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ππ±π¦π―.
s h a d o w;
1. a dark area or shape produced by a body coming between rays of light and a surface.
2. used in reference to proximity, ominous oppressiveness, or sadness and gloom.
OTA 25/8 - Action, Texts, Etc.
( art )
s h a d o w;
1. a dark area or shape produced by a body coming between rays of light and a surface.
2. used in reference to proximity, ominous oppressiveness, or sadness and gloom.
OTA 25/8 - Action, Texts, Etc.
( art )
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it doesn't bother toji. or, well. he finds that tightly-shut lid in his psyche and slams his metaphorical palm over the top of it.
(memories of small hands that he can barely recall, of a day when he felt like he was blessed with something other than the limitless boundaries of his own flesh and blood; of a name he hasn't uttered in ten years. megumi.)
he sits, and stares, and finally
shrugs. ]
It's not up to you.
[ as always, being hated is the easier option. if no one expects anything of him, he doesn't have to expect anything of himself, either.
rules to live by. ]
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It's not up to you either.
[ get out. everything about megumi radiates this, but he knows that asking won't get him anywhere, and likewise telling him probably won't either, really. megumi can read the room that much, but he isn't in the mood to chat with this stranger whose handful of words take up all the space here from the window he came through to the door megumi's heel presses against. admittedly, he is well versed in people who think they are in control, but it doesn't make him good at it. he know, however, that they often feel for one reason or another or a hundred, that the situation isn't ever out of their hands.
megumi's hands, not quite touching, feel heavy; rain and failure and the strange twist of something thorned the longer he stares at this man.
the scant light from outside whether the moon or whatever, catches on his eyes and the words are out of megumi's mouth before he can stop them. ]
Who are you?
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he scratches at the back of his head. rubs his nape. drawls a long aah. ]
You won't like the answer.
[ it's the only bone he'll deign to throw. if the kid is so smart, he'll figure it out.
breezily, he moves on. night starts to stretch into the boy's dorm, and while he has no reason to feel concerned about walking back to the nearest station while it's dark, the prevailing sentiment is 'too troublesome'. ]
Anyway, I told you. 'Relax'. [ fushiguro toji, father of the century, tells a teenager to relax about having an incredibly suspicious stranger in their room. amazing. ] If I wanted to kill you, I would've killed you about 300 times already. [ TOJI??? ] I'm just here to get paid. Thought it would be an added bonus to see that smug brat squirm, but that's a bust.
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his brow quirks. that's not news to him really. no matter who the man said he was, megumi didn't think it would be a reason for him to become understanding of breaking and entering and taking up indefinite residence on his bed. ]
I already don't like you. So the answer --
[ relax????
it would be most surprising if this man wasn't at least half crazy. no one in their right mind would tell him to --
-- he thinks of gojou.
...
well he's not wrong. no one in their right mind. it still stands.
his thought is timed inadvertently with the stranger talking about him again. megumi tilts his head. 300 times. brat.
what a lot of nonsense.
that's what he'd like to believe. but there's just...nothing about this man that suggests any of what he just said is a lie. how can someone with no cursed energy whatsoever feel this...dangerous?
he doesn't 'relax' but he lowers his arms, feeling foolish even as he does so. ]
Why is Gojou-sensei paying you? What for?
[ given he has no read on this man, megumi asks his questions not expecting answers. it has to do with gojou though, so it would be a dead lie to say he doesn't want to know. ]
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the bed is too small for his bulk; the mattress protests under his weight. ]
Adult business.
[ translation: i'm not gonna tell you, and you should've known that i wouldn't tell you.
but, well. since he knows he's just going to get more bristling and posturing from megumi if he leaves it at that: ] βHalf the reason for making him pay me is repayment for collateral damage, and the other half is to piss him off. Happy?
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it's been gnawing at him, since the catch of light on the man's eyes moments before he turned onto his side. never mind that he clearly feels megumi is negative on the threat scale (300 times, was it?!) but it's a certain green. a certain sharpness. megumi doesn't remember.
but.
a second step. ]
That's an evasive answer.
