Chapter Text
Fushiguro Toji was not the man you thought you’d spend the rest of your life with. Not because you didn’t find him attractive—hard to find anyone who doesn’t—or because he was eight years older, but because of the way he presented himself, which is to say: you judged a book by its cover.
And also because you thought you’d marry your ex.
That was until Takahashi, your boyfriend of two years, said you were nothing but a promiscuous, disrespectful city-girl; a slut, if you will. Which was ironic since you’d caught him with his co-worker in your bed just fifteen minutes prior. You didn’t know which stung more.
Probably his cheek after you backhanded him nearly to tears.
Before Takahashi, you liked to believe you handled break-ups well. But then again, you never considered marrying any of your exes.
You hadn’t planned on staying long when you moved back home from Tokyo; a few months at most, maybe half a year, just to be with your parents after spending nearly a decade away from them. But when you bumped intoTakahashi again seconds after arriving at twenty-three, your ‘plan’ combusted.
He’d always been handsome, even as a pre-teen, and your younger self had only ever dreamed of being the object of his affections. Turns out, you always had been. How sweet, right? Childhood friends reunited into lovers ten years later; a tried and true formula for everlasting love.
Too bad Takahashi took ‘object’ a little too seriously.
If only you’d seen the signs earlier, the bright splotches of red on his flag. The jealousy, the off-handed remarks, the refusal to even contemplate your desire to move back to Tokyo while expecting you to upend everything and remain in your rural hometown with him.
Love is blind; you hate that it’s true.
Regardless, at twenty-six, you moved back to Tokyo a single woman.
You’d tried to efface Takahashi’s impact on your life, but even in his absence he’d marred something else for you: other men. It sounds inane—because it is—but how could you trust another man again? Sure, they always appeared benign—pleasant, even—but who knew how much of a red flag they really were beneath the ‘earnest’ smiles and swoopy hair?
Any man who raised even the slightest red flag sent alarms wailing inside you. Which was horrible because everyone has at least a little pink in their flags.
And Fushiguro Toji? He embodied the colour red. Scarlet, crimson, merlot, rouge, cerise, carmine; every shade of it belonged to him, and damn, he wore it well.
The first splash of ruby on his white canvas was evident only seconds upon meeting him as he hauled your ass out of a tree. Yes, a tree , because the first time you met Toji—you at twenty-six and him at thirty-four—was when you’d clambered up a tree at 2:30 a.m.
So, here’s a retelling of how you met the love of your life for the first time, How-I-Met-Your-Mother-style.
It was two o’clock on a Saturday morning when you realised you’d left your wallet at Ieiri’s. That wouldn’t have been an issue under normal circumstances—you could swing by and pick it up on your way to work the next day—but the thing is, you were halfway home in a cab.
See the problem now?
The reunion at her place consisted of your high school friends, a commemoration of your moving closer to everyone in Shibuya after not seeing each other for nearly three years. Light banter, catching-up, laughing at shitty movies over too-salty popcorn (or too-sweet if you were Gojo); that’s how it was supposed to go. Alcohol wasn’t in the itinerary, but well, Nanami couldn’t make it, so there went your voice of reason. And when Mei Mei arrived with three bottles of imported whiskey you’d never have the cash to even see again…
If anything, Gojo was to blame for enticing you.
“Just a sip. C’mon, you’re really gonna regret not having a taste,” he said, the devil on your left shoulder. The apples of his cheeks were ruddy and his usually rapid-fire speech sluggish. “When’re you ever goin’ ta have a chance again?”
“You’re rich. Just buy me a bottle next time you see me.”
He rolled his eyes. “Have ya seen the price tag on this thing? I don’t like you that much.”
The contentions he presented gradually became increasingly—and vexingly—compelling. But when you glanced to your right shoulder for guidance from an angel, two more devils awaited.
