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December 2010
It’s 10 p.m on a Friday, and Satoru Gojo is exhausted.
Realistically, Satoru understands why he is in such high demand. Curses come and go along with human emotions, but sorcerers don’t, both due to their rarity and the risks involved in their job. Naturally, missions too risky or too urgent fall down on his shoulders. And Satoru can get over them just fine. He is strong enough to get them done without problem, quick enough to get rid of them in due time.
(‘Can’t we just let him handle everything, at this point?’)
So he gets it, really he does. Except his body does not. These last few weeks he’s been summoned in about every corner of not only Japan, but also the world, going from Tokyo to Stockholm, all the way to Brasilia. His muscles ache when he lands back on the tech, the soreness all too familiar by now, a friend he keeps close to his heart.
He wants to sleep more than he needs to, RCT might keep his brain from frying but it does not prevent his thought to loop on to no ends, any moment deprived of fighting or moving makes him wander to places in his mind he doesn’t want to go back to. Like Riko Amanai. Like Toji.
He wants to rest, if for a second. But more than that, he needs to get cleaned.
Wordlessly, he drags himself to the shower, letting the hot water wash away the grime and the curse blood he’s drenched in, the heat making him sleepier. Most of his stuff is at the school, his old apartment almost vacant due to the little time he gets to spend there. He knows that there are warm pajamas and a bed waiting for him in here. Except he does not want to stay here, he realises.
The school is too silent. There might be some students in their own rooms, Satoru is not too familiar with them, though he’d want to be a teacher in some years, but they must be sleeping by now. The air feels still, too heavy, silently carrying the ghosts of the past along with the smell of Amanai’s blood.
Somehow, Tokyo itself feels too still. It’s an ever moving city that barely sleeps, and yet it’s so foreign to him at the moment, it might even be a ghost city. He wishes he could see Shoko, annoy her a bit, complain in her living room, but he knows her to be in Kyoto due to a need for her healing capacities.
Tokyo is so big, and yet it feels like a cage.
It’s not so much on accident that he finds himself in front of the Fushiguros apartment half an hour later, dressed in cleaner clothes, the weight on his chest still so heavy. He’ll check on the kids, he thinks, he hasn’t been there in a while. See if they’re still kicking.
“It’s me, your dear dear Satoru Gojo,” he sing-songs after knocking when he hears the sound of Tsumiki dragging a stool by the door. She is still too small to reach the peephole on her own.
“Oh, hi Gojo-san,” Tsumiki answers politely as she opens the door.
She is dressed in a doraemon pajama set, her ponytail sideways, hair sticking out from the tie. Suddenly, Satoru feels very stupid—the kids were probably sleeping at that time of the night.
“Sorry, did I wake you up?”
“No, no, I was still up,” she answers as she moves aside, making room for him to enter.
He should probably comment on the fact that she wasn’t sleeping yet, children her age need to rest early, surely. It would be particularly hypocritical of him to do so, however, considering the time at which he knocked on their door. Besides, what right does he have parenting kids who had to raise themselves for the better part of their lives?
He makes his way inside, the warmth of the house hitting him immediately. He had made sure the thermostat was always programmed correctly as the kids didn’t have the best grasp of these things. Not like they had heating at their old place, anyways.
He follows Tsumiki to the living room, where the coffee table is covered in papers and crayons of varying colors, each neatly and carefully displayed. He had brought the material to them some time after they had met, around the same time where he made them move out from the filth their parents had left them to. The kids had always shied away from asking anything from him, so Satoru had decided to take matters into his hands and buy them about anything that kids their age might need. Granted, he didn’t have the best example of a classic childhood, so he might have been a bit over the top, but it was the best he could offer.
“Oh, you’re a little artist,” he comments.
Tsumiki’s face reddens.
“Oh, it’s just—uh, it’s just drawings,” she offers.
Satoru laughs a little, “It’s fine it’s fine, I won’t peek at it! Artists tend to be protective of these things, I respect that!”
