Chapter Text
When Megumi is born, Toji knows as soon as he holds his silent son in his arms that Megumi was exactly like him. Someone who lacked cursed energy completely. It was often called Heavenly Restriction, it was something that everyone had just a little bit of unless they were a curse but in the extremely rare cases like Toji and now his son, they only had Heavenly Restrictions. There was no cursed energy and while that may seem like a blessing, in reality it was a curse.
The baby, his baby, had flushed red skin but a calm face. A few wisps of black stuck to the baby’s head and two large, green eyes twinkled with mirth. It was ugly, all newborn babies were ugly. Naoya had been a pretty toddler with pudgy cheeks and a penance for being a shit head but cute nontheless. His son was ugly with his red skin and eyes just as green as his own. A fat ball of flesh that Toji could dash at a wall or break with his forefinger and thumb alone.
“We need to check the baby's lungs, sir. Please hand him to me.”
A nurse smiled kindly at him, Toji held him out but as the nurse touched his skin, the brat wrapped a pudgy hand around Toji’s thumb and screeched his lungs out. The nurse’s eyes widened briefly before she chuckled and pushed the babe closer into Toji’s arms.
“Well, it seems like your son’s lungs are fine sir. He has a good set on him.”
Toji winced and pushed his finger into the baby’s face. To his utter shock, the baby quietens down and lets out little huffs of air as the man cradles his son close.
Toji slowly crouched down, perhaps in fear that he’d drop this thing in his arms. It would die if he did that, surely it would die and maybe that would be a blessing instead of letting the cursed thing live a life like his. He wasn’t ready for a child, he knew he would be a shit father and though his wife had tried to comfort him once she found out about his worries, he knew he would be shit.
Yet, as he curled around his son, his baby, the little life he’d helped create, he couldn’t help but cry. A life for a life, a wife for a son. He’d been pushed out the room mere seconds after she’d started flatlining but even as he stood outside as they tried to resuscitate her, he’d heard her dying whispers.
“ Toji the baby…oh the baby…my baby…Toji our baby… ”
Then maybe twenty minutes after, twenty minutes in silence as he tried to engrane her heartbeat, her breath, her touch into his brain, he’d heard a smaller heartbeat, so gentle, as delicate as the beat of a moth’s hummingbird-fast wings. It sounded like hers, that gentle bump bump bump-bump bump bump bump-bump bump bump of atrial fibrillation.
Oh - oh how cruel could the heavens be? Giving his son the same heartbeat as his wife but only after having taken hers away and cursing Toji with the ability to hear it. It hurt just as much as it calmed him down, that heartbeat he’d gotten to know so intimately, it’s every fluctuation, it’s every palpitation. Every skipped beat, every additional beat, he’d been the cause of it once but now he could only watch and listen and pray that this wretched heartbeat would keep beating for his son, for himself, for his wife.
For now though, perhaps he could find a gentleness in this boy, this blessing of his own design. Megumi, he thinks. His Megumi, his darling Megumi. His son. His life. His everything.
So he took his wife’s effects with little emotion. Nurses gave their condolences but he couldn’t hear them, there was static in his ears as he listened to the gentle bump bump bump-bump bump of his son’s heart.
Minutes, hours and quite possibly days passed by in a blur. He couldn’t tell how long he’d been there, watching his son in the baby room through the glass window. His clean shaven face had turned into a five o’clock shadow which had turned into real proper stubble by the time the nurses seemed to take pity of him and had packed up the baby items and sent him on his way with his son in his arms.
He stood at the counter, staring at the birth certificate. Fushiguro Toji and Fushiguro Tomi stared back at him. Toji…Tomi…perhaps a name beginning with T to keep the tradition? He scoffed. No, his son was a blessing. He couldn’t just half arse this shit. Not when his son was all he had right now.
Blessing. Yeah, that sounded good.
伏黒恵
Fushiguro Megumi
And so it was. His son’s name, written in the delicate cursive that the Zen’in clan had made sure to beat into him when he was a child. A legal binding document, as strong as a binding vow.
“Megumi….”
He murmured at the child in his arms. The perfectly healthy child. He leant down to press a kiss as soft as a butterfly’s wings against his sleeping son’s forehead.
“My Megumi.”