Chapter Text
The coffee was still warm when Megumi pressed the back of his hand against the mug.
That was the detail that stuck with him, after everything else had blurred into the gray procedural mess of reports and phone calls and people looking at him with carefully managed faces. Not the deadbolt, unlocked, which he'd almost walked right past. Not the jacket hanging on its hook by the door. Not Yuji's phone sitting face up on the counter, screen dark, like something left out on purpose to be found. It was the warmth of the ceramic. The way a mug holds heat the way skin does, for a little while, in that strange gap between someone being there and someone being gone, after the body's already left but before the rest of the world has caught up to it.
He stood in the kitchen doorway at half past seven on a wet Tuesday morning in November, hand on the mug, and something in his chest went very still. Not calm. Something else.
He didn't know yet that he was already inside it. He thought he was waiting. He'd always been good at telling himself he was waiting, ever since he was small, through every apartment and every arrangement that had made up his childhood, until the posture of it, the waiting, had become almost impossible to tell apart from just being fine.
He stepped out for something, his mind offered first. Forgot his phone. That tracked. Yuji forgot his phone the way other people forgot to buy milk, regularly, without much guilt, cheerfully trusting the world to work around it. He'd left it at the combini twice in September. Once he'd set it on a park bench to tie his shoe and walked three blocks before Megumi noticed the silence on the counter and called the park office himself to ask about a lost phone. The woman on the line had sounded mildly confused that anyone would bother. They had it. Megumi picked it up. Yuji had been grateful in that uncomplicated way of his, fully, without embarrassment, in a way Megumi still hadn't learned how to take without looking somewhere else.
Both times, standing in that little office or listening to Yuji explain himself afterward, Megumi had felt a clean, useful kind of annoyance. Useful because it had edges. It sat on top of everything else like a lid. He went looking for that annoyance now. It would have helped. It would have meant this was an ordinary Tuesday and the mug was just a mug and the jacket was just a jacket and the deadbolt was one more small carelessness in a life already full of them.
He put the kettle on. Told himself Yuji would be back before it boiled.
The kettle boiled. The apartment had the particular quiet of a place with exactly one person in it, a different quiet than when someone's simply in another room. Megumi knew that difference the way you know a smell you'd thought you'd forgotten.
He stood in the kitchen until the kettle went cold again.
• • •
Gojo Satoru had decided, eight months back, with the breezy confidence of a man who'd never once considered that a decision might not be his to make, that Megumi needed a roommate. The whole consultation had amounted to: he needs a place, you need a person, it works out, before flying off to Singapore the same afternoon, leaving no room for anyone to argue.
The person turned out to be Yuji Itadori, who showed up on a Saturday morning hauling two duffel bags so overstuffed neither would fully zip, standing slightly behind Gojo with an expression that managed to be both apologetic and wide open at once, like he knew this was awkward and had decided the honest thing was to just let that show. His hair was pink. Natural, Megumi confirmed by staring at it longer than was polite for the first two days, before filing it away as simply a fact about him. He was built like someone who'd been physical his whole life and never thought twice about it.
He was loud in the way that fills a room without trying to. Not aggressive, not performing, just loud, like the volume knob on him sat a notch above everyone else's and there was no way to turn it down. He left his shoes dead center in the entryway every single time, somehow never noticing this was the wrong spot for shoes. He made coffee every morning in amounts meant for three or four people and drank maybe half of it before wandering off to something else. He watched nature documentaries at a volume that tested the limits of Megumi's sleep, and when Megumi finally appeared in the doorway to do something about it, Yuji would look at him like his showing up was something hoped for rather than assumed, and shift down to the far end of the couch, an invitation without ever saying so, and Megumi would sit, and they'd watch until midnight, and the next morning Megumi would act like none of it had happened.
He had a laugh that arrived before he did. You'd hear it in the stairwell before you saw him. Megumi had complained about the volume twice. Yuji took each complaint with total seriousness and changed nothing, which Megumi eventually decided wasn't carelessness so much as a real incapacity, the way some people just can't whistle no matter how many times you show them.
Megumi hated him for about three weeks. Clean hate, useful hate, with edges that kept other things out of view. After that it turned into something with no convenient name, and he filed it under a heading he never wrote down, in the part of himself reserved for things he meant to deal with later.
That part of him was getting crowded.
• • •
At eight fifteen he sent a text. At eight forty he called and heard Yuji's phone buzz against the counter, and stood there watching it the way you watch something you're hoping will turn into anything other than what it is.
