Chapter Text
“So it is true,” Yaga observes from his desk, sounding distinctly unenthusiastic. An unfinished doll rests on the corner of the table; he sweeps it and a loose pile of papers and threads into his drawer with a huff. “Sit down,” he commands, grumpily.
Megumi’s irritation spikes—he’s treating me like some inconvenience, as if I wanted this—but he steps into the small office and pulls a chair all the same, taking a seat.
Yaga presses his fingers against the bridge of his nose, dislodging his glasses, and gestures to the remaining open seat pointedly. “You too.”
A long moment hangs between the three of them. An eight-year-old’s attempt at intimidation, Megumi thinks wryly to himself. He’s not half bad at it.
“Sit or wait outside, then,” Yaga offers neutrally, leaning back in his chair. Satoru jolts.
The corner of Megumi’s mouth twitches upward. Yaga’s used to dealing with him in any iteration.
Satoru drags a chair to Megumi’s right, a few steps back from the desk, and climbs onto it. It’s almost comically big. The tips of his sneakers brush against the rug, not quite touching.
Yaga’s gaze softens, just barely, and then turns steely again as it flips towards Megumi. “Fushiguro. Explain to me exactly how this happened, and why it’s been over two hours since I last heard from you after the initial distress signal?”
Megumi bristles, indignation at being scolded like a child made worse by the fact that he can feel Satoru staring at him hawkishly. “Nobara was supposed to send you the details. I was focused on getting both of us back to the school quickly, which is why I neglected communication. Also, my phone broke. I had to use a burner.”
The principal rolls his eyes at this. “I haven’t received anything from her beyond the initial incident report. The real one and the mass report that obscures Gojo’s current status. The claims you made have been… difficult to establish validity for,” Yaga offers coolly. “I had to fabricate an urgent special-grade mission in western Indonesia.”
Megumi mentally curses her and Yuji for saddling him with this alone. See if I ever let them host a movie night in my room and get popcorn bits all over the carpet again after this. I bet she’s done this on purpose so that she doesn’t have to deal with an angry Yaga.
“Well, we didn’t exactly get a lot of time to make up a lie,” Megumi grumbles. “An overseas mission was the easiest explanation for Gojo’s disappearance. Nobara hasn’t sent anything else?”
“She seemed preoccupied with handling the surge of curse activity in the surrounding area after you departed. Kugisaki requested backup roughly fifty minutes ago.”
Megumi wilts, guilt immediately replacing annoyance. Of course. The energy surge had attracted attention, just as they had been concerned about. It tracked that Nobara had ended up encountering hostiles as well, after they’d split up. “...I see. Are Nobara and Yuji okay?”
Yaga nods. “They have the situation handled. Nanami joined them and has been updating me regularly.” Like you were supposed to do, pointedly goes unsaid. The principal’s shoulders straighten. “You ensured nothing followed you here?”
“Yes. G—Satoru, can mask his cursed energy,” Megumi offers, only stumbling for a moment. Satoru was doing it now, a display of control that would have been prodigious for any other sorcerer his age. “And Nobara… tried to make him less recognizable. In appearance.”
They both look at Satoru, dwarfed within one of Yuji’s red hoodies. No matter how Megumi had arranged it, the hood could never completely obscure the shock of white hair or striking, instantly recognisable blue eyes. Still, he had done what he could to conceal Satoru as they moved quickly through the backstreets.
Those blue eyes, currently scrunched in a nasty glare, flicker briefly to Megumi and then to Yaga. “If someone followed us, I would know about it,” The kid says defiantly, the first sentence out of him since they’ve arrived. “And I’d get rid of them.”
“I suppose that is the best I can ask of you both, given the circumstances,” Yaga mutters, examining Satoru curiously over the rim of his dark glasses. The principal shakes his head. “We need to debrief. Satoru, step outside for a moment and wait with Ijichi.”
Satoru’s head whips sideways immediately, something desperate in the glare he directs towards Megumi. Megumi waits for him to say something, to complain, but he doesn’t. Instead, all he does is stare. What do you want me to say? Are you hoping I’ll speak for you? When have you ever been content to let that happen?
