Chapter Text
"...Even if he is a potential vessel, according to Jujutsu regulation, he must be executed." Megumi recites, his voice low and a little bit hoarse from the dryness of his throat. He takes a moment to swallow so that his next words are clearer. "But... But, I don't want to let him die."
"Oho? Is that a personal opinion?" Gojo-sensei queries with that stupid little smile of his, perhaps surprised that Megumi was willing to pipe up just for this. It's comparatively far less significant of a break in character than other instances where Gojo has requested Megumi's opinions on things in the past, but, well, this time it's not just some prodding about an injury or a broken belonging or a question about whether they should go to McDonald's or Burger King afterwards. Of course he'll have an opinion. The fact that his teacher is surprised by this... Megumi lets the thought drift from his fingers.
"Yes." is Megumi's response. "...Yes," he repeats, but, before he can bring himself to speak further, he feels his voice die in his throat. There's no point in pleading. Not with Gojo Satoru, not with who Megumi is to him. He'll just get teased.
Predictably, Gojo laughs. Sometimes, Megumi wishes...
"A precious student's request~!" Gojo crows, adjusting Itadori-san's limp body where it's slung under his arm like a sack of potatoes. A merry little thumbs-up is given with Gojo-sensei's free hand. "Leave it to me, then!"
---
Megumi rolls Kugisaki's words about being unlucky to have been teamed with them over and over in his mind. Something in him, faint and bleeding, is sad that that's the impression that he'd given off, that he wasn't someone that a person wants to be around and that they could draw such a conclusion just from taking a single look at him. It's a familiar thing, though. There's not much more that he can do besides muse about Kugisaki's clear immaturity to try and soothe it.
He forms the required handsign. "Divine Dog," he murmurs, and the white dog he'd named Hokma after following a faint gust of humour bubbling in his chest rises from the dark of his shadow. He turns back towards his colleagues— hm. His classmates. "This is Hokma," he introduces, gesturing towards the white dog and its wagging tail. "It'll let us know if the Curse is close," he tells them. Megumi ignores as Itadori takes Hokma's face in his hands to coo over it. "...Well, unless it takes us by surprise." he then adds, because Megumi has... a feeling.
He turns back around, reaching out to tug open the door to Eishu Juvenile Detention Center's Detention Center Building 2. It's an inconveniently long name. There are at least two words that he could have pruned off of that for efficiency's sake; he wonders, idly, what the workers must've sounded like when inevitably doing so. He steps in, and—
—It does not look like the orderly innards of the building Megumi anticipated. No, it's buildings upon buildings upon concrete upon piping and piping and piping. Air conditioning units arranged neatly across walls clogged with it all, the ceiling so high that it simply disappears into the darkness where the flourescent lighting doesn't reach high enough to banish it.
"Huh? This is supposed to be a two-story building, right?" Itadori shouts, and Megumi shakes himself out of the stillness he'd been stuck in to cuff Itadori upside the head.
"—Quiet," Megumi hisses. The Cursed Spirit probably already knows they've entered, but it's good to foster good habits, right?
Kugisaki opens her mouth to say something, and, in an act of mild vengeance for grazing him in the side of his head with an elbow when she'd climbed over Megumi to swat at Itadori during the car ride here, he cuts her off. She glares at him, but, well... "Domain," is all he says, and he sees the way her eyes narrow in grim realization. She turns around.
"The door! The door's gone," she alerts Itadori, who had been gazing at that same mess of piping and uniform concrete that had captured Megumi's attention. He turns around so quickly that his shoes make a loud scraping against the concrete beneath his feet, expression opening up in shock and dismay.
"What!? How! We just came from there—!!"
"Hokma's got it," Megumi cuts in, feeling the affirmation from his shikigami in the lonesome cage of his ribs. He bids it to back up before his classmates can love on it, though— now is not the time.
"Stay sharp," he warns narrowly, and Itadori gives him this look that Megumi's learned means that whoever's got it on is about to say something seriously annoying.
"...Ah... haha. You're so reliable, Fushiguro." he instead tells Megumi with this... little grin. "You've saved a lot of people, yeah? Including me!"
...
Hm.
...Megumi shoos away whatever faint thing tries to come alive in his gut, swallowing down the nausea of it. Hokma grunts, and Megumi's gaze has a reason to leave Itadori so that he can look at it. A faint awareness blossoms in him as he softens himself for it, and then Megumi is struck by an urge to confirm what he's being silently told.
He turns away from his classmates and lifts his head, opening his mouth a little bit and curling his lip. He takes deep, patient breaths of the air. It smells like nothing, like antiseptic, like shit and piss and blood. Like a lot of it. The familiarity tugs at him, has his feet moving, steady. Like teeth grinding.
"...Let's go," he tells his classmates, instead of anything else that has half-formed in his mouth. "If this thing has a Domain," he then says, for Itadori's sake, "then the Womb has already hatched. If we encounter it as we are now, we are going to die, period."
"Eh?" Itadori queries in response, once again a bit too loud for Megumi's tastes despite his best attempts at keeping quiet. Megumi decides, right then and there, to just give up on that front. "It's that dangerous!? What, we can't fight back or run away, or anything like that?"
"Nope," Megumi bats back, popping the p. The scent of blood strengthens. What are the odds that the Special Grade is trying to lead them to the corpses of the people they'd been sent here to evacuate? If it's sadistic, then...
