Chapter Text
There's something about the air on nights like these, when he misses certain people in unfathomable ways. Shadows dance across the sidewalk at his feet, and he breathes cold, fresh oxygen with concentrated inhales. His nostrils flare, the life-bearing element cycles through, and then he breathes out. It could be argued that Megumi has taken just shy of one hundred and sixty million breaths in his fragile lifetime. But the air is still kind to him, the scent of rain a balm to soothe his tired nerves and ease the headache that clouds his vision. He feels better out here, minutely. Less suppressed.
Streetlights pair well with the crisp kick of the leaves beneath his feet and the crack of old branches in a vaguely frigid early autumn. Megumi wears a long black overcoat. The wool chafes against his skin.
He closes his eyes and pictures himself somewhere else. Gojo had taken him to New York, once, when he was very young. It had been autumn then, too. Megumi envisions himself on a brownstone-lined street, then blinks, and he's back to the lower suburbs of Tokyo, walking with an aimless sort of purpose. He knows exactly where he's going. He knows exactly what he'll find there. What will happen to him.
Maybe a walk in the night air would be enough to help, if he hadn’t already made up his mind.
Shoko’s apartment is a six-minute walk from the nearest train station. Megumi had gotten off close to narrow his options, because contrary to what the others think, he isn’t looking to get himself killed. He needs to keep the sensation of a one-track mind from veering off the pre-set path, the safest way to make a decision, one that he’s more or less negotiated with Shoko herself. She has dropped the slightest hints to remind him she has the means to take care of him. And god knows she’s not going to turn him away, no matter what the outcome. He got off at the closest stop so he couldn’t chicken out and turn to the nearest party instead, the nearest bar.
Besides, he tends to think too much of her, walking through the night. Indulging himself in his memories.
Megumi finds himself surprisingly clearheaded upon reaching Shoko’s front door. The noise dies down as the bell rings, and he greets her weary appearance without any unnecessary preamble. She’ll probably hate him for this less if he just cuts to the chase.
“I need help,” he says bluntly.
A scoff stutters in Shoko’s throat. The characteristic cigarette between her lips bobs with the twist of her lips into a frown, the tip glowing softly in the dim light. She dons a lavender sweatshirt over a pair of denim shorts and probably expected to spend a quiet night in alone with her work. Very slowly, methodically, she crosses her arms and raises one eyebrow. “Help?” she mumbles around the cigarette. “Or…?”
Megumi only feels a little bad about bothering her. The drive has spread throughout his body, dispersed and more subtle, but as present as ever. Just because he’s calmed down and gotten it to stop feeling like a knife in his chest doesn’t mean the feeling’s disappeared. He takes one more breath of cool air, the last measured action he’ll take for a while. “I need to get high.”
For a minute and a half, she stares at him with dead, unreadable eyes.
“Please don’t tell Yuuta.” Although he knows her well enough to know which gears are turning in her head, and knows she’s not plotting to rat him out, he feels the need to beg just a little, lay himself bare in front of her to try to plead his case and swear by attitude alone that he can be responsible. “Or Gojo.”
He’s being responsible by coming to someone he trusts at all. She knows she can’t throw him out, or he’ll wind up hurting himself.
With a long, dramatic exhale of smoke, Shoko finally rolls her eyes, and turns over one shoulder, marching into the depths of the apartment and leaving the door wide open behind her. Megumi takes the acceptance for what it is and follows. He closes the door quietly and removes his shoes in the entryway.
Shoko bangs around in the kitchen while Megumi creeps over to the couch. He sits himself down and watches her over the back, one arm slung overtop with his chin resting in the crook of his elbow. Her apartment is quaint, maybe even cramped, but she never complains, used to spending all her time at the desk in her bedroom. She’s a mere six steps away from him in her hunt for cooking ingredients, pots and pans, utensils. She throws something on the stove and moves two steps to the right to set the tiny dining table.
Megumi frowns, tracking her movements with careful eyes. “What are you doing?”
“If I’m going to let you engage in risky behaviours, we’re doing it on my terms.” She’s put out her cigarette, he notices. At least put it down somewhere. “When was the last time you ate?”