“He could stay for this part, at least,” Megumi tries. He keeps waiting for Satoru to interrupt him, for the natural order of things to fall back into place, but it doesn’t happen. “Just so he can understand everything that led up to him being affected by the cursed object. I promised him a better explanation at some point.”
Satoru straightens, nodding haughtily. Now, this expression is familiar—so much that it almost makes Megumi smile. Almost. The kid digs in the pocket of Itadori’s hoodie and begins loudly crunching his way through a pilfered granola bar. His foot kicks softly against the leg of Megumi’s chair. The teen feels oddly as if he’s passed some unspoken test.
It says a lot about how well Yaga understands Gojo (and Megumi as well) that he gives in immediately. “Fine. He can stay—for this part. But I will need to discuss matters privately with you afterward. Now, explain.”
Megumi nods seriously, having expected as much. “The three of us were assigned to clear out a swarm of third-grade curses independently at a condemned junkyard. They weren’t difficult to exorcise, but their volume led us to spread out and cover more ground. We could still hear each other clearly. But the piles of scrap metal blocked our visibility.”
Megumi sighs. We shouldn’t have separated. “I noticed a concentration of cursed energy within one of the storage buildings, so I told Yuji and Nobara where I was headed and went over to investigate it. I found a large number of curses on both floors, but my Divine Dog and I cleared them without issue. Yuji came inside to make sure everything was going smoothly and met me on the second level. And then he called me over to look at a residual he had found on a piece of scrap.”
That was a shit excuse to get in close to me. Why did I believe it? Megumi presses his fingers against the hastily bandaged wound on his arm, the length of it stinging at the pressure. “Then he immobilized my sword arm with several spikes and knocked me clean through a wall.”
Principle Yaga stiffens immediately, hand twitching towards a cursed corpse. “Was it…?”
“No,” Megumi assures quickly. “It wasn’t him… or Yuji. It was a curse user with a mimicry technique. He copied Yuji when we were separated and used his appearance to get in close to me. He had backup—they concealed themselves within a mudslide shikigami that could mask cursed energy signatures. There were three humans and two shikigami aiding them. I took down the first curse user before he could use his technique, and Divine Dog distracted the secondary shikigami.”
Megumi recovered quicker than they anticipated and was able to catch one of the curse users off guard, launching himself from the rubble and striking him in the gut with the blunt edge of the sword. He rolled immediately, ducking a blast of concentrated heat from across the room, and used the upswing to slam the hilt of his weapon into the stunned curse user before he could recover. The man dropped immediately, knocked unconscious.
Divine Dog was locked in a struggle with the second shikigami, a tornado-like amalgamation of pens and paper that seemed difficult to damage directly. The mudslide shikigami from earlier was concerningly absent—maybe it was only suited for concealment. Megumi directed his attention to the remaining figures: the newcomer with the heat technique and the curse user still wearing Yuji’s grinning face.
“I focused my attention on the curse users, but the second one had a heat technique affecting the entire radius of the building that was disorienting. It was impossible to get in close.”
The air shimmered with heat waves, Megumi’s skin cracking and blistering. The upper floor of the storage building had turned into an oven. A wave of sharp, pointed spikes lodged into the wall behind him as he ran, a few slashing into his side and sinking painfully into the skin.
“I used their shikigami to knock them off guard from behind by having mine draw it in.”
Stumbling against the wall, he angled himself so that the heat user—and the shapeshifter, seeming unaffected by the heat—were centered between Megumi and the ongoing fight between Divine Dog and the other shikigami. Then he ordered Divine Dog to rush towards him, recalling him just before he reached the epicenter of the heatwaves. Just as he had hoped, the swirling-paper shikigami gave chase, and its momentum carried it into the backs of both curse users, a gust of wind bowling them onto the ground.
“Then, I used the resulting distraction to take down the curse user with the heat technique. He relied almost exclusively on his cursed energy to fight, so he went down once I got a hit in.”
Megumi ripped a sheet of metal from one of the piles and leaped towards the heat user, bracing the sheet against his arms as a crude shield. A blast of intense heat boiled the air around him, but the shield diverted the worst of it, and Megumi slammed himself into the curse user before dropping the metal and spinning around. His cut took the curse user in the back with a spray of blood, and he dropped, the air cooling immediately. The tornado shikigami collapsed into a mound of office supplies.
