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There are not a great deal of constants in Fushiguro Megumi’s life. He can count on Tsumiki to be responsible and Gojo to be annoying, and the shapeless black void of the early childhood he can’t remember is always with him. He has his dogs. He can count on himself to wind up wanting to wring someone’s neck by the end of most school days. But, as far as he’s concerned, that’s a few constants too many, and he’d like to get rid of at least half.
So the realization that Ieiri Shoko is becoming another such unchanging fixture in his life makes him a little uncomfortable.
It’s not that he minds her. He doesn’t make a habit of cultivating strong emotions about anyone he doesn’t absolutely loathe. Her presence, since Gojo brought her in a few years ago because he’s clueless about caring for anything less impossible to kill than himself, has not been offensive. Sometimes, when she sasses Gojo, he even thinks she’s all right. But these days she’s been around way too much for him to go on pretending that he doesn’t need to form an opinion of her.
Especially now that there’s a decent chance she’ll be in his house when he wakes up on any given weekend.
“You’re disgusting, you know that? You disgust me.”
At eight on a Saturday, Megumi wants is a hard-boiled egg. There are plenty in the refrigerator – he buys them every time Gojo gives them money for groceries – but the sound of Shoko’s voice stops him from proceeding. Making himself known now would only make Gojo do something annoying, and that’s the last thing he wants when he’s just woken up. Wait it out, he tells himself, and he can get his egg and get out in peace. Simple.
“You like me,” he can hear Gojo saying, just before Megumi hears a dull smack and he yelps. Megumi has seen variations on this exchange play out enough times to know that this means Shoko is swatting at him with a spatula. “You’re just in denial, Shocchan. You want me.”
“I want you like I want an abscessed tooth.”
“So mean,” he says blithely. “That’s okay. Denial is the first st-“
“Of grief? Sounds about right.” Megumi can hear the sucking sound of the refrigerator seal pulling apart as somebody opens it. “Because if I ever did think something that crazy-“
“It’s not crazy if-“
“Dearly beloved,” Shoko says, taking on a low-pitched, pompous affectation, “we are gathered here today to mourn the loss of Shoko’s good sense.”
“Nah, you just like teasin’ me,” Satoru shoots back. Megumi, who can hear the teasing smirk in his voice, wishes there were something in his stomach to vomit up.
There isn’t, though, because he still hasn’t gotten his egg, and now he’s starting to think he isn’t going to.
Breakfast forgotten, he turns and quietly returns to his bed, pulling the covers back up to his chin, staring at the ceiling. He’s always known that his guardian had some kind of thing for Shoko. What he hadn’t known was how obvious it would be that Shoko likes the idiotic doggedness with which he insists that thing is mutual. Thinking about that makes Megumi’s stomach feel strange.
Gojo makes his stomach feel strange, in truth. He’s never felt at ease with the way Gojo jokes or tries to show he cares. He’s never felt at ease with being cared-for at all, actually, and it’s easy to hide that behind a mask of disdain. It’s not as if Gojo doesn’t give him plenty to work with on that front. But Gojo with a girlfriend…somehow, that’s worse.
Gojo with a girlfriend Megumi doesn’t even hate is just about the most revolting thing he can imagine.
Gojo isn’t supposed to be a person. He’s a clueless, larger-than-life clown. A role, an archetype. Nothing more than that. Certainly not a twenty-two-year-old with a heart and urges who might have something as mundane as a crush on his only remaining friend. That isn’t right. It doesn’t match the image of Gojo that Megumi wants so stubbornly to maintain. It…doesn’t fit.
Shoko was supposed to hate this as much as Megumi did, and yet she only smacks him hard enough to make him yelp, and when he says stupid things, she seems to like them.
He pulls the covers all the way up over his head. This is the last thing he wanted to wind up thinking about today.
**
“Takeout’s in the fridge.”
Gojo is standing by the mirror inexplicably placed on the living room wall with a wet cloth in one hand and a razor in the other, and when Megumi walks in after school, he doesn’t even look up. Megumi wants to stop – it’s rare to see Gojo home so early on a weeknight – but doing that would look too much like showing interest, and that’s the last thing he wants or needs to do.