Sizzling food in the pan on the stove covers up the lapse in conversation. Megumi considers it, glances away from her on purpose to stare at a corner of the table instead, and can’t come up with a concrete answer. “This morning,” he hums in lieu of nothing. It tastes like a lie, and Shoko can probably tell.
This morning, he woke up and brushed his teeth and got dressed, laid facedown on his bed for twenty minutes, avoided people at all costs on the train, and barely scraped through his classes. He knew from the moment he woke that it wouldn’t be a good day. If he’s worn ragged enough to relapse, there’s unquestionably no room for self-maintenance. He’s lucky he had the mental faculties to make it this far.
“Satoru would kill me if I let you get high before making sure you had a proper dinner first.” Shoko takes a few bowls out of the cupboard and fills up the largest two with whatever’s in the pan. The food is ready quickly, and she finishes setting everything out on the table, then turns to beckon him over. “Come on. We can both do something to take care of ourselves for once.”
Slowly, Megumi peels himself off of the couch. He had plopped down half expecting to stay there all night. Irritation thrums in his chest, and he hesitates, his body putting up a fight, but he has to move. Shoko’s too stubborn for him to try to argue.
At the table, a bowl of simple hot soba with vegetables awaits him, and he sits down, goes through the motions of thanking some arbitrary concept for the meal he doesn’t want to eat and positions his chopsticks between his fingers. The soba doesn’t taste like anything. The vegetables taste ever so slightly of the soy sauce he dips them in. There’s a chance Shoko will just make him keep completing minute tasks that feel like walking through hell before she allows him to have a pill. Maybe she doesn’t even have any in the house right now. But a long time ago, he formed a memory of being fucked out on unadulterated physical agony and lying in a hospital bed while she whispered to the only person who had ever loved him, “I’ll keep some on hand, just in case.” Shoko never gets rid of anything. He doubts she’d even flush a container of pills in an emergency. It’s against her broken moral code.
Megumi would obey anything she tells him to do, he thinks. He’ll eat every last bite of soba. He’ll take a shower. He doesn’t have it in him to risk an evening of lying on the couch buried beneath the weight of all his burdens; the monotony of pretending he can get through daily life is at least something of a distraction. He’ll let his limbs remain on fire while he walks through her whims until she’s ready to help him.
Shoko picks at her own food, but every time Megumi glances up at her, she shovels a whole clump of noodles into her mouth. It’s a fair bet to guess she’s turning over the past few hours of research in her mind. Yet, she still has the capacity to question him, after a few minutes of silence. Her tone is gentle, though prodding. “Anything in particular happen today?”
To set him off, she means. Megumi offers a slow shrug up and down. “Unnecessarily shitty day at the end of an unnecessarily shitty week,” he mutters, stabbing at a piece of cabbage and failing twice to pick it up. “Nothing happened.”
“Nothing at all?”
On Saturday, a friend had invited him out and he had to politely decline. On Tuesday, sitting near him in the library was a girl who had the same hairstyle as someone he didn’t want to think about. He always feels sicker on Tuesdays.
“My leg kind of hurts,” he fibs. Every tiny mishap manifests as a stabbing pain through every muscle anyway. He ignores Shoko’s cold eyes on his forehead and eats another piece of cabbage.
“I understand you don’t want me to tell Yuuta,” Shoko says, “but I think you should.”
Megumi squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head. He can picture the clear-cut look of disappointment, the small frown, the helpless outstretched hands. The situation they’re in is so much heavier than having dinner in Shoko’s cheap one-bedroom apartment can give credit to.
Megumi cleans his plate and drinks a full glass of water. It is after this that Shoko fixes him with a strong look across the table, filled with contemplation and curiosity and a tinge of what could be pity, but isn’t, because Shoko Ieiri has never felt pity in her life. She tears him open and stitches him back together in the same breath. The decision is not a visible one. Maybe she made it a long time ago.
“Go sit on the couch and pick a movie to watch,” she tells him softly, and it is here that Megumi starts to break.