“And then…” Megumi grimaces. “My attention slipped, and the other shikigami got the drop on me.”
Megumi turned and came face to face with himself. The distraction was momentary, a split-second, but just long enough for the mudslide shikigami to drop from the ceiling and envelope him immediately.
Megumi glances sidelong—Satoru listens intently, a small frown on his face. Megumi wonders, not for the first time today, what he’s thinking in the absence of the usual nonstop chatter. That he could have handled all this better than I could? I was stupid to let my guard down so easily just because the curse user took the face of one of my teammates, and I was stupid to let that curse user restrain me. I know that already.
Megumi shakes his head, forcing himself to finish recounting the events to Yaga. “It threatened to suffocate me the second I attempted to yell, and it immobilized my hands. I figured the curse user would kill me. But he wasn’t interested in me, or Nobara or Yuji—at least not as end goals.”
The curse user had coordinated everything, even fabricating the entire mission by placing those third-grade curses there himself, with a different target in mind.
“What did you do with Itadori?” Megumi spits out. The sludge tightens around him in warning, cloying and thick even as he struggles fruitlessly against it.
“Calm down, I didn’t kill him,” the curse user now wearing Megumi’s face reassures as he makes his way down the stairwell. His shikigami trails obediently behind, carrying Megumi and swaying nauseatingly as it moves.
“It should be obvious to you by now that I don’t need to kill somebody to don their costume,” he explains, tapping at his stolen skin condescendingly. “Both your friends are a distance away by now, chasing the trail I planted. I’ll only kill them if they return, which I’m sure might inspire some grand notions of escape, but for their sakes, you should really hope it doesn’t happen. I’ll just use the same old trick—a familiar face does wonders to lower someone’s guard. But you know that already, too.”
“I’m going to make you eat one of those spikes before I kill you,” Megumi tells him, forcing his voice to remain even. It’s disconcerting staring yourself in the face, especially when it’s grinning in a way that your muscles have never formed the shape of. His arm throbs steadily, blood pouring from the gash. He ignores it. “Or maybe I’ll just see how many I can fit down your throat before you suffocate.”
The shikigami holding him in place stretches its mud, dripping, to cover Megumi’s mouth. He thrashes, panic overriding conscious thought for a moment at the threat, but it leaves his nose uncovered. The sludge covering the rest of his body tightens and loosens as the thing breathes, offering no leeway for Megumi to slip free. Damn it. This is bad.
“Done?” the shapeshifter asks when Megumi’s stopped struggling. “You can cut the theatrics. I really don’t have any interest in killing you, and I’m no cold-blooded villain. I’d give you a good knock over the head and be on my merry way if you would only let me do what I need.” He sighs deeply. “But you won’t, of course. You’d give me trouble the whole way. So I’m still a bit torn on what to do with you.”
Megumi spits muffled curses at him through the mud.
The curse user sighs. “Something to say? I’ll allow it, provided you’re polite.”
The mud slowly recedes, once again allowing Megumi to open his mouth. He spits out a glob of the nasty, dirt-and-metal tasting sludge that had slipped past his lips. His side and arm throb. “What are you going to do, then?” Megumi sneers.
“Revenge, of course,” the man says easily, pulling a woven bag out of the mud beside Megumi’s head. “The gentleman’s justification for murder.”
“...Revenge.” Megumi tries to sound interested. “On someone from the school, I’m guessing. Why?” He couldn’t care less about this guy’s sob story, but buying time (and letting the enemy thoroughly spill the details of his plans to you) is generally a smart strategy in hostage scenarios. This is embarrassing. How did I get caught so easily?
“Oh, I didn’t think you’d be interested,” the man says brightly, setting down the bag and turning his attention to Megumi. The shapeshifter’s smile, wide and toothy, looks awful on a copy of Megumi’s face. This is why he never smiles in pictures—fuck you, Satoru, for always giving me grief about ‘showing teeth’ when it makes me look like a serial killer if I do. “I’ll show you, then! They always say it’s better to show than tell.”
The shapeshifter reaches up to the corner of his own hairline and begins to peel away at the skin. Bile rises in Megumi’s throat, threatening to mix with the mud staining his teeth. The shapeshifter’s real face—that must be what it is, however distorted—is shredded to bits, actual chunks of scarred-over jaw and cheekbone missing entirely. The face is hardly identifiable as human, if not for the single, sunken eye. The other socket is dark and empty.