[ the empty room next door is out of the question for this man.
it is also out of the question for megumi.
he sighs and moves back to the counter where his phone is, not entirely committed to even trying to reach gojou, not sure what else he's supposed to do either, frustrated with every facet of both. ]
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[ evasive answers, he means. he toes off his soft shoes, and lets them fall from the corner of the bed down to the floor; making himself at home in megumi's small, bare space. fushiguro toji, a man who knows how to flit from place to place without ever staying.
he knows himself. even now, with his son finally in front of him after ten years of neglect, toji knows that he doesn't have the self-respect to try to make amends. megumi has grown, not despite him or because of himβ toji doesn't harbor any illusions about the role he'll play (or won't play) in the kid's life.
still, instinct moves him quicker than reason does. when megumi is within reaching distance, his hand too close to his phone for comfort, toji closes his callused fingers around his son's wrist. too fast for normal people to perceive.
thin, he thinks. ]
βShit, does this place even feed you?
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he pulls and stops almost immediately.
forget a feeling of struggle; it takes one attempt for megumi to register the type of strength he's dealing with.
on the floor, the man's shoes have fallen next to megumi's slippers in a weird adjacent disarray.
his other hand remains motionless. even if he could grab his phone quickly enough, he wouldn't pull up a number or connect; it would be a waste. and he finds himself distracted anyway by the man's words. there's nothing about them that, in and of themselves, suggests real empathy or concern. but words come from somewhere. careless or not.
that gnawing is drawing blood in the middle of megumi's thoughts, but it's a stale kind of thing. ]
Do you care?
[ should you?
the fact that megumi prefers salads and black coffee makes him sound at least thirty years older than he is and even more humorless. add that to his training and his age. of course he's thin, is what he thinks.
though yuuji had said something like that to him too, come to think of it.
if there's a slight tremor in megumi's body it's not fear.
but whatever it is, it hurts. ]
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he feels megumi tremble under his grip. tighten his fingers another fraction, and he knows he'd feel the flimsiness of bone and sinew under his palm.
life is transient. megumi is so weak, so slight. it's only his stillness that makes him powerful, the conviction in his green eyes that makes toji pause.
no, is what he should say. it doesn't matter to me, one way or the other. ]
βYou're not the kind of kid that'd need me to, are you?
[ a mistake. selfish and self-serving. what does toji expect this fifteen-year-old to say? "i've been living just fine without you"? for what reason? his own peace of mind?
his thumb runs across the hard bump of megumi's wristbone. this is the first time he's touched his son, he realizes, since infancy. ]
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that should say plenty.
and even he couldn't save or heal or change tsumiki's fate.
megumi doesn't think about himself. even though he doesn't have a sister to look after except to see that she's still breathing in her sleep. so when anyone might ask him this, whether a man whose face is as good as new to him, or a complete stranger, it wouldn't matter.
he stays impassive as he answers, ]
It doesn't matter what I need.
[ what matters is his work. what matters is tsumiki's curse. what matters is itadori yuuji died and was it better to die like that or should megumi have never saved him in the fist place?
what matters is when toji traces against the jut of his wrist, that impassiveness glitches and megumi hates it β how he flinches, how he can't hide...
...not even from someone who, ostensibly, gave the answer to megumi's own question ten years ago.
this time when he bites his tongue he tastes blood. ]
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something drifts in toji's expression, vague and unreadable. it settles like resignation on his sharp features, dulling the preternatural sense of impassiveness he wears over his invisibilityβ it's almost funny how little he understands about how loaded Megumi's statement is.
toji, again, has nothing. no context, no idea, no direction. he's a beast living eternally in the present, running from self-reflection; the shape of megumi's emotional pain in that one flinch only resonates as distaste.
and, here's the kicker: ] Ha.
I know I said you don't need anyone to care, but brats like you should be a little more selfish at that age.