Ieiri and Geto consummated the formidable SaSuSho—SuShoSa, ShoSuSa or Triple S, depending on who you asked—trio and were quick to come to their fellow devil’s aid, which was bad. Especially since Geto is infamously persuasive. In high school, he’d been voted ‘most likely to start a cult’.
Team Triple S prevailed once more unfortunately, because ten minutes after your exchange with Gojo, you downed your first glass.
So, it was extra humiliating to be kicked out a kilometre from your place with empty pockets but a stomach full of exorbitantly priced booze after telling the cab driver you’d forgotten your wallet.
And because the universe hated you, obviously it was cold. The night chill needled the skin of your legs, and you lamented your decision to forgo pants for a skirt. The choice had been last minute, a deliberate departure from the ‘modest’ apparel Takahashi would’ve approved of. You remember how horrified he’d looked when you wanted to leave the house in a tennis skirt one time. Though your outfit was adorable, you’d relented without objection and changed into something more ‘appropriate’ because you found his possessiveness flattering at the time. That didn’t last long.
You’d even splurged on a pair of new shoes to pair with your current skirt. Who knew that fourteen days later they’d hang from your index and middle fingers as you staggered through the streets?
It was then, as you were cussing yourself out, that you heard the first meow.
Drunk, humiliated, and freezing, you thought you’d hallucinated it. But when a second one, shriller and closer, speared the otherwise silent night, you were sure it was no figment of your imagination.
You didn’t stop to think how deranged you probably looked when you started meowing back, ears perked for a reply.
No way you’d abandon a helpless cat. They were considered part of the people back home; most households, yours included, had bowls of kibble and fresh water outside even if they didn’t own any pets.
Maybe it’d slipped into a drain or tangled itself in some brambles, but a few steps and another yowl later banished those assumptions. The cat, you realised, was above ground.
Above you .
You had to squint to spot the splotch of mottled fur between the leaves. But unmistakably, about thirteen metres up an oak fringing one of the mini recreational areas was a calico, its tail swishing like paddy plants in a draft. The cat meowed again, the branch it was clinging to bowing beneath its weight.
What else could you do but climb?
Sure, you’d climbed a few trees before. Growing up, the neighbourhood kids used to constantly challenge each other to see who could pluck the most coconuts and mangoes in five minutes. You’d only tried to once. The rashes from the fire ant bites you’d endured had scarred you too deeply to try again.
Going up was never the issue though, it was coming back down. When you’d gotten stuck in a particularly tall tree, you bawled for fifteen minutes straight. You only scrounged the courage to get down after your parents bribed you with a pack of gummy bears, the pricier ones which were denser than the sugar-filmed pastilles you usually got.
But right then, your parents weren’t around to coax you with saccharine coos and promises. No, it was just you, the cat in your lap, and the flimsy branch creaking beneath your weight.
You weren’t—and still aren’t—sure how you managed to get up there in the first place, drunk no less. But even booze-addled you were sane enough to discern that, Holy shit, one wrong move and I’ll fucking die.
Which is when you started screaming.
Who knows how long you were up there, screaming your throat raw? Long enough that you started making empty promises to whichever god would spare you an angel first, that’s for sure. It was when you brazenly swore off alcohol forever that the angel you’d been searching for at Ieiri’s answered your prayers.
Or, well, an elderly woman in a hot pink parka did.
She must’ve thought you were a ghost, because she looked like she was about to barter what few breaths she had left to book it out of there until you shouted, “I’m stuck!”
And you thought getting booted by the cab driver was humiliating. If you’d just waited half-an-hour later you would’ve realised being ogled at by an old woman and three college kids who’d appeared out of nowhere—perhaps god’s way of spiting you for breaking your promise of sobriety barely a month after making it—as you hobbled onto a fire truck’s raised metal box was even more so.
The truck had the nerve to keep flashing those gaudy red lights the entire time too, announcing to the whole neighbourhood: Come one, come all! Feast your eyes upon the spectacle of this drunk chick with leaves in her hair and dirt scuffing her skirt as she limps out this tree! Look at her stumble! What an unseemly sight!