Tears well up in his eyes and threaten to spill. His breath starts to come in sharp gasps, and an unbearable chill radiates through his body, first in his hands, then his shaking arms and trembling torso. He shouldn’t be here, but he is. He’s too aware of the weight of the remote control in his hand as he settles himself back down on the couch, and the headache returns with a swift kick to his temples as a result of his scrunched forehead. He turns on the TV and picks the first movie that comes on. He just needs background noise. Something to draw his attention.
Shoko joins him with her hand cupped near her stomach and crouches down right in front of him. She tracks every subtle quiver of his body, places a hand on his thigh, and rubs circles that she knows won’t soothe him. For a minute, she guards the pill and doesn’t even let him see it, as if to run one final test on his psyche by sight alone.
Megumi doesn’t say please, but it’s a near thing.
A world opens up between them in which they aren’t doing what they’re doing, where every detail is different, and the real and raw circumstances don’t even have the space to exist. Shoko looks at him, and Megumi looks back, and he’s six years old again and looking up at a very tired older version of himself and wondering with his poor heart what the fuck went wrong. Shoko’s eyes are lined with dark circles. Her lips are permanently chapped. There is no other world; this is the one they’re living in.
“I need you to understand,” she begins, more bitter than she has addressed him at every other point tonight up until this, “that this cannot be a regular thing. I will feed you, I will give you a place to sleep, I will even clothe your twenty-one-year-old ass or take you to appointments or help you with your homework if that’s what you need to get by, but I will not let you destroy yourself all over again because of me. Am I clear?”
Megumi clenches his fists around empty air and wishes he could be anywhere else. This is the blow he’d been waiting for. “Yes.”
Her decision seems to hit her in that moment. She heaves out another sigh and curls in on herself, rests her head on her knees, and composes herself before she carries on. She sounds all the more fatigued when she slides one hand into place on his jaw. “Open.”
Even now, he doesn’t catch so much as a glimpse of the pill. He lets his mouth fall open obediently and watches her other hand move, and then it’s just a matter of her fingers rubbing past his lips and teeth and over his tongue until the pill settles at the back of his mouth. Shoko’s fingers are warm in their smooth glide from the back of his mouth to the front, running once more over the velvet patch of his tongue. She removes her hand just long enough for him to swallow, a completely unceremonious action. He swallowed fifty times while eating his soba. But this is different, and it sends a shiver through his whole body; swallowing soba couldn’t be equivalented to taking the drug he is under strict orders not to take. All he sees is the stained ceiling tiles. All he tastes is soy sauce.
He must lose himself for a second too long, because Shoko is tugging at his bottom lip again, frustration in her tone when she has to instruct him a second time to open his mouth. And she knows she doesn’t have to—he doesn’t have the strength to plan on hiding it to save for later.
Still, Megumi sits patiently and lets her prod around his tongue, slip her finger into the pocket of his cheeks and around his gums. He blinks away the tears. His body gives up some of its struggle. Her fingers are dry, and it’s uncomfortable, and he’s ready to not care anymore.
In the wake of her warmth around his face, the cold seeps in again. He might as well be wandering the streets like he could have instead of this, and he wouldn’t have to take her bitterness, or put up with her rules, or let her see him crumbled and broken down at what is very near to his absolute worst. Shoko has seen him in every state, and he still doesn’t want her to see him with her own fingers in his mouth as she checks to make sure he actually swallowed the oxycodone she’s breaking everyone’s trust by giving him.
“I’m getting you a blanket, pillow, and a glass of water, and you’re going to stay right here the entire night, understand?” Shoko rises and leaves him where he is, and Megumi can’t complain. This is exactly where he expected to spend both the high and the comedown.
Now that it’s done, he’s settled on the couch and busy sinking into it, and there’s nothing for him to do but wait for the oxy to take effect, he doesn’t bother tracking where Shoko is anymore. He doesn’t pay attention to how long she’s gone, or how often she comes back. At some point, she forces him to drink some of his water, then retreats completely, and he’s left to hug his pillow, warm himself with the blanket, and turn his attention to the television.
He’s seen this film before. He realises it a few minutes in without much fanfare; he recognise the faces of the actors, the meandering music. A greyscale city takes up the screen most of the time. Or maybe that’s time moving like glass through his fingers, freezing on a singular frame, a captured still of two characters looking at each other like they’re the only light in all the world.