He picked up the phone. The lock screen: one missed call from Fushiguro. Below it, a message at six fifty three from a contact saved as Gramps. Good morning!! Don't forget you promised to call this week!! Two exclamation points and a cartoon bear sticker, sent at six fifty three, which meant Yuji had still been home at six fifty three.
Megumi set the phone back exactly where it had been. He wasn't sure why that mattered to him. Some instinct he didn't examine, something about not disturbing a record before it had been read.
He wasn't by nature or by practice, a panicker. After Tsumiki- he’d learned that panic was an expensive way to spend limited energy. So, he put on his uniform. He sat through two periods, his mind having already concluded there was nothing useful to do. He was methodical because he had to be.
He called Nobara at lunch, standing in the corridor outside the classroom.
"Have you heard from him this morning?" he said.
A pause, the sound of her recalibrating. She was quick like that. "No. Why, what's going on?"
"He's not home. Phone's at the apartment. Wallet too. He didn't take his jacket."
"Okay." The brightness in her voice shifted into something more focused. This was the thing about Nobara, she could be loud, she could be a lot, but she wasn't slow and she wasn't careless. "Since when?"
"Before seven. I don't know exactly. He was home before six fifty three." He looked at the wall. "It's cold out. Twelve degrees."
"Okay. Let me make some calls. Maybe he went somewhere and forgot to say."
"Without his phone."
"I know, I know. Give me twenty minutes."
She called back in fourteen. Nothing. Her voice had moved further into that careful register. "I think you should report it," she said. "I know it feels like an overreaction. I know that. But I think you should."
"I know," he said. He'd already decided that. He hadn't called her to be talked into it, just because she was the one he called.
• • •
He didn't go to afternoon classes. He walked home in the rain without his umbrella, which hung uselessly by the door where he'd left it that morning for reasons he couldn't reconstruct. The twenty minutes passed in a state close to ordinary thought but not quite, the city moving around him in its November mood, indifferent, everyone with somewhere to be, no visible gap anywhere that suggested a person missing from it.
He stood outside the apartment door a full minute before going in.
• • •
He went through it the way he went through anything he needed to understand, systematicaly, the feeling held at arm's length, the watching part of him taking inventory.
The jacket on the hook. Both pairs of shoes on the rack, the worn sneakers with the splitting heel below, school shoes above. The wallet on the nightstand, sitting on top of a library book about bioluminescent sea creatures that Yuji had been working through with the focused discomfort of someone who found the vocabulary genuinely hard and refused to let that show. The book was open to page one hundred forty seven. A convenience store receipt, folded in thirds, marked the spot.
Yuji had been on page one hundred forty seven.
Megumi stood in the doorway and looked at that number and felt whatever was left of the ordinary Tuesday slide all the way out of reach.
He called the police at four seventeen.
• • •
The officer who came was somewhere in her late thirties, with the practiced patience of someone who'd done this enough times to know her job right now was to take what was given to her and make it look like it'd be acted on. She wasn't unkind. She asked her questions thoroughly without being alarming about it, which Megumi recognized as trained, and which somehow alarmed him more than directness would have, because it implied a world where this kind of careful managing was a regular requirement.
"Most adults who leave without warning have personal reasons," she said carefully. "There's no sign of forced entry. No sign of a struggle."
"His wallet's here," Megumi said. "His phone. His jacket. Both pairs of shoes. It's twelve degrees outside. He's been gone since at least six fifty this morning and he didn't take a single thing a person takes when they're leaving on purpose."
She wrote things down. He watched her turn a person into a document: height, weight, hair, last known location, last known time. Pink hair, she confirmed. He said yes. She wrote it. He thought of Yuji running a self-conscious hand through it whenever someone stared too long in formal settings, not ashamed, just aware of how it landed in rooms that weren't expecting it. That had been one of the first things Megumi noticed about him, that he was always aware of how he came across and that the awareness never changed how he showed up.
"Is there someone who can stay with you tonight?" she asked at the door.
He thought of Gojo, in Singapore, unreachable the way Gojo got mid-project, which was completely. He thought of Nobara, who'd come without being asked and arrive like weather, filling the place with noise until the noise itself became its own kind of pressure. He thought of Nanami-sensei, who'd come if called and stand in the kitchen with his tie straight, making tea, present in the only way he knew how to be present, contained and correct, an expression of care Megumi had learned to read by watching it almost surface for three years.
"I'm fine," he said.
She left. He locked the door. He stood in the quiet and let it be what it was.
• • •
He slept on the couch facing the door. Told himself it was practical, closest to the entrance, he'd hear the key turn. He didn't look too closely at that logic.