She relaxes a little, tiptoeing around. She’s grown a bit taller since they had met, looks much healthier. It’s a bit refreshing to see her free of the burden of keeping herself alive at such a young age. Being sure to have a meal at the end of the day or to still have a roof over her head at the end of the month sure helps.
“Did you need something, Gojo-san?” she asks finally, when neither of them say anything.
It’s a polite way of asking what he is doing here at that hour of the night. Satoru isn’t exactly the most present figure in their lives, checking in on them every other week at most, so the question isn’t odd. He doesn’t have any excuses for that if not the lack of time, however he does reason himself that the kids don’t need him that much either. They had kept themselves alive for several months after Tsumiki’s mother had left, and to this day they took themselves to school on their own. Satoru didn’t ever intend on becoming anything more than monetary support for them, and later a mentor for Megumi, and the kids had never asked for anything more.
So her question has all its pertinence.
“Just checking on my favourite little ducklings,” he says lightly. “To see if you’re still kicking!”
“I’m not kicking anything,” Tsumiki answers slowly, her eyebrows furrowed in confusion, “but thanks for checking in!”
His hand goes to ruffle her hair. “Of course kiddo, I’m here for that. Where’s my second favourite duckling?” He then puts up a finger on his lips, whispering. “Shh, don’t tell him I called him my second favourite. I’m sure he’d be devastated.”
Tsumiki laughs, showing her missing incisor teeth. She had lost it some weeks ago. “He is sleeping. I think he was very tired.”
Satoru nods. He is also very tired, though he doesn’t tell her that much.
He tiptoes around the living room when she doesn’t say anything more, feeling awkward, all skin and lanky bones in the living room of the kids, with nothing more to offer than his presence. He should have brought them something, some food or sweets. He usually brings them souvenirs from his missions, but lately he has barely had the time to breathe from one location to another, much less for souvenir shops visits.
As he looks around, he sees that the place is clean, much cleaner than he thought a seven and an eight year old would be. The kitchen seems pristine except for some stubborn stains that they probably didn’t know how to get rid of on the stove; the living room is put together, each pillow placed neatly on the couch, a cartoon channel playing on the TV. The kids don’t need him, and he needs to remind himself that he never wanted them to feel like they did. It’d be particularly cruel to ask them to get attached to yet another adult figure in their lives when all they’ve known was abandonment. Not when he couldn't offer them what they needed in that department anyway.
“Well, since you’re fine, I guess I’ll get going,” he ends up saying for a lack of better thing to do. “Don’t stay up too late, or you won’t grow as tall as me!” he adds with an exaggerated smile.
He isn’t going back to his apartment, he knows that much. The place doesn’t really feel like his, not since he’s spent more time in hotels than there, and he doesn’t think he’ll be able to bear the unfamiliarity tonight. The school somehow sounds like a better choice.
“Do you want some tea first?” she asks timidly, before he can even move towards the door. “Ijichi-san got us some nice ones.”
An olive branch. Satoru couldn’t not take it.
“Oh, how could I say no to tea?”
She runs off to the kitchen, a small smile on her face, and he hears her turn on the kettle. Minutes later, he is sitting down on the couch, a cup of camomille in his hand, and Tsumiki is sitting on the floor, back to the masterpieces she finally lets him see.
“I’m drawing bunnies,” she explains as she adds the highlights to what must be the fur. “Megumi told me he saw them in his dream, but he is not very good at drawing,” she whispers the last part as though her brother will materialise at that admission. “So I draw them for him.”
Oh. Bunnies. While his knowledge of the Ten Shadows isn’t as extensive as the Zen’in clan, he knows about each of the shikigamis. He is going to start training the kid soon, isn’t he?
“That’s nice,” he says instead. “It’s pretty.”
It’s not really, though he doesn’t expect an eight year old to do any better—the proportions are a bit off and the eyes look slightly scary, but it’s still sweet enough that it makes him smile.
“It’s his birthday soon,” she adds. “So he can’t see it before that.”