“Okay,” he says, dropping his backpack in the foyer and then kneeling to take out the things he needs to do his homework so he can leave the rest.
“Aren’t you gonna ask why?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“It’s because,” Gojo announces, clearly undeterred, “I’m going on a date.”
Megumi, naturally, does not latch onto the piece of information in that sentence that Gojo hopes he will. “Why don’t you feed us when you’re not going on a date?”
“Your sister has a gift in the kitchen,” he says sagely. “It would be a sin to make her waste it.”
“Or you’re just lazy.”
“Look, kid, if you want conbini food, there’s always money.”
“I don’t.”
“Aren’t you gonna ask who I’m going out with?”
“No.”
“Shoko.”
Megumi scoffs. He would hoped she would stay strong, give a firm ‘no’ instead of surrendering to his charms (what even are they, anyway?) the way everybody else does, but she’s just not afraid of Satoru, and that works severely to Megumi’s detriment.
“What, jealous?”
“Shoko is too cool for you,” Megumi informs him.”
“Megumin!”
“It’s true,” he says.
“I birthed you, Megumin,” he says, hands on his hips. “I feed you, I clothe you, I guide you-“
“You don’t do any of those things.”
With that unbeatable comeback, Megumi disappears down the hall, ignoring Gojo’s protests behind him.
He doesn’t need to know where Gojo is taking Shoko tonight. He doesn’t want to sit through the inevitable seven minutes of backstory about what tricks he’d had to pull to get Shoko to agree to go out with him. He doesn’t want to think about Gojo going out with a woman, looking shyly down at his food because he might pretend to know what he’s doing but he really doesn’t have a clue, flushing when she asks if she can kiss him. He would rather have not known at all.
Why, he finds himself wondering as he tries to focus on his Japanese homework, can Gojo not just leave him out of this entirely?
**
“I think Megumi has mommy issues.”
Shoko stops chewing mid-bite, gives him the most exhausted look he’s ever seen even on her perpetually-exhausted face, and resumes chewing after a moment, her expression not altering for a second. Damn. He’s never met a woman with such mastery of the art of disdain.
“No way,” she says, after she’s done with her last bite. “The boy who can’t remember his mom? Whoever would’ve thunk it?”
“I don’t know if he remembers, though,” Gojo says. He frowns. “I don’t even know when she died.”
“Okay, but why now?”
“Whaddaya mean?”
“Why are you thinking about that now?”
“Oh, because I told him I was going out with you tonight and he got all weird.”
“…how the hell do you take that and end up at ‘mommy issues’?”
“I’m telling you, Shocchan, he does.”
“Gojo,” she says sweetly, “he doesn’t want to hear about your date because you’re his weird big brother and that’s gross.”
“But-“
“If my little brother was going out with someone, I’d gag him if he tried to tell me about it.”
Gojo, only child as he is, cocks his head. “That’s kinda mean.”
“Siblings, Satorun. He doesn’t wanna know who you’re sucking face with.”
He pokes at his food in annoyance. “We’re not even sucking face.”
“And this,” she tells him, “is precisely why he doesn’t wanna talk to you.”
“What did I even say? It’s true.”
“Who the hell wants to hear you say stuff like ‘sucking face’?”
“You said it first!”
Shoko, once again called upon (unfairly, she thinks) to be the adult in the room, plants her palms flat against the table and sighs. “Okay, can we put a pin in the face-sucking for a sec and go back to why you think that any of this means Megumi has mommy issues?”
“Oh, ‘cause obviously he doesn’t want me to get a girlfriend because that would replace his mom.”
Gojo half-expects Shoko to say something scathing, but she doesn’t even look at him. She takes a slow sip of the broth from her udon instead, and when she’s done, she tells him, quietly, “I really don’t think that’s it.”
“But…why?”
“I know think by now I know that kid pretty well,” she sighs. “And he’s not the type to get hung up on stuff like that.”
