Chapter Text
Even in the bleakest, most denuded perimeter of Saitama, Fushiguro Megumi was not hard to spot.
What surprised Satoru was not the area—he actively haunted desolate places like these backward community centres to exorcise curses afterall. They always took root in poverty-stricken communities, which itself yielded as both the cause and the consequence of that unrelenting cycle of despair. The dispirited people, their crumbling homes and hopes were a ripe breeding ground that grew and groomed curses. No, Satoru was not in the least surprised by the backwaters.
What did surprise him was that despite the name, this “Megumi” was a boy. People—non-sorcerers, and definitely ones that did not grow in overbearing clans like Satoru’s—were flexible with names. 'Twas his wife’s wish? he pondered, making long strides towards the boy. He should flick Ijichi on the back of his head later. Missing out on a critical detail like this when scouting for sorcerers? Tch. It made for a very poor report.
Megumi was tiny. He barely reached Satoru’s knees. His needled hair stood atop his tiny basketballed head like an inversely uprooted tree, a very trademark of his association with Zen’in Toji. But that wasn’t the end of the tricks up his sleeve—when Satoru knocked the top of the boy’s head and he turned in response, Satoru did not balk from gagging. The shape of this boy's jaw, the crinkle of his eyes, down to the steady fall of his bangs and the grave tilt of his mouth in the most infuriating glare, Fushiguro Megumi was Toji’s son through and through.
Megumi remained relatively polite and quiet, all for a grand total of 15 seconds. “Who are you?” he voiced, and then, “and what’s with that stupid face?”
Quite the mouth, Satoru chastised in his head. But he remembered being just as, if not doubly demeaning in his formative youth. Plus, this was Fushiguro Toji's son. “Nay, you just look too similar is all.”
“To who?”
Satoru ignored that. “So hey, Fushiguro Megumi-kun, aren’t you?”
The boy narrowed his eyes. “So what?”
Satoru filled the desolate, fucked up kid on the latest, fucked up news about his family. The only saving grace in this bleak backwater of a community home was the sole money plant and a who-knows-what blossom tree snaking around the brick wall on Satoru’s left. Megumi himself was a sight to behold—his shorts were too short on his tiny, emaciated frame and the t-shirt a size too loose. The schoolbag on his back was nearly beyond saving. Scratches blossomed around the curve of his cheek, and his shoulders were already hunched.
Did the Zen’ins not scout for this boy? Everybody in the Zen’in household knew of Toji’s death, to the extent that some even celebrated that loser’s passing (if it could be called that). Megumi’s existence was no secret either. If Toji’s last words had to be believed, down to the semantics: In two or three years, my kid will be sold out to the Zen’in clan, it meant that someone had to have known.
“So, whaddya wanna do? Go to the Zen’ins?”
Megumi’s sharp voice was instant and final, despite the reasoning clouding over his eyes. It would do him good, Satoru thought. Toji was 100% a deadbeat dad, but to remember his son in his parting moments, to tell Satoru of him would have connoted even a sliver of care. Satoru’s known about Zen’in Toji since his childhood: the clans are, first and foremost, the hotbeds of gossip and rumours. And, when you had the right people and a generous pair of nosy ears, it never took long to learn clan secrets. In this case about Toji’s blessings: a Heavenly Restricted, physically gifted body. All contradictions.
He was a loser in every sense of the word, but he did stand tall in a fight, boasting his strength and his pride in his choices. That much (and only that) Satoru could respect. Toji had been ostracized, and if his hypothesis was true: that Megumi could possess the prized Zen’in Cursed Technique, then Megumi would lead a privileged life, nearly akin to Satoru’s own comfortable youth. Servants left and right. Discipline, strategic thinking, militaristic drivel and unmatched strength: the jujutsu clans were the pinnacles of power, and Megumi, by the nature of his birth, would have the most facile path to it.
It would do him good, except…
“What’ll happen to Tsumiki?”
Right on cue, Satoru’s ears snagged on a lovely, cooing voice with a hint of a rough, boyish lilt to it from somewhere above them. Oh, Megumi’s home!
“What’ll happen to her?” Tsumiki—the little kid that stood by the hazardous wire that strangled the balcony railings, careful not to touch but eager enough not to care. Her hair was long, falling onto her shoulders with two parts of bangs framing her round, pudgy face. Something about her… was not quite typical. “Will she be happy?”
“No,” Satoru emphasized firmly, “A 100% no.” The clans, the Zen'ins in particular, were not easy to navigate if you did not possess the strength, or if you were a woman. The image of the two younglings, Zen’in Maki and Mai, projected itself in the front of his mind. In particular was the hunger and yearning in Maki’s eyes that mirrored Satoru’s own juvenescence: brimming with want but being restricted by honour.