[ as if he's not directly responsible for some of that lack of self-worth. as if gojou won't tell megumi the same, at some point. as if this is some sort of sage advice, instead of an offhanded, irresponsible comment by a man who only knows how to be selfish.
he lets go. puts his palms in the air in mock-surrender. ]
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and... it's weird. it's so...so weird. to hear these words now. from this man. megumi was so sure so absolutely sure with the perceived infallibility of being young and old and young that he was telling gojou the truth that day: i don't care.
he has of course no idea how often his own father has uttered those words in his head or otherwise.
he doesn't know either, what he means. and what he doesn't mean.
fushiguro toji hasn't let go of him but for half a second when his son makes what is probably a mistake but call it selfishness; call it youth.
two things people tend not to ascribe to him.
call it the exception, the bad kind in his room devoid of personality except that it's someone who likes things clean and unobtrusive and easy to clean away if he ever fails to come back.
call it family. maybe.
he doesn't expect to actually be able to hit him.
so why does he try?
'i don't care.'
not exactly.
i refuse to care.
as if he's ever been good at that. the almost-foil for the man he came from. ]
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he sees himself in megumi's incoming aggression. that flashbang of anger that comes from wanting so desperately not to give a fuck.
(memories of being sequestered in the muggiest corners of traditional japanese housing, hands folded in kimono sleeves, listening to whispers of maids and branch family. shame, externalized. the thrill of killing the people who'd called him scum.
scratch thatβ megumi is nothing like him.)
the fist lands. right along his cheekbone, hard enough that it would make a normal person fly back and hit the wall.
to toji, it's about as painful as being scratched by a cat. his head whips to the side, but his lips are curved. "you deserved that one, probably". ]
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he was exasperated. he was upset. he was trying to be neither.
now he might as well be both, and angry to boot.
subsisting on his own resourcefulness alongside tsumiki's almost a decade ago, megumi came to the conclusion that adults could not be trusted. he still thinks that, and no wonder, given his influence. there is, he admits, nanami kento who is so responsible it's almost like he's trying to make up for the satorus and the tojis of the world but that's not true of course. nanami would never exert effort that's so futile.
megumi wishes for a hair of a second he could be more like that man and it throws into sharp relief who he's never wanted to be like.
his body feels both burning and freezing; he wants to yell; he wants to not say anything else to him; he wants to not want.
why can't he just leave? that's all he's good at.
just having that thought makes megumi feel small and childish and he hates it, hates himself. then he slides all of that into a long box that might be medicinal or might be for a body in the ground and shuts it away in his head.
quiet.
well if toji won't, megumi will. he retracts his hand and makes a grab for his phone even as he turns away. ]
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he doesn't wish he could taste iron in his mouth (megumi'd have to do more to make him really bleed), but he wishes his son's anger hurt more. just so he can pocket it, like so many other things he's pocketed, and shut it away to dwell on when he's drunk and filling himself with convenience store food. killing himself with junk.
toji watches the kid move to go. doesn't stop him. this isn't some cheap TV drama where the father pulls his son into his arms and begs him for forgiveness-- that ship'd sailed more than ten years ago, even before gojou satoru and the star plasma vessel, with the zen'ins and billions of yen in toji's pocket.
still sitting on megumi's bed, toji says nothing. like this, he really is nonexistent; unless megumi turns around, he knows that the kid won't be able to sense a thing about him.
probably for the better.
but, before that small, thin frame can go out the door: ]
Tell the Gojou kid that 'Toji' stopped by.
[ at the very least, gojou's reaction will be priceless. ]
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almost, this could be a very strange dream but it's not and he knows that. he's not a child anymore.
never mind that when he said as much to gojou not so long ago, he'd flicked him in the forehead and just said 'is that so?' in that tone adults use when they're patronizing, well, children.
the only person 'yes you are' wouldn't be offensive coming from, would be someone else his age.
maybe it's good for megumi to leave tonight regardless, the room beside his like a ghost itself.
but... ]
Tell him yourself.