You considered jumping off. If this was what the universe demanded in exchange for an angel, maybe devils weren’t so bad.
And so, Toji arrived.
His face was haloed by moonlight when you first saw him, slowly rising in the fire truck’s metal compartment. But the luminescence paired with the leafery high above cast hard shadows across the planes of his face, eclipsing his angular cheekbones, the sturdy set of his jaw, the hood of his eyes; a cloak of twilight.
He looked eerily impassive, bored, almost. Was saving drunk girls from trees a common occurrence?
“Hold still,” he said, voice deep with the slightest rasp, asphalt almost. “I’m coming.”
You managed a nod and a dry swallow, hugging the cat in your lap tighter.
“I’ll need you to drop the cat first.”
Toji extended his arms and gestured for the calico. You would’ve been offended by how eagerly it abandoned your embrace in favour of his if the force of its leap hadn’t shaken the branch below your goose-pimpled thighs.
You gripped the trunk behind you, dirt and wood flecks gumming the underside of your nail. Expensive whiskey threatened to purge itself from your stomach. You strained to breathe, to think, to see, to feel, to not fall, to—Oh God. Oh shit. Holy shit, you were going to die, you were going to slip and fall and spill your brains onto the ground and—
“Hey, hey, relax. I’ve got you.”
Swish . That was the sound of red flag number one flapping in the breeze.
Toji’s voice was lower, steadier. He meant to sound reassuring. You know now that he was using his Fireman Toji voice, the one that bleeds through when Tsumiki argues with her friends or Megumi topples off his bike.
But in the moment? He sounded like your scumbag ex.
“Will you relax ?” Takashi had hissed, as if he hadn’t ripped two years from you, shackled you to his wiles, guilted you into thinking you were the problem, that you were somehow being ‘unfaithful’ by wearing heavy perfume or face-timing Geto or, god forbid, Gojo —oh the fucking horror —any later than six in the evening, when Takahashi was the one who’d stuck his dick in another woman. As if you were supposed to accept his infidelity as simply another infinitesimal flaw and toss it into the mountain of other infinitesimal flaws. As if him cheating was something you were meant to handle calmly, like you were a bitch , a psycho, for not doing so.
So instead of ‘okay’ you said, “I’m about to fall off a fuckin’ tree and crack my skull open. Don’t tell me to relax .”
And maybe if it was some other poor firefighter, they would’ve kept silent, maybe gaped, then guided you down, before driving off into the freezing night and never seeing you again. You’d forget their face, they’d forget yours and the status quo would remain unchallenged.
But it was your Toji that showed up that day, and he loves a challenge.
So he laughed. Which was the last thing you expected, but you soon learned he gave zero shits for convention.
Toji cocked his head as the sound left him, his face sloping out from the foliage’s veil, becoming fully-illuminated by the night. You remember thinking, as everyone usually does, that he was horrifyingly attractive. The kind of attractive mothers shielded their daughters from when he ambled past, that had fathers suddenly deciding to clean their guns if said daughters brought him home. The kind of attractive that the shirtless men on the covers of chick-lit books strived to be.
Basically, hot. Toji was hot.
But there was something else skulking beneath the surface-level sex appeal he exuded. Something illusory, there and there not, something you only glanced once in a lifetime yet would never forget.
Beauty. That’s it. You remember thinking he was beautiful. Not a beauty that was sprightly or awing or orthodox, but a beauty that was elusive. Because Toji isn’t beautiful in the way that inspires poets or painters or writers. No, he isn’t a beauty for the romantics. He isn’t beautiful in the way spring is with his honeysuckle perfumes and vibrant narcissus hues. He is beautiful in a way that refuses to be pinpointed, like a fleeting glimmer of moonbeams upon rippling water, the glint of a wolf’s eyes amidst the snow the moment before it strikes, the ephemeral bliss of winter air after centuries in the hearth before it chills your lungs and devours you alive.