A weakness, the analytical part of Megumi’s brain that takes over in situations like this, notes. He’ll fight with a blind spot on the left despite appearing to have two working ones.
A mask of skin is dragged back over the wreckage as the curse user reattaches the facsimile of Megumi’s face, patting it gently to secure it. Megumi’s torn between revulsion (it’s wearing him like a suit) and relief that he no longer has to look at the mess underneath.
“There’s your why. But the who… well, do you recognise his work?” The curse user wonders, running bloodied fingers over the lines of his stolen face almost reverently. “I suppose you wouldn’t. It was an… accident, I assume. Directed at something much stronger than little old me. I was just… in the way. A fly on the wall of an active warzone.”
“It was Gojo,” Megumi guesses, something sour curdling in his chest. It was undoubtedly deserved, if so. He must have been affiliated with a particularly dangerous group. Satoru didn’t often fight curse users, and the result was usually a parade of terrified, lightly-singed prisoners who surrendered the second he showed up. Not this.
( “It’s so boring,” Gojo had complained to Megumi once, after raiding the base of a criminal sorcerer organization. “They never want to fight once I get there. You can’t even goad them into it! I call them names, and they just start crying. Feels like kicking puppies.”
“Wanted criminal puppies,” Shoko interjected while feeling against Megumi’s ribs, because the same ‘boring’ mission had landed him in the infirmary with a concussion and deep bruising. “So, you know, don't feel too bad about kicking them.”
“Very true, Sho-sho.” Gojo had agreed, and Shoko visibly soured at the nickname. “Do you think I need to get more personal with it? Maybe my insults aren't biting enough to motivate them. I could start bringing up people’s poor old mothers. Maybe love lives, or lack thereof.”
“I recall you lack both as well,” Shoko responded before immediately sheltering behind a gurney. Gojo had flung himself across the table, laughing boisterously, to get at her. Megumi’s ribs stung from holding in his own laugh watching them. )
The curse user smiles again. It's a distinctly different kind of smile than before, tighter, pulling at the lines of Megumi’s face. “Correct. Your… mentor. I have had reliable sources tell me that you're the closest to him by far. Your tie to him dates much earlier than your classmates’. He raised you and that sister of yours, correct? Your primary school records list him as a guardian.”
“I don't know what you're talking about,” Megumi says coldly, the mention of Tsumiki sending sharp terror through him. Shit. I'm some sort of bait. That's why he wanted a student. And he's figured out I've known Satoru much longer than Itadori or Nobara.
“Lie if you must, if it brings you comfort,” the man offers, sickly-sweet. “It's not too important, either way. Student or child—both have enough of a pull to prompt the hesitation I need. Though I was correct, I think, to have chosen you.”
“You don't know anything about me.”
“Unfortunately for you, I don't think that's entirely true. I can tell you care for him. And for that reason, I'm afraid I probably will have to kill you after all,” the curse user apologizes. “I don't want you getting caught up in your own quest for revenge! You understand. It's truly nothing personal. You just happened to be… in the wrong place, at the wrong time,” he finishes, eyes gleaming.
Rage fills Megumi, threatening to burst. He caps it down. I have to be careful about this. I still don't understand what he's planning, but I can't underestimate him. “What are you going to do?” He asks again, guarded.
“I'm going to kill him, obviously, and steal his face for myself,” the curse user points out, having recollected the bag from the floor. He brushes it off carefully and then pauses. “Oh, but you want details! Well, alright then. You've got me—it feels such a waste not to share it with anyone, when I've planned this all so brilliantly. And you'll be dead before you can tell another soul.”
Megumi swallows carefully.
“My technique is quite wonderful. I imagine you've figured out the gist of it by now. All I need is… a connection… and I can be anyone I want! I can even mimic your energy if I truly focus—though only for a few minutes at a time—and it leaves me very vulnerable. And I don’t get to share any of your memories or abilities, so I have to do a lot of acting. Thankfully, I always was good at improv. I used to sell out every night, before I became this.”