[ and stay away from me.
he can almost hear tsumiki chastising him.
it doesn't help.
when megumi leaves he doesn't bother to close the door.
he doesn't own anything he's afraid of losing anymore, and the intruder is already inside anyway.
where he should go is another question though.
well. he'll figure it out. ]
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βtoji doesn't leave. consider that a first, in toji's thirty-odd years of being alive on this planet. and really, the only consistent thing about toji is that he's inconsistent and apathetic; he stays in megumi's room not out of obstinance or sentiment, but out of convenience.
he snoops, too. opens closets, looks under the bed. the entire setup of the room is so staggeringly nondescript that he can't help but laugh. it reminds him of his own days in the zen'in house, of rotating the same three kimonos every week, of having nothing in that place that made him feel like a real, breathing human with worldly attachments to insignificant objects.
maybe loneliness is genetic. (under fifty layers of his subconscious, he distantly wishes megumi took after his mother more.)
(under five hundred layers of his subconscious, he misses megumi's mother every day.)
if megumi ever comes back, the unfortunate truth of the matter is that toji is still... there... sprawled on his mattress with a pile of his books stacked next to his pillow. an invisible gorilla sleeping with his face buried next to megumi's personal belongings. an absolute menace. ]
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by the time he's gotten through all of those 'and doesn't', it's morning and if he thought he was exhausted before, he's even more so now.
fushiguro toji has no presence in cursed energy, so megumi really does have to go back to see if he's still there. he hesitates outside his own door and then opens it with more ire than is useful or necessary or matters.
what bothers him the most, maybe (these things are difficult to rank), is he doesn't hate him as much as he thought he would. is apathy a form of hate? is disconnection a form of exile? megumi just doesn't know. he thinks he should feel either more loathing or more sadness but he doesn't.
he just feels cold, staring at the man in his bed.
there is, he thinks, no point in talking to him.
but he needs somewhere to go, to sleep before he passes out, the tremors in his hands indicative of overtaxation.
he backs out of his own room and goes instead to stand and stare at itadori's room. well, the door of it. he puts his hand out, curls his shivering fingers around the knob β
β ah. he can't do it. his head hits the wood of the door and he closes his eyes. what is wrong with all the adults in his life, personally?
you know, all two of them. ]
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Had fun last night, delinquent?
[ a palm to a door, a presence (or lack thereof) against megumi's back. the bulk of a body trained specifically to aggress, curled and corralling a much smaller one. there's an unspoken promise here, that the fingers splayed against scratched wood could push forward and tear through this flimsy partition like paper...
...but toji doesn't. yawning, he bends forward and puts his jaw on the crown of megumi's head. ]
What's up with this room?
[ without consideration. with a degree of carelessness that doesn't belong to a man who abandoned his single-digit-aged child at the height of his tenderness. picking up a nonexistent conversation from a nonexistent time, as if toji and megumi have started a cordial relationship somewhere along the line and toji is going through the motions.
toji wasn't worried, no. but he is, in fact, curious. ]
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i don't care.
the weight of toji using him as a perch is somehow less oppressive than the hand against the door. ]
Get off of me.
[ not an answer to either question; he has no intention of doing so, after all. his hands are free. he could call his divine dogs. he could call nue. beings megumi has treated with kindness whether he meant to or not, both in the perceived battlefield of jujutsu shaman and the lesser acknowledged one of growing up and figuring each other out. he knows more about them than this man who he turns to shove away from him.
it's graceless and stupid, and megumi is not a stupid person.
he doesn't think toji is here for anything other than he said.
if he lies, if he tells him a random place where gojou certainly isn't. will he leave then?
for some reason, it feels important, keeping him out of itadori's room, keeping him from even splintering the door.
not that it would take much. the school is old. they both know that. ]
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and, really: what has gojou been teaching him, all these years? he's given the brat a decade to hammer some useful skills into megumi, and he's still letting a stranger take his back. sigh. ]
Aah, I've really gone and made you hate me, huh.