“But-“
“If he doesn’t remember his mom, I’d bet you anything he doesn’t think about her.”
“Oh.”
“And…and I don’t think he sees me like that.”
Gojo looks at his food, suddenly feeling a little foolish. It had been a wild conclusion to jump to, but it had amused him, and he’d thought it would amuse Shoko, too. Hadn’t expected that she would so easily poke holes in it.
“Would you want him to?”
She shakes her head but smiles. “Getting a little ahead of ourselves, aren’t we?”
“Just wondered.”
“I’m twenty-two,” she says drily. “Ask me that when I’m thirty or something.”
“Eh?”
“I’m too young for my milf era,” she says around a mouthful of noodles.
Of course she would say that. Of course she would say that in just the right way to make Gojo blush furiously.
“I wasn’t even asking that,” he retorts. He knows he sounds peevish, but right now, it doesn’t really bother him.
“You kinda were.”
“Well, then it’s your fault for going out with a guy with kids,” he shoots back, puffing out his chest. “You knew what you were getting into.”
“Didn’t think I’d end up negotiating custody on our first date.”
Gojo goes quiet after that. He guesses she does have a point.
“Satorun, c’mon.”
“Huh?”
She reaches across the table and pokes his cheek, and when he looks up, she’s smiling at him. “Don’t mope.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Hasn’t anyone ever told you it’s bad manners to sulk in the company of a lady?” Shoko waggles her eyebrows. “Where was your mother?”
For about five seconds, he’s too stunned to answer, and he just blinks at her. But then it sinks in – what she’s said, but also the humor of it, the timing, and how funny Shoko can be when she actually means it and she’s not just being mean, and even though he’d like to put up an offended front and show her what’s what, he can’t help but start to laugh. He keeps it up until he’s breathless, all of the muscles in his stomach sore with exertion, and even Shoko, whose laugh has always been wheezy and small and relatively contained, can’t resist joining in.
“Touché,” he wheezes, clinking his bottle of watermelon Ramune against the rim of Shoko’s glass of water.
“Mommy issues,” she scoffs, still smiling. “You really are ridiculous.”
“I’m telling you, he does.”
“Not denying that,” she concedes, “but I don’t think that has anything to do with him not wanting to hear you wax poetic about how hot your date is.”
He rests his chin on his closed fist and smiles at her, sweet enough to rot her teeth. “You are hot.”
“Sap.”
“Realist,” he corrects her. “You are.”
She rolls her eyes, but when he takes her hand and kisses it, color rises in her cheeks, and it doesn’t really seem like she minds.
**
Megumi has always liked crows.
Most people, he’s fully aware, find them obnoxious, but he sees their finer points. They’re obscenely smart. They know how to get what they want. They can solve problems with an efficiency that Megumi thinks most of the idiots at his middle school would benefit from. But mostly, in a world that is forever changing too fast to keep up with, crows seem to be able to adapt to anything. It’s become a part of his philosophy: sometimes, if you really want to make it to next week, you have to be willing to eat trash.
Thus, after reading everything the library had on corvids in elementary school, Megumi thinks he’s absorbed everything they have to teach him, and those lessons are as applicable to the problem of his caretaker’s new girlfriend as they are to anything else.
Gojo and Shoko’s relationship hasn’t practically changed much about his life in the two years they’ve been together. She’s been hanging around the apartment more than she needed to since he was eight, so that’s no different, and Gojo has always looked at her with that stupid moony expression, so Megumi has plenty of practice at avoiding it. What’s really changed is how it feels to be at home.
Knowing that Gojo is always bringing his girlfriend around, Megumi forever feels as if he’s going to intrude on something he won’t be able to unsee. No problem, though. Be a corvid. Solve the problem. Maybe make himself a little obnoxious while he’s at it to deter the problem from returning.