Satoru hums, Megumi is turning eight in about a week. He thinks he would have wanted a party at that age, something with people similar in age to him and lots of sugar and all the attention on him as Satoru, birthday boy and not on him as Satoru Gojo, pride of the Gojo clan. But similarly to him, he doesn’t think Megumi has many friends to invite over, nor would he actually like a party. He has a couple ideas on what to gift him, though he knows the boy will show not make a show of his appreciation.
“When is your birthday?" she asks then, her eyes on him.
He blinks at the sudden question. “December seventh.”
“Oh no,” she clasps her hand on her mouth. “We missed it!”
“It’s fine,” he chuckles. “I hadn’t told you.’
This seventh of December he was away in Helsinki, fighting grade one curses, and had to head off to Casablanca in the afternoon for a similar mission. It was already the eighth in Japan when he returned to nothing but a promise from Shoko to take him for dessert and a birthday message from Yaga. What difference would it have made, had she known the date?
“But still,” she insists, pouting. “How old are you now?”
“Twenty-one!”
She opens her eyes in awe, “Wow, you’re so old!”
“Hey there, that’s not nice!”
She giggles before returning to her drawing. For a while, it’s just that : him, his cup of tea, and the sound of Tsumiki coloring while they quietly chatter about their day. Every now and then she shows him her piece of art, and he nods and smiles and shows a thumbs up.
He feels like he shouldn’t encourage her to stay up so late, and a comment about bedtime dies on his tongue as he doesn’t even know if they have one. Once again, he must remind himself that he isn’t anything to them. Not in any way that matters. Not when they don’t have someone to pick them up and band their wounds when they fall, not when they still only have each other to trust on an everyday basis, and definitely not when the anxiety of their old lives still cling to their walls in a way Satoru isn’t sure it will every disappear.
Satory is the guy who makes sure they still have running water and electricity, who pays cooks to deliver healthy food to their house on a regular basis, who makes sure their primary needs are met. He vanishes in an out of existence in their lives sporadically, with no stable schedule to which these kids who’ve never known structure can get attached to. None of these things give him any other status than the one of a benefactor, and on most days he doesn’t think this bother him. These two children had never been a part of the plan, though none of his current life had quite been what he would have imagined, so he had never intended on taking any direct role in their lives. But when he listens to Tsumiki’s passionate chatter about her drawings or her school days, commenting on her classmates and upcoming class trips, something akin to resentment blooms in his heart. She doesn’t have anyone to listen to her like this any other day, he realises, no mother who listens to her day while cooking dinner, no father who brushes her hair while she complains about substitute teachers. Satoru’s presence is about all she’ll get, and even that will never be enough.
These kids deserve more than that—more than Satoru will ever offer them, more than whatever scraps Toji and his wife had left behind for them.
He hears feet shuffling behind him, and if not for his cursed technique, Satoru wouldn’t have felt Megumi’s presence in the room until he had seen him. The boy truly moves like a shadow, silent in a slightly creepy way, standing next to the wall like one of the twins from The Shining, and truly enough Tsumiki startles a little bit when she sees him. Once she does, she immediately turns her drawing towards the table. Smooth.
“Megumi?” Tsumiki gets up and goes up to him. “I thought you were sleeping.”
He clutches a plush toy to his chest, blinking slowly. “I was,” he mutters.
“Did you have a nightmare?” she asks him lowly, as though it’s a recurring issue.
Megumi stills for a minute, his gaze fixed on Satoru, before slowly shaking his head.
“Why are you here?” he asks him. He probably means to sound mean, but he is way too sleepy for that to work. That makes Satoru smile.
“Just checking in and drinking the tea Tsumiki made me. How about you, Megumi dear, why are you awake?”
He doesn’t expect Megumi to talk to him about any nightmare he might be having, and indeed, the boy doesn’t. He shrugs instead, looking between him and his sister.
“I’ve felt a presence,” he offers, like it’s not a creepy thing for a kid to say without any jujutsu context. “Turns out it was you.”
Satoru offers him a smile that’s all teeth, “Yeap, your favourite Gojo.”