That settled it. Satoru dribbled the top of Megumi’s head in a fond pat and promised to take care of everything. He lent his eyes to the drooping excuse of an engawa next to him. Nobody seemed to peek out of their own balconies throughout Satoru and Megumi’s conversation. All for the better. He didn't need prying ears.
Lost in thought and leaving Megumi to rush back into his house to his sister, Satoru treaded the rocky path back to the arch of the perimeter where the dingy main office housed a weary, creepy man as the community centre’s director. He reminded Satoru a little of the clone curse user he had encountered over two years ago, what with the swelling pot belly protruding out like a smoothed pebble from under his undershirt.
For a brief moment, he considered the significance of this coincidence. Nothing about the dinky office looked amiss. Curses, petty, stupid ones, hung around the engawa like Christmas lights. A steady, stagnant stream of cursed energy filtered into the rooms like calm, dying sunlight of the dusk, which was nothing out of the ordinary for any building under the sun. Nothing amiss. Nothing to slice and combust; they were intermediately safe from curse users.
But something… something lurked beneath that veneer of calm: a subtle string of anxiety that ran parallel to the ground, like when it did during Amanai’s escape from her school. Satoru couldn’t narrow its path precisely. Something that zapped, like a sliver of static electricity on a dry blanket. Something was amiss. Something that even Satoru’s six eyes couldn’t pick up on. If Suguru were here…
Letting his six eyes wander, Satoru trudged his way through the sheets of paper on the floor to the director. The director looked every bit like it: looked shit, spoke shit and drank, you guessed it: shit. Even to breathe in around him burned his nostrils.
He roused him and struck up the conversation with him. “Those two children, the girl and the boy—Fushiguro siblings—who cares for them? Any visitors?”
The man burped. “Hain? Huh…” He picked up a register and blinked. “Nah, none.” He blinked again. “The girl and the boy? They’re both boys,” he laughed wetly. “Stupid children playing their stupid dress up games.”
Satoru narrowed his eyes. “What?”
“Dont trust them,” he burped again, puffing up a rotten stench of garlic and something else else into the room. Satoru resisted scrunching up his nose. He needed to be in his good graces.
“They're real sketch,” the rotten man continued. “That black haired boy is constantly wrangling his fingers into shapes and what not, and I've seen the shadows move around him. Creepy children,” he shuddered. “Don’t know where their parents are, but I say good riddance to them!”
Good naturedly, Satoru ignored his statements and thanked him instead, then pressed for details. It should have been Ijichi's job, but he supposed he'd already worked the poor boy well beyond his limits. He was only a first year student no less. “How long have they been here?”
“A little around 7 months now,” came the slurred reply. “Heard their parents have run away. I say good for them!”
“Yeah, yeah, you’ve mentioned.” Shut up already. “What about their schooling?”
“Dropped out, the last I heard.”
“Show me their records.”
“Huh? Aah, records.” He threw a gigantic register towards Satoru and gestured to page through it himself. Silently, he obliged. Both the children's surnames were Fushiguro, which left scant information about Tsumiki. As of March 2009, Megumi was 7, born December 22nd, 2002, and Tsumiki was 8, born March 19th, 2002. A recent birthday! Female. There were their blood groups, heights and weights, specific physical indicators—Megumi’s hair being one made Satoru snort. Past residencies, current status, budget allocated, terms of stay. Blah blah blah.
He chanced a look at the director, who’d already busied himself with another magisterial swig of something so vile and shit smelling, it made Satoru’s stomach lurch and threaten the lunch out of his system; otherwise, he seemed entirely raptured by the bottle.
Without a noise, Satoru tore and pocketed the pages containing the children's information. He couldn't imagine a rundown place like maintaining duplicate records, and he did not like the idea, not one bit, of this imbecile having any information on the Fushiguro children.
There were other scribbles mentioning loose comments about the kids in the other pages, but the sloppy handwriting—sloppier than Satoru's, which was saying something—left a lot to the imagination. Good.
“I'll be taking them away in a couple of days,” he called out to the man, whose eyes all but gouged out of his head in utter shock at Satoru's declaration. “I'll spare you the relieving process. Just put up a sign that a room is available again, will you?”
“You don't say!”
Satoru challenged him with a raised brow. “You got a problem with that?”
The man tossed a coin up in the air. No sooner did it fall into his palm did he lean over the table and gripped Satoru’s slender fingers with his sweaty, greasy ones. Then did the worst imaginable thing he could: he leaned in towards Satoru. Oh the stink, good heavens, take me out. Satoru recoiled at the contact but did not attempt to pull away, if only to keep his face. What on the sweet damned earth?