It’s in Korean. Megumi’s gaze darts to the subtitles, then back to their shining faces. He chews on the inside of his cheek.
He’s seen this film before, and it carries him to a place he thinks might be where the theme lives, of repeating and living over and over. But that sounds like a chore, he thinks, and he would tire of it easily, if he had to move through life just looking for the same person again and again. He’s not even sure if he would look for the people who love him now, if he got another chance. He’s already burdening Shoko, and the others if they find out—Maki’s probably going to tear his head off when she finds out—and it becomes more definitive as the seconds tick by, a clock somewhere to his left inside his head and down, that they will find out. Everyone will. Everyone knows.
Cold. He feels cold, and he wraps the blanket tighter around his shoulders. He rubs the skin over his sternum through his shirt. He reaches over and manoeuvres his hand very carefully around the glass of water, and lifts it up to sip from. He puts it down, and the glass disappears. The last time he lifts his hand. The last.
Smoke pools in a pair of lungs that aren’t his, and Megumi loses track of the movie. He lost something else, too, he remembers, but it forgets him again, and he presses his cheek into the pillow and doesn’t drink his water and his tears are sticky. He’s not crying anymore. The imaginary pain in his made-up leg doesn’t hurt anymore. Megumi would laugh if he could find the breath, or the smoke, but there’s no punchline anymore.
It takes him as gently as a prayer, and he’s gone.
“The girl you remember doesn’t exist here,” someone half-familar says halfway.
Numbness, in Megumi’s experience, starts in the eyes and works its way through his head, massaging the feeling out of every cell as it goes. The muscles in his jaw lose their tension, and his vision blurs. There’s more to it than just the physicality, and his mind is often quick to go, to float off where softness swallows him and breathing is bliss and meaningless, night has no name, no one will make him stay, and he can let go. He’s safe in this space he’s so carefully carved out for himself over time and lifetimes and the repetitive roll of the film.
“You awake?” someone asks him, not him. No one’s there beside him. Megumi’s eyes slip closed. He sinks into the pillow, drooling a little, just gone, his hands heavy and chest heavy and head so heavy he can’t hold it upright. If she were here, would she scold him? Tuck him in?
She’s here, the closest she ever will be, and she puts an arm around his shoulders and kisses his unruly hair.
The dreams start with the end of whatever sound is in the background and fog up his absent mind. They always start so slowly, flashes between blinks he isn’t taking, and it takes him a little while to realise they’re playing. But they’re playing now, and the car is green and rumbling, the sky as bright as it ever was. Megumi closes his eyes. They were never open. He blinks six times. It’s a six minute drive.
“I can’t always be here to pick you up when you’re in trouble.”
She comes into focus, her gaze fixed sharply on the road, and the bite in her tone is the sort Megumi hates hearing from her. He’s had to put up with it all night, from the front door of the library to the desk all his belongings laid crowded atop of. Her hair is tied in the loosest bun it’s ever been in.
“I already told you,” he snaps back, “I’m not in trouble. I’m allowed to choose the things that are important to me, and this is it.”
“It shouldn’t be.” She takes one hand off the wheel to chew at her nails. Blood lines the cracks in her skin, he notices; she must have been more anxious than angry when he called, and now it’s just carrying over like it does. “I don’t know how many times I have to drill it into your head that you are the most important thing in your life. You need to be your own priority.”
Megumi scoffs and turns away, leans his head against the icy cold window, and watches the cars flying by in the opposite direction with headlights glaring. “You’re not my mother.”
“Megumi—” The car swerves around a piece of cardboard in the road, and she curses under her breath. Ahead, the streetlights curve towards the sky where a high bridge takes over their route. “Megumi Fushiguro, don’t even start with me. It’s almost three in the morning, you’re obviously exhausted, and I don’t want to argue—”
Rooms are red inside the dreams, and his eyes are red, and Megumi takes it like an angel, he whispers in his ear. Warm lips trail down the curve of his neck, and he couldn’t fight back even if he wanted to. It’s not the first time, but he knows it isn’t the last, not with the plastic baggie fisted in his softened hand and the fingers sliding a pill onto his tongue, willingly, pliantly. He’d let him do it again. It’ll happen again. The last time, he was alone in his room, and this is so much better, with nothing weighing on him but a burning hot body and two hands that feel like four pinning his wrists, exploring his thighs, tickling his ribcage. Megumi’s breaths are slow like he’s asleep, and he can’t open his eyes. It’ll happen again.