He blinks at him like he is dumb. “You’re the only Gojo I know.”
“That’s because I’m the best one,” he assures him, patting on the sofa next to him to invite the kid over.
Megumi climbs on it, sitting the furthest away from him, because of course he has to make a point of being as antisocial as he can. Tsumiki also joins them on the sofa but on the contrary to her brother she sits closer to Satoru.
“What were you doing?” Megumi ends up asking.
“Talking,” Tsumiki answers. “Are you sure you’re fine? Do you want some milk? It helps you sleep.”
He shakes his head, almost embarrassed. “Why aren’t you sleeping yet?”
She struggles to find a good reason, so Satoru intervenes. “It’s all me,” he says. “We were talking about very fascinating topics.”
Megumi squints his eyes. “What was it about?”
Satoru lowers his face, looking at him through his glasses. “It’s a secret.”
Megumi breathes through his nose, and turns his head away from him, making Satoru erupt into another round of laughter. The boy was too easy to tease, upright as he is, and Satoru takes great pleasure in doing so.
“How is school going for you, Megs?” he asks then, the nickname making the kid scowl.
“Good. It’s boring. Why do you care?”
“Mhh, of course it’s boring for the little genius that you are! I keep telling Shoko that you’re so so much smarter than some of the students from the school, but she doesn’t believe me.”
“That’s because you sound stupid,” Megumi genuinely offers him as an explanation. “I’m not a genius.”
“Sure you are! I’ve seen your grades, good job kid.”
The comment makes him red on the face, and he must sense it because he immediately turns his head away once again. Toji was the stupidest person alive, giving this up for what? Money? Suffering?
Stupid man. He could have given these kids a good life, it was as easy as to simply ruffle their hair and smile to them in the morning and hug them goodnight once the sun had set.
They’re good kids. They deserved that much.
Tsumiki fills the silence, unable to sit in comfort with it, always trying to fill in, and Satoru follows her lead. From the corner of his eye, he sees Megumi going towards the the kitchen. Minutes later he comes back with two mugs of steaming milk. He gives both of them to his sister, climbs back up on the sofa, much closer to them this time, and takes back his own mug. Before drinking, he pushes a small packet towards Satoru.
“You already had tea,” he tells Satoru,before hiding his face in his mug.
Satoru looks at the choco pie before him and smiles. They’re good kids.
Eventually, when the conversation between Tsumiki and Satoru bores him, and the cartoon playing on the TV can’t distract him anymore, Megumi falls asleep, his head on his sister’s lap.
Tsumiki twirls her fingers around the hair of her brother, lazily playing with the untamable black spikes. She arranges them in different ways, distractedly testing things out.
“Do you know how to braid hair?” Satoru finds himself asking.
Tsumiki shakes her head. “No, not really. I’ve tried but I’m bad at it. My mo—uh, she always promised me that she would braid my hair in the morning, before going to school. But then she was always late, so she never got to do it.”
She never bothered, more likely. Tsumiki rarely ever mentions her mother, he'd only ever heard her do it once. ‘Is she ever coming back?’, she had asked him when Satoru had offered them to move out, her voice small and her eyes unblinking. Satoru couldn’t give her any appropriate answer, not when he had found the woman in a whole other city at the arms of a much older and much richer man. Tsumiki had taken the silence as an answer, though, and had never mentioned her again since.
Distantly, he wonders how many nights she has cried for her mother, as silently as she could not to alarm her brother, only to wake up to her absence once again. He wonders if Megumi remembers how it was like to be hugged by a mother, if he ever heard her voice even.
“I’ll braid your hair for you,” he says gently. “I learn quickly, don’t worry!”
Shoko has been growing her hair out, he’ll bug her until she lets him. He probably won't even need to do much, considering her badly concealed liking for the kids. Tsumiki smiles at him weakly, expecting another broken promise.
On the couch, Megumi stirs, making her stop her movement for a second, her hand hovering up in the air so as to not wake him up.
“He hasn’t been sleeping well,” she admits when he doesn’t open his eyes, her voice low. “I don’t know why. I think he is having nightmares, even if he will never tell me.”