No shouting, he intoned in his mind, and definitely no ripping out anyone's throats if he could help it. The world was comparably bearable with Suguru when they dealt with creeps like these scoundrels together. But there was no Suguru to level things out anymore. No one to watch his back. No one to watch Suguru’s either.
“Listen to me boy. No,” he gripped Satoru's sylphine fingers tighter, and pitched his voice to something maniacal and doubly emphasizing: “I tell the child services and orphanage outreaches too: leave these children be. They're already at the thread's end. A few more months of this and the world can be rid of them. You don't know the freaks of nature that they are.”
“Sensei,” he chided him lightly, panicking out of his mind. He didn’t like his voice at all. The stench was bad enough, but the grip was worse. He tried to pry his hands out of his slippery hold and found his skin glued to the man's fingers. Infinity? It struck him far too belatedly that his technique had been nullified. He wandered his eyes around again and still found no trace of potent cursed energy. What the hell?
Hiding. Camouflage specifically, and something to do with whatever the grease the man had smeared across his palms. How exactly he was accomplishing CT nullification remained unclear. And so Satoru continued his line of defense the only way he could think of: loquaciousness. “Children can't be freaks. They're usually only a product of their environment, you know. Actually, you would know it better, considering you're a community centre director and what not.”
“You're Gojo Satoru, aren't you?”
A beat.
“I'm not Gojo Satoru,” Gojo Satoru replied smoothly. He even shook his head for extra emphasis.
The man blinked slowly like a lazy cat, and loosened his fingers. Satoru counted seconds until he deemed it safe to extract his fingers from that oleaginous scum, trying unbearably hard not to wipe it off on his gakuran trousers.
Oh fuck. The school uniform crest. But… because the director wanted Satoru's information, he possibly didn't mind jujutsu sorcerers as a principle? Surely pretending to not be Gojo Satoru would be enough.
The director clearly was not a curse user himself. He seemed to be acting on the orders of someone, but whom? Community and ration centres often operated as rich grounds for money and influence, with only the Star Religious Group being the exception that exploited the ultra rich and altruistic individuals. Something in the room had to be a catch. Which was it? What could it be? Satoru would figure the rest of it out with at least that piece of information. He already had three theories in mind.
“If you're not Gojo Satoru then who are you?”
Satoru blinked. “Geto Suguru.”
“Who is that?”
“That is me!” Satoru piped cheerfully, and punched the living daylights out of the director's eyes. The man fell to the table with a painful groan and an earth shattering thud, hands reaching to cup his aching nose.
“Sorry, okay?” Satoru placated before bringing the register down on his head.
“You bastard—”
“You’re mistaken,” he clarified. He knocked the man out with another hit from the bulging register, then broke two of his fingers for good measure. “That’s you.”
He glanced around the room, taking in the dust motes and the garbage lying around important sheets and paper scattered on every available surface. The clock ticked. The breeze rustled the papers. And an indicator sung in unison with them.
He froze. Indicator?
There. Through one of the bright kokeshi dolls on the shelf hosting the community centre’s accreditations was a blinking red light. It often zapped with cursed energy, and then immediately doused itself for a long moment, before springing up with a swift zap again. It went on at a 30 second interval.
It would be easy to kill that, a snap and slice, were it not for the alarming intuition to not touch it. It could be a system, like those bomb circuits they engineered in the movies. Satoru did not intend to demolish the kokeshi dolls—he never liked the idea of harming harmless, cute, traditional dolls since he did grow up around them—so whoever left this blinking entity was smarter than most. And utterly traditional.
He squinted at the doll. The doll paid him no mind.
He crouched to the bottom of the table and hopped around the floor without falling into its line of sight any more than he already had. Like Mei-san’s crows and Suguru’s Cursed Spirit Manipulation, the doll likely shared the vision of the director’s office back to the curse user. The question was why? Who cared what the community centre director achieved in this room beyond filth and detritus?
He blinked. The clock blinked with him. The indicator flashed with him. Stupid, he still couldn’t place the exact technique. All he knew was that he needed to get the hell out of here. Or kill that indicator. Think. He was so stupid, but could it have been helped? Satoru had appraised the area's cursed energy and found no spirits lurking around, no imposing imminent danger. So what now? How could he get out without being noticed? It didn’t matter, truly. If there was anyone watching Satoru, they would know it was him all along. Satoru only hoped there was no one watching the vision in real time.
Think. Think. He needed to block the vision. Stop it from stealing any more information than it already did. A cloth, but touching it might be a problem. A screen perhaps?
With a final glance around the room, he stepped up and lodged his spectacles on the kokeshi doll’s head. It slipped continuously, but the dark, nearly black eyeglasses would conceal his exit.
In a single stride then, Satoru sprinted out of the office and ran for his life. Only a single thought remained: kokeshi dolls looked hella stylish with his brand of sunglasses.