"We're all first-years. It'd be like..." he pauses, trying to come up with a good analogy. Itadori knows anime stuff, right? Megumi remembers seeing him handling a box of manga when he'd been moving in. "It'd be kind of like that part in the Chunin exams," he decides, "when Orochimaru crashes the party and trounces everyone."
Kugisaki gives Megumi this look that he catches out of the corner of his surveying eye, half displeasure and half something like consideration. She's from the countryside, right? Naruto's pretty popular, though, he's pretty sure... Does she feel left out, maybe? Megumi files that thought away.
"Huh," Itadori makes this musing sound in response to his words, and Megumi elects to just ignore the feeling of the guy's gaze on him. "But wouldn't—"
They turn a corner, and Megumi pauses. They all pause. Hokma jumps down into the drained pool, and barks an affirmative— they're most likely safe for now. Ish.
The air is thick with the smell of it. Blood, blood, smeared and splattered every which way, even reaching up to stain the walls outside of the drained pool Megumi steps out into. Mildew and stains from rust and tainted water blacken the tile, yet all Megumi can smell is the blood and the gore.
"Three corpses," Megumi reports, glancing back at his classmates. Itadori, who has likely never seen a real corpse, is wide-eyed. Unsmiling. Kugisaki's lips are pursed, her brow furrowed.
There is the body of a man who had been shredded in half— not sliced; Megumi knows what slicing wounds look like. The skin's been ripped, not cut, and the guts spilling from the belly appear largely undamaged outside of the bruising and a shredded lower portion where they'd been yanked from where they ought to be nestled. His lower half and his arms beneath the elbows are nowhere to be seen.
The other corpses cannot be identified. Their skin has been pulled from their meat, their bodies crushed and bones splintered and cut and rearranged to form crude spheres. Megumi's nose catches a smell he's come to recognize as terror clinging to their bodies, all of their bodies, even through the thick, cloying scent of voided bowels and bladders and the rawness of their bared internals.
Megumi checks off a bullet point in the mental list he's been compiling: this Cursed Spirit is sadistic, as well as physically powerful. They are all most likely going to die here.
"Shit," Megumi curses simply as Itadori runs past him, reaching for the only recognizable body. "Shit." he repeats as Itadori pulls at the corpse's clothing to peer at the name tag.
"...We're bringing this body back." Itadori states, voice low and steely, and Megumi opens his mouth—
"What?" Kugisaki blurts. "Why would we—"
"It's that lady's son. His... his face isn't that messed up! She's not gonna be satisfied if we just tell her that her son is dead!"
"But," Kugisaki argues, visibly grossed out by the idea of carting a corpse with them, and Megumi takes that as his opportunity to intervene in what could be a brewing argument.
"Take his identification instead," Megumi states before it can escalate into a spat between the two. "It'll be easier to carry, and less distressing to see. We need to leave. Now."
"I— but what about his mom? What about the other people?" Itadori barks in response, turning his head to glare at Megumi from the corner of his eye. He sets Tadashi's body down gently, respectfully, like Tadashi is still around to give a shit about any of this at all. "Are you just gonna give up on these people, just like that? What if even one guy's still alive in here?"
...Oh my fucking Wings...
"The Cursed Spirit's most likely a Special Grade," Megumi snaps back, glancing at Hokma, whose hackles raise at the tension. "Mundane people cannot survive being trapped with that kind of thing." he elaborates, attempting to mentally soothe the Divine Dog. It doesn't quite work, but it's good enough; it at least looks slightly less pissed off than before. "Dying just for some corpses is stupid. Another team can retrieve them; this is above our pay grade—!"
"They're not just corpses!" Itadori shoots upright, leaning in closely enough that Megumi can smell the remnants of his breakfast on his hot breath as he grasps at Megumi's collar. Megumi almost punches him before his brain kicks back in and reminds him that Itadori is not an enemy. His fists instead ball stubbornly at his sides, because the urge had felt so...
"They're human! These are people— we can't just leave them to rot here!" Itadori insists, brow furrowed and teeth bared with it all. "Do you not care!?" he shouts, leaning in even closer, and Megumi has to steady himself. Megumi isn't given the opportunity to try and respond, even if Megumi knows that he wouldn't have been able to really offer one.
"Why are you here, then, if you don't care!?" Itadori shouts, although the tone edges with something almost... pleading. Megumi opens his mouth. "Why'd you save me, if you didn't—"
"Enough!" Kugisaki yells over him, moving to intercept the two of them. "This isn't the time or the place to be fighting!
A thread in Megumi's chest snaps, and he shoves Itadori away, wide-eyed as a patch of something dark like mold opens up like a hungry mouth beneath Kugisaki. Her foot hits nothing but air when it expected solid ground, and she falls.
Soundlessly, it swallows her whole.
Running his thoughts over the loss thrumming through him like a tongue over a freshly missing tooth, Megumi turns to face Hokma. Hokma, whose severed head is embedded into a far wall. Its eyes have been gouged from its sockets, black blood spilling from every orifice as well as the ragged edge where its head had been torn away from the rest of its body. Seeing the shikigami, one that has been with him ever since he was little, is... is... it's...!
"Fuck— Itadori, run!" Megumi screams, throat going ragged with it, reaching to steady Itadori from where he'd stumbled and then to push him away, and warm, gruesome death pools in his chest as what is left of Hokma finally dissipates into the dark, and he moves to—
It comes to them so quickly that neither of them could see it coming, and Megumi freezes in place.