He shares drinks with someone with two faces, one on the front where it belongs and one he cups in his hands at the bottom of a drink. They have the same hair, she and her and the years in between, and he feels sick to his stomach and empty only for a little while. She makes him feel whole.
There was someone else. Megumi can’t remember.
You can stand at a gravestone for years, and it never gets any older, the grief.
His eyes are open, and he’s pretty sure this isn’t the same movie he was watching an hour ago, but his skin itches, and it wakes him. Megumi leans back on the sofa and blinks into another world, then back out again. He’s six years old and screaming. Satoru rubs his back while he vomits into the toilet. His fingers crawl slowly up his wrist to try to suppress it. Sleeping doesn’t work anymore, but at least he can’t feel pain.
Shoko comes back. Incomprehensible when, how long, she crouches in front of him like when she slipped her warm fingers into his mouth and coaxed him to swallow the thing that someone told him that night will kill him, eventually. He doesn’t know what that means, but it seems impossible here, with his nails in his skin and nothing wrong.
“It’s me,” she says, and he peels his eyes shut and squints at her.
“Hey,” he says, maybe.
In one swift motion, Shoko removes his hand from his wrist and cups his fist between her palms, then presses to fingers to his pulse point. Her grey eyes never leave him. Her eyes are green. Her eyes are brown, somewhere else. “How are you feeling?”
Megumi hums something inaudible, a huff of oxygen and a slouch of his spine. His eyes droop closed again. “Quiet,” he thinks he might murmur.
Shoko seems to deem his pulse tolerable, because she removes one hand to move it to his thigh, rubbing it up and down in soothing loops. A cold kiss dabs at the inside of his wrist. “Are you sleepy?”
An aborted nod makes him dizzy, and Megumi winds up with his chin tucked to his chest. He has to forcibly lift his head up again, and in the meantime, his gaze catches on something the drugs took away from him. He lifts his hand, the one Shoko isn’t holding, and studies it closely.
Beads of red blossom on his fingertips. They just sit there, glistening, not growing, not rolling. He has the strangest temptation to lick them off and taste his own skin and cells. “I’m bleeding.”
“You are.” Shoko finished whatever she’s doing, gliding her hand inside his wrist and taking the itch away with her cool touch and clever tricks. She always knows what’s best for him, even if she doesn’t know what’s best for herself, and she’s gentle when other people think she can’t be, and she spreads some sort of lotion or ointment on his skin and lowers his tired hand into his lap. “All done,” she declares with a short inhale through her gritted teeth. “I think you should lie down for a while, Megumi. Come on.”
He’s in his bed, until he isn’t. The dreams start again the second he closes his eyes. He opens them again and shakes his head, gets dizzy, starts over. Shoko’s hand comes to rest on his shoulder and guides him down, down, and it’s still just the couch, and she still smells like the smoke in his lungs and the blood that was always his, and there is no bridge and no bed and no toilet and no back to run a hand over. His tiny hands clutch the fur of a dog. He’s asleep before he’s fully horizontal.
He wakes up, not really, and whines. “Auntie.” His head is a ghost. His mind is not his friend. Nothing matters anymore.
Shoko tucks the blanket around him, but she freezes at the sound of his childlike voice and retreats slightly, as though she is afraid to touch him. “What?” she asks, startled, soft.
Megumi tucks his face into the crook of his elbow. “Love you,” he sighs.
Silence creeps into the room. Soba is warm in his stomach, and he’s so far gone he doesn’t know past from present. Sound still echoes from the television set. It doesn’t hurt. His chest and wrists are torn open and bleeding, and he feels no pain. He marvels at it every time.
“Sleep it off, buddy,” Shoko finally responds. She’s louder than the movies and kinder than a friend. She’s never done anything to show him love. She loves him in everything she does. “You’re going straight home first thing in the morning.”
Megumi doesn’t drink his water, but he closes his eyes and barely dreams. It would have set in faster sooner without dinner to fill him up. Shoko leaves his side, and the apartment is safe.