He, to you, was hauntingly beautiful, is hauntingly beautiful.
But when he laughed, it fractured the confines of your daze. Because despite how imposingly attractive or strangely wistful his beauty was, Fushiguro Toji laughed like a dork.
It began high, raising as the scar across his lip did, then petered into an exhale through the nose, a rumble in the chest. He smiled lopsidedly, the left side of his mouth lagging behind the right as it curled. It made his right eye squintier, right canine greater bared than the left, accentuating their different lengths because the right was longer, sharper. His smile was deceitful to his appearance in the way that it made him surprisingly… boyish.
You wondered if he was single and then, whether it was appropriate to lust after a firefighter in the middle of perilous doom.
“Alright, alright, point taken. But you better c’mere before that branch really does snap, sweetheart.”
Your charmed stupor evaporated, leaving your chest arid and primed to raise red flag number two: sweetheart .
Affectionate nicknames assigned by strangers were a privilege reserved only for old people and hawkers trying to sell you gratuitous knick-knacks (though technically Toji fell within the former). But if it came from a man you barely knew? Run. Run for the hills and never return, because there was a high likelihood he’d either leave you sobbing into your pillow or filing a restraining order in a month’s time.
“I was trying to be nice,” he said when you commented on it a year later, voice muffled by your chest. “You were panicking. I thought it’d calm you down.”
You shifted to a more comfortable position on his lap. “You sounded sleazy.”
“Thought you like it when I call you sweetheart.”
“Only because we’re dating now. You were a stranger back then. All I thought was ‘I wonder how many poor girls he’s subjected this to’. And besides”—you tugged him away by the roots of his hair, eliciting a grunt, to meet your eyes—“you only call me sweetheart when you’re horny.”
Toji grinned that stupid grin of his that had you pooling at his feet. “If it makes you feel any better, you’re the only person I’ve ever called sweetheart in my life.”
“Sure, and I’m the prime minister.”
“I’m serious,” he said, leaning in, his breath hot and minty (“I thought we’re going to bed? You’ve already brushed your teeth, Toji.”) (“I know, I know, but just sit in my lap for a bit. I miss you. Haven’t seen you all day.”) to press the softest kiss to your jaw, “ sweetheart .”
It was difficult retaining your petulance. “Is that so?”
“Yeah.” The char in his voice coursed a shiver past your spine, but the appling of his cheeks betrayed his facade. “The other girls prefered doll or baby.”
“You fucking—”
Anyway, you’re getting off track. Where were you? Right, the nickname.
Unfortunately, there were no hills nearby or any running you could do without bleeding out on the sidewalk, so you settled for gingerly lowering yourself into the metal compartment instead. Toji’s arm brushed your waist when you stumbled upon your landing, the metal underfoot sobering with its frigidity.
What hit you first was the sheer warmth suffusing from him. You couldn’t resist leaning into his frame. Not to mention, the swaths of his uniform made it feel like you were nuzzling one of those huge teddy bears you’ve always wanted but could never afford, though the fabric was coarser.
This close, you could pick up on the subtle nodes of his scent: an odd amalgam of sweat, cedar, laundry detergent and… something sweet. Cologne? Maybe, but it smelled too familiar to be just that.
You inhaled again, faintly aware of the metal box’s descent. God, you knew this smell. It reminded you of something in your youth. Why did a man who looked like Toji smell like your childhood? Why did he smell so sweet? That wasn’t fair. Why was he hot and smelled great? The red flags were lowering by the second.
“You can get off now, y’know?”
Oh? Oh. Oh.
Seemed like in your desperation to pin the exact fucking flower and exact fucking brand of Toji’s musk you’d completely forgotten why he was beside you in the first place. Not even beside you anymore either; you were practically slumped against him at that point, trembling from head-to-toe, teeth chipping away from how direly they chattered.