Knowing Megumi, he’d not let anyone know, Satoru understands that much about him.
“I wish he would,” she continues. “I’m his sister, I’m here for that, right?”
“He probably thinks he is protecting you like that, in a way,” Satoru offers.
“But I don’t want protection. I’m older, I should be protecting him.”
She shouldn’t have to. Neither of them should feel that way, as though life will turn around and stab them front and back, as though everything is a threat. Kids should just get to be kids. Satoru does not say that out loud, though. Reflexes like those don’t bloom overnight, not when these kids have had nothing but each other for so long, having to fend against the world with their bare hands. They don’t talk much about their life before, and Satoru does not pry, equally out of respect for the wounds they probably want to heal, but also out of sheer selfishness. He wants to keep himself far away from that uncomfortable truth, of two of the brightest humans he’s ever met being buried under the stress and burden of a life too big for them, as if his ignorance will make it any less true.
Most importantly, he blames himself for not stepping in sooner. For waiting for so long before intervening.
“He’s already having a hard time,” she continues, biting her lips. “I wish I could protect him from everything.”
“You are already offering him so much comfort,” he says, “don’t undersell yourself.”
She shakes her head. “It’s not the same. He can—he sees the curses, right? Like you do. He sees them, and he is going to have to fight them, and I can’t do anything about it. I just wish—I wish I could help, you know? I’m the big sister, I should be able to do something, but I can’t even see them. What if he is in danger, one day, what will I do?”
One would call her wise beyond her age, but they wouldn’t know what it took for her to come to that. It was months of keeping both herself and her brother alive, her heart still heavy grieving a mother that was still alive but away, wishing for her to come back. It was burnt meals and cold nights where both her and her brother searched for warmth under sweaters and blankets, it was falling asleep to silent cries, only to wake up to try to survive another day on their own.
Satoru doesn’t know much about what they’ve been through, and he doesn’t know if he ever will. So right now, all he can do is listen and try to understand them all the ways he can, through the broken words of a scared little girl.
“I know,” she admits in a low voice once she understands that she has all his attention, “that we only have this because he is a sorcerer with a good technique. And I—I’m a little happy, you know? It wasn’t easy before, and the money she had left was running out, and it was—” her voice shakes a little, “it was not very good times. But then you found him, and you found us, and I’m very happy for this, but—”
She lets out a breath of air, like the next admission is something to be ashamed of and she is sinning by her thoughts alone, like speaking them out loud is approving of them.
“But I wish he wasn’t forced to fight curses,” she admits. “I don’t know if he is scared of it, but I am, because I don’t want to lose him. And I’m probably selfish, because we have all of this because of that, and it makes me happy, but—I can’t lose him.”
Can’t lose him too, he hears the unspoken.
“That’s why I drew him the bunnies. You know, since he is having bad dreams, maybe a drawing of his good ones will bring more good dreams? Maybe I can do something for him like that.”
Oh, but Tsumiki, you have done so much more for him than anyone else in his life, Satoru wants to say. More than Toji could achieve in a lifetime, more than Satoru can pretend he has done. Tsumiki had learnt how to love in less time than it took her to learn how to breathe, she had enveloped her brother with so much care, so much affection, she cared about him so much, it could probably make up for any hurt he’s had in his life. Beyond just keeping him alive, Tsumiki had given Megumi more love than the one she had been yearning for, all while still wishing for a single embrace from a mother that had left her without even looking back.
And Satoru wishes she knew that, that she could understand how she was the best person one could wish to meet in their lifetime. But he doesn’t know how to translate all of that into words—that had never been his forte. Where Tsumiki excelled at loving, he was all about brute force, that was his way of protecting.
Except right now, it wasn’t what she needed from him.
“Tsumiki,” he says instead, hoping his simple words could ease up her heart if only a little bit. “You’re the best sister he could have asked for. I promise you that much.”
“You think so?”
“I know so.”
She smiles a little, a fragile little thing, a flower in the snow, and his heart clenches. She didn’t understand, he couldn't make her.