I don’t care. Talk about something useful. The man pulls a small jar from the bag and holds it in front of his face. Inside, an hourglass-like vial of dark energy swirls, slowly filling the bottom of the container and yet never seeming to run out as it pours from the top. Megumi can’t sense any cursed energy, but the hair on his neck stands on end from looking at it. It’s sealed, but it’s definitely a cursed object. It must be a powerful one if he’s convinced it’ll do anything against Gojo.
“Interested? It took me years to procure this, and no shortage of bloodshed. It’s not even a weapon by design, but it will serve as one. It’s activated by touch—which puts a wrench in one’s plans when the thing you wish to kill is untouchable.” An amused look crosses his face. “I know I’m far from the first person to dream of ridding the world of Satoru Gojo. The problem with all the rest, however, seems to be a terrible lack of creativity. You don’t shatter a suit of armor by beating at the metal with crude weapons—that’s what it was designed to withstand. You look for a crack, a tiny opening in the plates. And then you kill what’s hiding underneath the shell. Something weakened without its defenses.”
Megumi glares at him, heart thumping.
The shapeshifter slides the jar into the pocket of his uniform—Megumi’s uniform. “I’ve learned a lot from watching you already, enough that I think I could play you convincingly enough. Sullen, monotone, but concerned for the well-being of your teammates. And the twin energy signature is easily solved, of course—my shikigami will conceal you for me.”
The mud covering Megumi suddenly becomes heavier, thicker. Or, no—it’s just covering his cursed energy. Megumi flails, straining with all his might to pull his limbs free, but nothing budges. The sludge envelops him like a blanket, and Megumi feels his energy signature dampen and then disappear beneath it. Darkness creeps in at the edges of his vision as the mud slowly, slowly creeps over the rest of his face. Panic sets in again, and Megumi forces himself to breathe deeply and evenly.
“It’s remarkable how much complexity an individual can contain, beneath the surface,” the man remarks, uncaring of Megumi’s panic, and reaches into the shikigami to grab Megumi’s phone. Holding it, he begins stepping backwards, out of the storage building into the open air. High above, the veil covering the lot casts everything in a dim, purple glow. “And yet, it is the surface through which our eyes perceive everything, like a blackout curtain over a sunny window. But your mentor doesn’t really have eyes like the rest of us. If anyone could catch the cracks in my performance, it would be him.”
Of course he won’t buy it. Gojo isn’t stupid, Megumi thinks desperately, violently jerking his head as the mud begins to spread over his mouth. He’ll notice the fake’s energy is off, or that it’s acting uncharacteristic, and Infinity won’t let him through.
The shapeshifter taps away at Megumi’s phone, activating the emergency distress call on the lockscreen. Immediately, an alarm begins blaring from the speaker. One ring. Megumi inhales a final breath before the airway closes. “You see the dilemma I faced. I’m only an ant, after all. We have to get creative.”
He’s activating the alarm already. How does he know it will direct to Gojo? It’s meant to direct to the school, and he’s on a mission until late tonight. But Gojo’s always dropped everything when the signal comes from a student. When the signal comes from me.
The curse user grins at him, as if reading his thoughts. The phone’s alarm blares. Two rings. “No, even my technique has its weak spots. That’s why I’ll decide to make sure he’s feeling a little… distracted.” Then it summons a spike and drives it into the soft hollow of its throat.
Megumi watches, struck with horror, as the carbon copy of himself collapses and begins loudly choking to death on its own blood. No. No.
The mud covers his face, leaving only the blurry imprint of a bloodied, fallen body. Megumi forces himself to remain calm, even as his lungs begin to ache. He can still hear the alarm—that’s three rings. In all the scenarios Megumi’s had to use the distress call, it’s never reached the fifth ring. Gojo’s always gotten there first.
Don’t come. Just this once, Megumi wishes, eyes shut tight against the thick mud. You’re all the way up north right now, hours away. Send someone else. Please don’t come.
His ears strain for a fourth ring, over the faint, wet gurgling of someone dying. It doesn’t come. Instead, a familiar energy floods the warehouse, and several things happen very quickly.
The first is someone yelling his name. It takes Megumi a second to realize it’s Gojo because he doesn’t remember him ever sounding like that before. Almost panicked. Wrong. Megumi instinctively tries to call out to him in response, and the mud floods fully into his mouth, heavy and suffocating. It feels like being buried alive.