“Right, I knew that,” you said. His arm loosened around your waist (When did that get there?) as you pushed yourself off him, brushing debris from your skirt. “I just—”
“Fell asleep?”
No, actually I was trying to decipher what cologne you use. “Yeah, I… I’m drunk.” It was the best excuse you could conjure. “Shit, should I have told you that? Are you going to arrest me?”
“Why would I do that? It’s not a crime to drink.” He arched a brow. “Assuming you’re over twenty.”
“Do I look younger than twenty to you?” He scanned your figure, shrugged. You hated how you basked in his attention like some sun-bathing lizard. “But I don’t know? Reckless endangerment? I think I almost gave that old woman a heart attack.”
“Why’re you setting yourself up?” A smile ghosted his lips. “Do you want me to arrest you?”
Was he… teasing you? Did most firefighters in the city do that? Why were you into it? It was the uniform, huh? No, enough. Stop. Remember the red flags: the relax , the nickname, the chilling beauty.
“I’m a firefighter, not a cop, sweetheart,” he continued. You grimaced. “But try not to get yourself stuck twenty feet up in the air next time you’re drunk, alright? Unless you plan on seeing me again.”
Boom. There it was. Red flag number three. A lovely little bow to cap off the onslaught of reasons why Fushiguro Toji was a man not to be trusted. The pick-up line.
Ah, you realised, it’s just him who breaches the code of conduct. Because if it were common practice for firefighters to tell cheesy pick-up lines to the people they rescued, nobody would start a fire in Shibuya again. Or would they constantly?
Did you like Toji or not?
On one hand, your heart was urging you to pursue— You know what? No point in waxing poetic. Your heart wasn’t saying shit; you were horny. Plain and simple. The horny part of you was demanding that you pursue Toji, but we all know being horny leaves no room for rational thought. Besides, the last time you’d heeded to the word of that side of you, it ended in heartbreak. You couldn’t afford another.
So you listened to your brain, and it was warning you to stay away with lights as blaringly red as the firetruck’s . You were a proud (fuck you, Takahashi) and true city girl now; no more chasing whimsies. It was time to march down whichever road logic paved, no matter how much you wanted Toji to leave you trembling.
You patted his chest and side-stepped him. “I’ll pass. Thanks.”
And that was the last time you saw him, or so you thought.
“You thought I was corny?”
Toji asks this now, sitting beside you on the park bench, a sports towel slung across his shoulders and sweat dripping past his temples.
“Hello? ‘ Unless you plan on seeing me again.’ ?” You deepen your voice to a grating baritone, hook your lips into a sordid grin, squint and recline your head to give the impression that you’re looking down on Toji when he’s taller than you.
“Why’re you making that face?” A voice pipes up from your left, interrupting you before you can elaborate on the technical aspects of Toji’s corniness.
You’ve always thought Megumi stood too rigidly for a kid, and that hasn’t changed even after the almost three years you’ve known him. The eight-year-old now stands with his palms flat against his sides and his shoulders straight beside you, dirt rasped across his knees after he fell face-first going down the slide.
“I was trying to look like your dad.”
Megumi purses his lips and his chin dimples in thought. “You did a good job.”
Toji laughs humourlessly. “You damn kid.”
It’s not long until Megumi’s whines and yells of “Stay away! You stink!” condense the Tuesday morning air as Toji chases him, weaving through swings and seesaws and people, who are either amused or irritated by the commotion. When Toji catches up and tosses Megumi over his shoulder, his son pounds his back with his little fists and nearly kicks his father’s face in protest.
“What did Megumi say this time?”
Tsumiki, despite only being nine, has completely nailed the tone of a woman jaded by life, though when she sits beside you, her feet don’t touch the ground.
The only response you can muster is a roll of your eyes and a chuff. But Tsumiki understands, she always does, and you love her dearly for it. Silently, she rests her head against your shoulder and watches her dad and brother squabble. She hums; a habit she adopted from her father.