[ AS IF... THAT WASN'T CLEAR FROM THE START... but, let's be real, toji is only saying this for the sake of saying it. his tone verges on dry, even when he reaches and tries to close his fingers around the collar of megumi's oversized shirt.
if he manages, he.
picks megumi up the way someone would pick a cat up by the scruff of its neck. ]
But you should be more careful. Bristling like that's just gonna make me more curious.
[ again: what's in the room? ]
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as if that could have saved her.
he knows just enough to know better.
whatever he's better or worse in aside however, he'd thought he wasn't quite this bad.
or is toji just very good?
he knows nothing about him other than his observations: absent, absent, non-presence, and β
β strong.
knowing precisely how little good it will do, megumi at least tries to reach one hand to toji's wrist. even if he almost certainly fails, doing nothing isn't something he has in him, yet. probably never. and call it a sixth sense or what-have-you, but he doesn't want to call his shikigami out.
it feels...dangerous.
and maybe megumi never fears for himself but the same can't be said of how he feels for others, born of flesh and blood or shadows or light. ]
What is your problem? Go find Gojou-sensei. If he owes you, I don't care. There's nothing here for you.
[ he's not speaking about himself though it could easily be construed as such. if nothing else, he just wants to keep toji out of itadori's room. it's selfish and presumptuous to let himself mourn. they hadn't known each other long. they weren't family.
itadori's voice is an echo that doesn't stop. "please."
he'll have nightmares; he knows. maybe it's for the best that he can't find a place or moment to sleep. he wonders if he kicks out at toji, if he'll break his legs, if it would matter. if he would care even less than that.
"have a little faith."
no.
not like this, anyway. ]
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here's what he knows about megumi, now: he's sentimental. there's something beyond that door that breaks his heart, and he's fighting to keep a stranger from walking barefoot into sacred territory. thin fingers to a thick wrist, flimsy digits that toji could break in a millisecond. what then?
stupid. sentiment is the sort of thing that'd get megumi killed in half a heartbeat. ]
You're not wrong.
[ there really isn't anything for him here. if there was, he's gotten it already: the guarantee of megumi's wellbeing, made real. megumi is alive and breathing and very much against the idea of breathing the same air as him; small comforts.
still. there's one thing that toji wants to confirm. or, well. not confirm, because he knows it alreadyβ he just wants to hear it from the kid's mouth.
(in another life, toji is long dead and will only utter these words from the safety of his inevitable return to the afterlife. it'll be the only thing that drives him to sink the sharp end of an invincible weapon into his skull.) ]
Hey. [ out of nowhere: ] What's your name?
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engaging with someone who he swore at six didn't matter to him not knowing that couldn't possibly be true for someone like himself (probably both too much like his mother and his father all at once, if from a different time, a liminal space of change cut short), is out of his wheelhouse. when toji asks him his name, megumi can't help his confusion or is spike of frustration. he's learned at this point to control and conserve his cursed energy but that's not equivalent to his feelings.
his fingers are brittle things when they curl tight, branches in winter. but it's strange perhaps, hard to tell if he grips tighter as if to hold on or to tear away.
one has to wonder why these things are so close to the same. ]
You of all people should know.
[ without meaning to, without understanding what he denies him, fushiguro megumi of the coveted zen'in ten shadows technique, lashes back; the sore spot of the name he couldn't leave behind and wanted to hate because this man gave it to him. ]
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a teenager's denial, given fangs. toji actually has the nerve to laugh. ]
You'd think.
[ funny story, megumiβ your father'd made it a point to forget, for a longass time. the irony isn't lost to him, and once he starts laughing, it doesn't stop. silent chuckles wrack his spine, constricting his lungs until they knock at the hollow space between his ribs.
it isn't funny. still, he grins. and eventually?
lets go. unceremoniously, like a puppet on a cut string. ]
Megumi.
[ toji gives up on barging into the silent room tucked next to megumi's. relinquishes that act of invasion, in favor of this one. that three-syllabled curse he'd bestowed on a kid who, even by his own admission, probably deserved better. ]
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