The second is a wave of unfamiliar dark, oppressive energy—the cursed object, unsealed. It buzzes up against Gojo’s like two opposing magnets before reversing and pulling. The pressure in the room changes.
The last thing, which is easier to follow: everything explodes.
Megumi’s vision comes back in sparkling waves, static and then white and then into color with slowly growing clarity. He remembers that he needs to breathe because he hasn’t done that in a while, and the next few seconds are devoted to heavy wheezing interspersed with hacking up chunks of brackish mud. The rest of the shikigami is, seemingly, evaporated away or resting in lifeless chunks around him.
“—not supposed to be able to do that!” a reedy, unfamiliar voice cries out, through the ringing in Megumi’s ears. “All the other times—shock of it—to sleep!”
“I don’t—tired—’t all.” A child’s voice responds coldly.
Megumi’s vision finally focuses enough to become something comprehensible. Two blurry shapes solidify outside the warehouse, under the dimming sun—the veil must have shattered.
First, the threat—the curse user, backing away, Megumi’s skin melting from him like hot wax. Something has scorched him terribly, and smoke wafts from his side. The self-inflicted stab wound is real, still dripping blood, but nonlethal. He was acting, of course. He just needed to make it look like I was dying, so he hit as close to an artery as he could.
“You set a trap for me,” the second, smaller shape observes without inflection. Megumi stares at him. I must have lost enough oxygen to start hallucinating.
It’s unmistakably Gojo—the same stark white, messy hair and blue eyes, but this kid has the soft features and small stature of a much younger iteration. Tsumiki had begged Satoru to show them baby pictures of himself once, and he’d finally agreed to hand over one after weeks of begging. The same child from that photograph stands there now, facing down the curse user unflinchingly.
“I’m terribly sorry,” The curse user tells Gojo, pieces of skin dripping and falling onto the grass. Megumi levers himself slowly to his feet, the world still spinning and ringing. “I wasn’t aiming for you, of course. I simply hit you by accident.”
Was this his plan? Megumi scans the wreckage of his face, his nervous body language, the way half of his body is scorched from the effects of whatever blast killed the shikigami. No. Or, it might’ve been, but something’s gone wrong. He’s terrified.
“Don’t lie to me,” the kid drawls, something bored overtaking his face.
“Go—Satoru,” Megumi calls out weakly, stumbling towards the door of the warehouse until Satoru stands only a meter away. It’s him, for certain. Megumi can feel his energy, familiar and not all at once. The kid turns only slightly, keeping his attention focused on the curse user but acknowledging Megumi. “What happened to you? Are you okay?”
“Keep out of the way,” Satoru orders, holding out a palm as he glances sideways. “I’ll deal with you—”
With a loud cry, the curse user shoots a deadly barrage of spikes directly towards Satoru’s face. Megumi moves before he can process it, flinging himself in front of Satoru to shield him. They don’t make impact. The air hums—the spikes have frozen, suspended midair inches from Megumi’s stomach and chest. It must be Infinity, protecting him. They fall.
Slowly, Satoru creeps around Megumi, craning his neck to peer at him. The look on his face is a mix of bafflement and irritation. The sight of him unharmed loosens the tension in Megumi’s chest. I was quick enough, good. Though I guess he didn’t really need me.
Satoru looks away from Megumi and towards the curse user, who stands heaving with terror. “Wait,” he protests, palms facing them. Satoru’s expression darkens, and he slowly lifts his hand in a familiar motion. “Wait, wait, wait—!”
The man dies quickly but horribly, because even at eight years old and clearly disoriented, Gojo remains in a league all his own. The best Megumi can describe it is like a vacuum opening in the guy’s chest and tugging inward until he becomes more of a bloody, inside-out cube than anything resembling a person. Blood and gore splatter across the lot.
The breath in Megumi’s chest releases in a wheezing sort of gasp. He didn’t think—he hadn’t expected Satoru would…
Satoru slowly retracts his hand and wipes a tiny shimmer of blood from beneath his nose. “There. He’s gone now.” Familiar blue eyes snap back up to Megumi, brimming with confusion and thinly veiled distrust. “Who are you? ‘Cause if you’re here to kill me, I’ll do the same thing to you.”