He makes a point not to talk to Shoko, which bothers Shoko about as much as a single mosquito bite that barely itches. He never talked to Gojo much before anyway, so no issues there. He doesn’t engage when Tsumiki sighs over how sweet she thinks they are. (No. He refuses to entertain that notion. Just no.) He gratefully takes whatever missions Gojo sets up for him, determined to be out of the house as much as he can. When he doesn’t have work to distract him, he stays out and does whatever occurs to him until he’s too hungry or tired of people to stay out any later.
It's fine. He’s adapting. He doesn’t even need to think about the fact that Gojo’s girlfriend practically lives on their couch. Doesn’t need to think about how loudly Gojo always insists that she’s not sleeping in his bed because “Megumi-chan would get ideas,” as if Megumi has ever felt even an inkling of attraction to anyone in his life. Doesn’t need to remember coming into the kitchen to eat shredded cheese out of the bag in his boxers at four in the morning and seeing Shoko backed against the fridge, her face in Gojo’s surprisingly-gentle hands, caressing his back as she kissed him. If he plays his cards right, he doesn’t have to deal with any of it at all.
And then Tsumiki disappears, and none of that feels even a little bit important anymore.
**
Megumi is a pretty unpleasant kid. He used to make Shoko laugh, but over the years, as things have grown serious with Gojo, he’s retreated, more and more sullen by the day. It doesn’t bother her, really, but she can’t help but notice it, and she knows it means she’s supposed to stay out of his way. No issues there. She’s almost never in the mood to be snapped at.
But the Megumi she sees in the hospital the day they find Tsumiki’s unconscious body at Yasohachi Bridge is not sullen the way she’s known him to be before.
There’s no spite in his silence now. He sits with his shoulders rounded and his head bowed, not looking at anyone, not even moving. It’s probably the most emotion Shoko has ever seen him express. Even though all this time has made him harder to talk to, she still can’t help but want to say the right words.
But what does she know? In all her twenty-five years of life, she’s never once known the right thing to say when it counted.
She hadn’t known when Geto had needed it. She hadn’t known what to say to Gojo after that. They’ve been together for three years, they’ve talked about the future, they’ve thought about marriage, but she still doesn’t think she would be able to get it right if she ever had to address the Geto-shaped hole in both their hearts that they’ve taken to pretending isn’t there. And she especially doesn’t know what to say to this poor kid with no parents but a ridiculous man-child who’s really more like an irresponsible brother. Not when she, in her own way, had loved Tsumiki, too.
Shoko can heal just about anything except a broken heart. The irony of that has never been lost on her.
“Megumi,” she says, very gentle, very hesitant, and touches his shoulder.
“Unh.”
“I know you don’t want to talk, but I’m here if you do.”
He doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t try to push her hand away. She had been expecting that he might.
Tsumiki had always been the one who reassured Shoko that her brother would grow out of whatever funk made him avoid her so carefully. She’d seemed so certain of that that Shoko, no matter how much older she was or how much smarter she should’ve been, had almost bought it. Now that she sees how many things Tsumiki had been quietly holding together, it’s hard to believe.
Tsumiki had made her French toast for her twenty-third birthday. She had been twelve. Thinking about that now makes Shoko’s throat feel tight.
“If I could fix it,” she says, starting to choke up, “I hope you know I would.”
“I know.”
**
By the time Megumi is a first-year in high school, he’s thoroughly out of touch. Gojo might live in the dorms more often than not, but Shoko rarely visits him there. Long nights in the common room with Itadori and Kugisaki replace any risk there might once have been of walking in on Gojo and Shoko with the very real threat of being clobbered in the crossfire of a fight between his classmates. He doesn’t even think about it much anymore, honestly. It’s not like he’s ever in the morgue.
In mid-September, Gojo calls Megumi to his office. That is when he’s forced to.
“It probably doesn’t mean much to you anymore, but, ah, I thought I should run it by you,” he finishes, and his eyes are full of hope. Megumi can’t remember the last time he looked like that. It all makes him feel vaguely sick the way strong, unfamiliar emotions always do, but he nods his assent. Far be it from him to be needlessly cruel.