For a minute, Tsumiki isn’t even dead.
✧✧✧
The worst part about coming down, without question, is that everything aches, badly. It’s not unlike the pains he gets during a storm, with strong discomfort building behind his eyes and in every muscle the symptoms dare to touch. Even worse is the fact that he skipped breakfast, which usually helps at least a little, in favour of bending over the toilet and begging his stomach to stop threatening to crawl out of his throat. He didn’t throw up at all, sitting there in the sticky bathroom with the lights off, but his body still feels like he did. He feels like he got hit by a truck.
Shoko ended up calling Yuuta despite Megumi’s request not to, which is humiliating in its own right. He knew she would, but it still crept beneath his skin in an uneasy way when the first thing he could process upon waking up was Shoko on the phone explaining the situation. The next thing he knew, Yuuta was standing over him, fingers curled into his hair.
“Hi,” Yuuta said with a tender smile.
Megumi struggled to look at him through his heavy eyes, when Yuuta was so high up. The first words out of his mouth were, “I missed you.”
Yuuta offers a laugh, strained as it is, leans down to kiss him on the shoulder, and helps him to his feet. “I missed you too, bud. Wanna go home now?”
The drive back to their apartment is nearly electric. Tension crackles in the air now that Megumi is awake and at least partially alert. He threads his arms around his stomach and holds himself, grits his teeth every five minutes, and tries not to snap at the red lights Yuuta almost runs through. He’s quiet. They both are, on a regular basis, but not like this.
They get into the garage and to their designated spot for the one slightly rundown, much loved car they have before either of them dare say a word to each other. Megumi can sense without looking at him that Yuuta isn’t willing to be as gentle as he was earlier, and he wonders how early Shoko called home, and whether Yuuta and Toge had to stay up all night worrying their heads off about him.
“You were supposed to be home by ten,” Yuuta mumbles in a broken voice, which tells him enough.
Megumi counts the number of times his heartbeat richochets around his empty chest before Yuuta speaks again.
“You know, I really want you to feel like you can talk to me—”
“I have shit to do,” Megumi cuts in, louder than he means to, bowling right over his sentence. He tugs his coat tighter around himself and shoulders the door open. He steps out of the car, and his knees almost give out then and there, red hot pain radiating all the way up to his hip and down to his ankle. He grits his teeth again, harder, and slams the door behind him, staggers on his way, barely makes it to the elevator. His head spins. He doesn’t notice if Yuuta follows right away.
It’s getting worse. He feels it in his short ride up the elevator, and on the crisp air of the balcony to get to their door. His hands shake as he fumbles with the key. Everything hurts, and he just wants it to stop, but he feels it in the marrow of his bones—that this time, he’s done something even worse than before. This isn’t like last time, or the first time he disappeared into an underground club and didn’t come out until it closed, and someone dragged his sorry ass to a home that wasn’t his.
This isn’t like anything. Megumi hangs his coat on the hook just inside. The smell of eggs wafts from the kitchen, and he finds Toge there, cooking a second breakfast he still won’t eat. Megumi stalks past and pretends he doesn’t see Toge’s frantic wave in a desperate attempt to get his attention. He probably can’t leave the stove for more than a few moments.
All Megumi wants to do is sleep, and on cue, a yawn splits his mouth open like Shoko parted his lips, but it hurts. It hurts in his skull, and his heart, and his hands. It hurts in the base of his throat to swallow back the urge to cry.
Untouched homework sits buried in the backpack against the wall, slumped in one corner of the kitchen. Megumi makes it down the hall and crashes into the room he shares with Yuuta, crashes face-first into his bed, and hates himself, deeply, unforgivingly.
He shouldn’t ignore his friends. He shouldn’t have showed up at Shoko’s. He shouldn’t feel so cold through every muscle in his body, but que sera, sera. He was doing so well. It had been months.
He’s too upset to notice it, rooted in the piece of him that wants it all to be over in the way it never will be. His head hurts. His hands shake. His tongue feels heavy in his mouth, and he can’t breathe.
Megumi doesn’t know it yet, but last night was, for all intents and purposes, the beginning of the long, broken end.