Chapter Text
"Every object in motion is pulled by something it cannot name."
Megumi Fushiguro has a ritual.
He does not call it that. He would not call it anything if asked, because admitting to a ritual would require admitting that there are things in his life that feel necessary, and Megumi has spent nineteen years building an interior that does not reveal itself easily. But the ritual exists regardless of what he calls it, and it happens every evening when he comes home from university and the apartment is quiet in the specific way that means his father has forgotten that time is a concept that applies to him.
The apartment is the top three floors of a building in Shinjuku that costs more per month than most of his classmates' parents earn in a year. Megumi knows this not because he thinks about money particularly — his father thinks about it even less — but because Yuji mentioned it once after looking up the address, with the expression of someone trying to recalibrate their entire understanding of a person they thought they knew. The floors are polished concrete and pale oak. The windows are floor-to-ceiling on three sides and overlook a city that never stops moving. There is a private elevator that opens directly into the entryway. There is an observatory on the third level, accessible by a spiral staircase that his father installed when Megumi was twelve, which Megumi had thought was the coolest thing in the world until he was fifteen and decided he could never admit that.
He still thinks it is the coolest thing in the world. He has simply never said so again.
Tonight he sets his bag beside the door — there are shoes already there, two pairs of them, one large and one larger, which means both of them are home — and does the thing he does not call a ritual. He moves through the apartment quietly. Not sneaking. Just moving the way he has always moved, with the low center of gravity and the particular stillness that his sports science professors praise and that his father claims to have personally engineered through years of excellent parenting. (His papa rolls his eyes at this every time. Megumi has learned to take the eye-roll as the real answer.)
The kitchen is clean, which means his papa cooked tonight and cleaned up after himself, which means his father did not cook, which is simply better for everyone. There is a covered plate on the counter with a folded note beneath it. The note says: Training ran late — eat before it gets cold. Your dad tried to 'help' with the rice. I have intervened.
Megumi eats standing up, reading the note twice for no reason. His papa's handwriting is precise and slightly formal, the kind of handwriting that looks like it learned itself from medical textbooks and has never entirely relaxed. His father's handwriting, by contrast, looks like someone threw a pen at the wall from the other side of the room.
He puts the dish in the sink and goes upstairs.
The observatory is dark, which is not unusual, because the observatory is always dark when it is in use. His father does not work with the lights on when he is thinking. The room sits at the top of the spiral staircase behind a door that was originally a feature of the building's architecture — heavy, steel-framed, fitted with a seal against light pollution — and opens into a circular space about nine meters across, with a retractable ceiling panel that reveals the sky on clear nights. Tonight the panel is open. The Tokyo sky is never truly dark. But above the city's orange haze, if you look at exactly the right angle, you can see certain bright things holding steady.
His father is sitting at the desk by the window.
Barefoot. White shirt. The black ink is visible beneath his shirt. Dark sweatpants that cost more than most people's formal wear. His sunglasses are pushed up into his white hair, which means he forgot them there, not that he chose to wear them — at home he rarely chooses the glasses, because at home there is no reason to manage how people look at him, and the photosensitivity is easier to manage when he controls the lighting himself. His laptop is open. The screen casts a faint blue glow across his face. He has one hand braced against the desk and one knee drawn up on the chair, which is a sitting position that no ergonomist would endorse. Research papers radiate from the desk in the particular pattern of someone who started organized and then forgot about it two hours ago.
The coffee mug beside the laptop is cold. Megumi can tell from across the room because he has had considerable practice at telling.
"Dad."
Nothing.
"Dad."
A pause. Not the pause of a person who did not hear and is processing. The pause of a person who absolutely heard and is choosing their relationship with the world very carefully before deciding to engage with it.
"Hm?"
"When did you eat?"
Silence.
Not the thoughtful kind. The kind that means the answer is either embarrassing or nonexistent.
Megumi crosses the room without being invited. He moves around behind the desk where he can see the laptop screen — star formation models, a half-written paragraph of academic prose that looks like it is winning against its author — and picks up the coffee mug. The ceramic is cold. He carries it to the small corner station where there is always a kettle, because he installed one here three years ago without comment and no one has ever removed it, and starts water heating.