Well, maybe once he would’ve been, but these days he hasn’t had the heart for it. Tsumiki took too much of that burning vitriol with her when she fell asleep. “Okay,” he says weakly.
It gets easier with more distance not to be so frightened by the idea that Gojo is human, has a heart, might want to use it. He couldn’t put that into words if he tried, but the privacy of his dorm lets him keep Gojo at arm’s length more than he could before, and it’s less awkward that way, less fraught. It is probably, upon reflection, the only way he’s managed to get on with Gojo without the buffer of Tsumiki between them.
Otherwise the way that Gojo cares for people – like a cannonball crashing through his bedroom ceiling – would be more than Megumi could carry.
Gojo clasps his hand and gives him a look full of gratitude that Megumi is sure he neither needs nor deserves. He tries not to think about it, and maybe that is why it’s Kugisaki who notices the ring on Shoko’s finger first.
Megumi could tell her who put it there – maybe he should. She’s his friend. Friends, according to Kugisaki Nobara, never withhold relevant gossip. He doesn’t, though; Gojo will do that. Later. He’s sure of it. For now he can pretend he neither knows anything nor cares.
It’s better that way.
**
It’s not really much of a ceremony. Back when they were first together and Gojo had told her he was going to marry her and thought he meant it, he had been picturing something much sooner and much more grand. Now they’re twenty-eight, though, not twenty-three, and the only ceremony they observe is the signing of a license. No fuss, no guests. He doesn’t bother to inform his clan, scattered and ineffectual as they are. She tells her family but there’s nothing to visit for. It’s…uncomplicated, spur-of-the-moment. Something is coming. They have to do this first.
There won’t be a honeymoon or any kind of party, but when they leave city hall, she pulls her husband into an alleyway and looks up at him and then stands on her toes to kiss him.
He leans back so that her feet don’t touch the ground and laughs, stifling her squeal of surprise with his mouth. This Shoko reminds him a little of the girl she was when they met, when all she was to him was the background noise in his dealings with the classmate he liked better. He was stupid for that, he thinks, ignoring the one who meant it when she said she’d stay by his side.
She really did mean that.
He sets her feet back on the ground, but only barely, and he hugs her to his chest like a favorite pillow. She smells like lavender and formaldehyde and cleaning supplies. He thinks that smell will always make him the happiest that he has ever been.
“Shocchan,” he whispers, “there’s a hotel across the street.”
She halfheartedly thumps his arm. “We’re on our lunch breaks, dumbass.”
“I can do what I want.”
“I can’t.”
“You’re my wife. I can give you my do-what-I-want powers if I want to.”
“Don’t think that’s how it works.”
“Is too.”
She lets go, grips his arms, looks up at him.
“Satorun,” she says, shaking him a little, “we need to head back.”
**
For nineteen days in November, Shoko watches over the injured, finds space in the overcrowded morgue for the less-fortunate, worries the ring on her finger. News is scarce, and it only really starts to come in in the final days, but when it does, it’s in a torrent. Yuuta is the one to tell her, probably chosen for his gentle delivery. She notices him noticing her fidgeting with her ring.
“Ieiri-sensei, we’re gonna get him back.”
“I know.”
That isn’t what she’s worried about.
**
She still smells like formaldehyde, but no longer like lavender, and by the time Gojo reaches her, he has no strength left to go on putting up a cavalier front.
“Satorun,” she murmurs, holding up half his sagging weight. “Hi.”
He drapes himself over her like a tablecloth abandoned outside and heavy with rainwater, and when she touches his shoulder, she can feel it trembling beneath her hand. She wraps him as tightly as her thin arms can manage and knows exactly what he can’t bring himself to say.
“We’re gonna get him back.”
She hears his breath catch before she feels the first of his tears dampening the back of her shirt. So she’d been right, then, that Megumi, among all, of the other things he’d had to grieve, had been first and foremost.
Of course he had.
“Say that again, Shocchan.”
“We’re gonna get him back,” she repeats, cradling his head to her chest, and then presses a gentle kiss to the crown of his head. “I know we are.”