The couch smelled faintly of Yuji, the cheap body wash he bought in bulk, and underneath that something warmer and harder to name, just the accumulated presence of a person who'd spent eight months on this exact piece of furniture watching documentaries at eleven at night. Megumi lay there with his phone on his chest and the rain on the windows and told himself Yuji would be home by morning.
He lay there until three. The door stayed closed.
Before dawn his mind went, without permission, back to the library book. The receipt on page one hundred forty seven, a book about creatures that made their own light in places no other light reached. He thought about Yuji reading it cross legged on his bed, brow furrowed at the vocabulary, lips moving slightly. He'd come into the kitchen the week before while Megumi made rice and said, did you know some of them can't turn the light off? It just keeps going. Even when there's nothing to see it. He'd sounded genuinely moved by that, like the persistence of an unasked for light meant something to him.
Megumi had said something deflecting back. He couldn't remember what now. He'd said it and looked away, because looking at Yuji when he got like that, open and animated and looking at Megumi like his opinion on bioluminescent fish actually mattered, required a level of managing his own face that he'd learned to do invisibly over eight months. He'd filed it with the others, under the heading he never wrote down, and gone back to the rice.
He pressed his face into the cushion and held still.
There was something in that drawer he'd been not looking at for so long that the not looking had become its own habit. He'd meant to deal with it later. He always meant to deal with it later. He had a whole list of things waiting for some more convenient time, and he didn't ask himself why this particular item had been sitting on it for as long as it had.
The door stayed closed.
He lay there until the city woke up around him, then got up and put the kettle on and went to school, and told himself the day would resolve into something with a sensible explanation, and he carried that with both hands all the way through the morning.
• • •
Nobara came that evening before he'd even called her. She showed up with two bags of takeout and moved through the kitchen with the focused competence of someone who's decided the best available action is producing something edible. She set the bags down, washed the dishes already in the sink, moved with the kind of purposeful noise that displaces silence instead of sitting in it.
She didn't look at the mug on the counter. He noticed. He didn't either.
"Sit down," she said, sliding a container of rice in front of him.
He sat. He ate. She picked at her own food across from him, as quiet as Nobara got, which wasn't very, but it was something, a dial turned down out of respect for the room. Eventually she said, "He's gonna come back with the most unreasonable explanation you've ever heard. Something that makes no sense and then somehow makes total sense. That's what he does."
"Yeah," Megumi said.
"And we're gonna want to kill him."
"Yeah."
She looked at him directly, eyes too bright, a brightness that wasn't the usual performance she put up like a shield. This was the thing underneath it. "He's going to come back," she said.
"I know," he said.
He gave her that because she needed it more than he could afford to need it himself, and because giving people what a moment called for was something he'd done his whole life without it ever once getting easier.
"I know you don't know that," she said. "I know I don't either. But I needed to say it. Is that okay?"
Something shifted in his chest. "Yeah," he said. "That's okay."
• • •
Gojo called eleven times before Megumi picked up. When he finally did, there was nothing performed in his voice at all, none of the easy charm he wore so constantly that Megumi sometimes wondered if it cost him anything. Just: "I'm on the first flight home."
"You don't have to."
"I'm already at the gate." A beat. "Megumi."
Just his name. Nothing attached to it.
"Okay," Megumi said.
He came. Too large for the apartment, the way he always was, too present, and he stood in the kitchen and looked at the mug on the counter and something crossed his face for a fraction of a second before he put it away. He looked at Megumi instead. Didn't look at the mug again.
"I'll make calls," Gojo said. "There's people I can get on this fast, a firm that handles things like this, international, Hayashi, he can do things the police don't have the resources for-"
"The detective's handling it."
"The detective's got forty other files. I can get you someone with one."
"Gojo." The rarely used name, rarely used, landed with its (intended) full weight. Gojo went quiet. Megumi kept his eyes on the mug. "Let the detective go first. Then we talk about the firm."
Gojo stood there looking at a problem he couldn't buy his way out of, and his face did something Megumi had hardly ever seen on it, the look of a man who's hit a wall in a life that had previously contained very few walls. He was frightened, genuinely, underneath all the management. Megumi didn't know what to do with that.
"He'll come back," Gojo said, the way people say things they need to be true.
"I know," Megumi said.
He left the mug on the counter. Didn't wash it. He wasn't ready to think about why, so he didn't. He'd gotten very good at not looking at things until the time felt right, and sometimes the time never came, and sometimes by the time you finally looked, the thing had already turned into something else, and he had no idea yet which kind this would be.
He wouldn't know for a long time.