his teeth and cries, and cries, and cries.

Somewhere between twilight and the end of time, Megumi finds both his hands on Yuji’s cheeks, Yuji’s on his shoulders, and Yuji is shaking him gently and helping him stand. Megumi’s head hurts. He breathes and sees and feels through a fog he can’t shake. The scars carve agony into his cheeks.

But they pick their way back towards the car, through the dandelions and other weeds, and Megumi notices the telephone poles. He notices the death in everything, and the day.

“Let’s get out of here.” Yuji rubs a calming hand up and down his side and leads him step by step. He whispers in Megumi’s ear and plants tender kisses to the side of his face. He opens the car door and slides Megumi inside with so much love, as much as he has to give, in every action. “Let’s go home.”

Megumi puts his head against the unbroken glass window on the passenger side in the minute it takes Yuji to walk around and get himself situated, too. Megumi sees the nests and their birds. He sees the billboard and the plasma lights that no longer work. Cardbord and plastic bottles from a recycling bin knocked over and forgotten rustle in the breeze, and it sounds like the dry bones of children laughing.

“Let’s go home,” Yuji says more clearly, but it might be mostly to himself. Megumi lifts his head and looks over at him and doesn’t see the scars.

Yuji buckles his seatbelt, checks the roads around them, even though there’s no one else there and never will be. He puts his foot on the pedal, and they leave Shibuya behind for the second time.