“No, Tsumiki,” he calls her, hoping to find the words this time around. “You have done so much for him, it’s—” he tries, almost losing his thread.
How to explain to her that she gave her brother all the love in the world with more ease than anyone else could have? How to explain a wounded little girl that she was all her brother had ever known and somehow, nothing would be more precious than that for him. Not in years, not in a lifetime.
But she looks at him with wide eyes, waiting for something, anything, so he tries again.
“Megumi is grumpy, and he doesn’t know how to show affection,” he begins, “but Tsumiki, he looks at you constantly like you’re the greatest thing that’s happened in his life. I promise you, all of the love you have for him in your heart? He wouldn’t be able to ignore even if he wanted to.”
And it’s still not quite that, he doesn’t know if words alone would be able to explain the bond they have. These two are like the earth and the moon, both finding purpose in each other’s existence. It’s something to be witnessed, the loud worry that characterises Tsumiki whenever her brother is involved, while Megumi shows his care in silence.
‘Will Tsumiki be happy?’ had been the first ever thing he had asked him, when he had mentioned the Zen’in.
‘Will Megumi be okay?’ had been the first thing Tsumiki had asked him, when he had told them about sorcery.
So hours and hours wouldn’t be enough to explain what these two mean to each other. But somehow his few words do the trick for now, and he feels some weight fall down Tsumiki's shoulders, feels her tiny teeny human cursed energy slow down in its endless spiral of fear and worry. For now, this will do.
“Gojo-san,” she says after a while. “Can I ask you one thing?”
“Anything at all.”
“Can you please protect Megumi, even when he becomes a sorcerer? He…he can be very reckless, and he doesn’t show affection a lot even if he has a lot of emotions, and he is mostly very nice,” she says, like she is sharing a secret. “He always does the dishes, and he comes to check on me at night because he knows I drop my blanket when I sleep and end up cold, and—”
She stops herself, biting her lips to keep tears from coming. He feels her cursed energy bubble, there must be so many thoughts and fears in that little head of hers; if he could, he’d take them all out and banish them from ever bothering her again.
“And I don't know what I'd do without him,” she finally musters the strength to say. “So please, protect him.”
He looks at her in the eyes, bright blues meeting her softer browns, carrying all the burden and the love of the world.
“I promise, Tsumiki,” he says and he believes his own words. “I swear. I’ll protect both of you.”
She smiles at him, the most precious thing in the world, and immediately, he vows to never break that promise.
“And by the way, for what it’s worth, I’m happy I got to meet both of you,” he adds. “I might have found you because of Megumi’s powers, but believe me Tsumiki, even if he swore to never use them one day, I’d still be here. Don’t feel guilty over anything, especially not about feeling happy. You deserve good things.”
She accepts his words and acknowledges his promises with all the wariness in the world, and yet Satoru is happy she even opens her heart to him at all. He promises himself, too, to do anything, everything to make sure she never feels that way again. Not about Megumi, not towards Satoru. One day, she’ll get to walk around without a worry in the world, she’ll allow her heart to be full and her mind to be free. Satoru will make sure she does.
Right now, though, all he can do is lower himself so she can let her head fall on his shoulder. And a little while later, when he hears her regular breathing, he knows that she’s just as asleep as Megumi.
There’s a cartoon playing on the TV, something obscure that Satoru has never heard of, probably too unpopular to play by the morning hours. It provides background noise, and every now and then he catches a sentence or another. Slowly, to that sound, he drifts into sleep as well.
Tokyo doesn’t feel quite so big, right now.
Next morning, he wakes up before the kids.
He gets up slowly, trying not to wake them up, and his eyes fall on a piece of paper on top of all the others. He picks it up, and feels a smile grow on his face.
On the left, there is a little girl, smiling and dressed in a pink dress. On the right, a smaller boy, somehow pouting, two dogs at his feet. In the middle, a tall man with glasses, smiling brightly.
Happy late birthday, Gojo-san!
From Tsumiki and Megumi.