"Megumi," his father says, finally looking up from the screen. His eyes are extraordinary — the blue is the kind of blue that belongs in deep water or high atmosphere, the exact shade that occurs in neither place but is somehow the compound of both — and they are currently slightly unfocused in the way that means part of him is still in whatever calculation he was building. "When did you get home?"
"Twenty minutes ago."
"How was training?"
"Good. Coach moved us to the main gym. When did you eat?"
His father's eyes drift back to the screen with the particular guilty momentum of someone who realizes they are not going to win this.
"I had coffee."
"That's not food."
"It has calories."
"Dad."
"Suguru left a plate, right? I was going to—"
"I ate it. That was mine." Megumi pours hot water into the mug, adds the instant coffee that lives in the observatory because his father refuses to use the kitchen coffeemaker when he is working and claims that climbing stairs interrupts the thinking process. "Papa left you one too. In the oven."
"The oven." His father says this as though the concept of food being maintained warm by a separate appliance is genuinely new information. Which, to be fair, it might be. Satoru Gojo's relationship with the oven is primarily adversarial.
"It has been there for two hours, so it is probably not great anymore, but it is still food."
His father looks at the laptop. Then at Megumi. Then at the laptop again.
"I was about to work out this stellar evolution variable—"
"You can work out the stellar evolution variable in twenty minutes after you eat."
"It might take longer than twenty minutes."
"Then it will still be there when you're done eating." Megumi puts the mug down on the desk, directly in front of the laptop. Not blocking the screen. Just present. Undeniable. "Come down."
His father stares at him for a long moment with an expression Megumi has been seeing his entire life and still occasionally struggles to interpret. It contains too many things at once. Pride. Amusement. Something softer and more complicated that his father has never learned to say out loud. Megumi is nineteen years old and he has understood for a long time that it means: I love you. I don't know how you got to be like this. I am very glad you exist.
He has never said it out loud either.
They are, after all, the same.
"Fine," his father says, unfolding himself from the chair. He is tall — very tall, in the particular way that fills doorways — and he stretches as he stands with the boneless ease of someone who was once extremely athletic and still carries that ease in the body even when the mind is living in a mathematics he barely surfaces from. He grabs the coffee mug. "But I want to tell you about this variable after."
"Sure."
"Because it's genuinely interesting."
"I know it is."
"You're humoring me."
"I'm not," Megumi says, and means it, which his father understands because he turns toward the door with the smile he usually keeps for smaller audiences than his lecture hall. The quiet one. The one that is not performing anything.
They go downstairs.
His papa is at the kitchen table reading. He has been home for longer — his earrings are in, the small ones, the ones that stay in almost always and only come out for university — and he is in a dark sweater with his long black hair loose around his shoulders, and he looks up when they come down the stairs with the expression of someone who has already done the math.
"He didn't eat," he says, not a question.
"He didn't eat," Megumi confirms.
"I knew I should have told you directly."
"I would have been fine," his father says.
"You would have been three more hours into that variable before you noticed you had a headache," his papa says, with the patience of a person who has been having this exact conversation for over a decade and has made complete peace with the fact that it will never end. He closes the book — medical journal, Megumi notes, something about muscle recovery protocols — and stands. "Sit down, Satoru."
His father sits down.
This, too, is the ritual. Not that Megumi calls it that.
He leans against the kitchen counter and watches his papa warm up the plate that has been keeping in the oven, and watches his father wrap both hands around the coffee mug and look at the table with the slightly bewildered expression he sometimes gets in domestic spaces, as though he never entirely expected to be here and has never entirely stopped being surprised that he is. After sixteen years of this apartment, of this family, of this particular kitchen at this particular hour, and he still looks sometimes like someone who forgot to be certain.
Megumi thinks he understands it. He thinks it is the same thing he feels when he wakes up in his room here and the city is bright through the curtains and there is the sound of his papa making coffee below, or the distant tap of his father's keyboard late into the night — this specific frequency of not quite believing and not quite needing to.
The plate arrives in front of his father. His papa sits back down. His father eats.
Neither of them speaks for a while, and that is fine, because silence in this apartment has always been comfortable. They learned it together, over years, through all the versions of themselves that brought them here.
This is where the story begins. Not in this kitchen, not quite — but with the understanding that this is where it arrives. A kitchen in Shinjuku. A plate of food. A cold mug of coffee. Two people who chose, and one who was chosen.
Start earlier.
Start at the beginning.
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