over the horizon is the great machine of death
a/n: chapter 212 gutted me, like I'm sure it did to many others. I wrote this immediately after, but had to wait for further chapters to make sure that my guesses were mostly correct. I don't think gege will kill maki (... knock on wood. knocking on so much wood, going to redwood forest to kiss a blessedly tall tree), so I decided not to wait any longer.
This piece is consistent with the rest of the "my younger years" fic chain.
Title comes from The Curtain
summary: you knew that there was nothing you could do, but there really is nothing you can do. ghosts will keep pealing away the last pieces that matter
c/w: spoilers, the whole thing is spoilers, parent-child relationship between reader and the fushiguro siblings
Up north, it is already cold. Over the blue slate cliffs, grey clouds press down like the palm of god. Hello rises up to meet them, dissipating all too quickly.
You know who it is. You hope - no you wish because what good is hope for a sorcerer - for good news while hello drifts in the air. Too many other options wait for their dark names to be spoken out loud.
Maki is very quiet on the end of the line.
In that long moment, everything is alright.
She says it without inflection, and the first thing you think of is her sister. Nothing would be able to compare to losing the other half of yourself, the person who had been with you for the entire arch of your life.
"What to you mean 'lost'?"
It's a stupid question. You've gotten this call before. Lost means gone means dead, but lost also means slipped out of your pocket, set somewhere out of sight, don't know where it went, might find it between the couch cushions later.
Megumi was once that small. Satoru had sat on him, muffling his furious outrage, pretending not to know where he was when you tried to ask Megumi what he wanted to wear on his weekend field trip. Tsumiki had played along, told you his bags were already packed. You'd found out from the pictures that Satoru had kept you from finding a kumamon bucket hat, little black ears poking from the brim. Megumi wore it and a put upon expression in almost every photo from the trip.
Had they encountered... the colonies weren't impossible to enter but surely the thing wearing stolen skin wouldn't risk joining the cull. And together he and Yuuji should be able to handle a special grade curse. Megumi had mentioned the bridge in an abbreviated text and the students' mission reports said the rest.
He would only have refused to listen if Tsumiki was...
"It was Sukuna." Maki's voice carries the edges of anger.
"What happened to Yuuji?" you ask, incredulous. He'd had it under control, even at three quarters cursed.
"How can he be fine? Maki, what happened?"
And she tells you, stopping and starting again as she finds the words. You imagine you hear a shiver in her voice to match the roar and creak of ice as it springs up from nothing, dries out the city for three blocks around the epicenter.
What had been the last thing you'd said to him?
You'd said a lot over the years. For all of Megumi's resistance to being burdened by others he took on a lot. There had been a time when you thought he didn't like you talking, but when you had fallen silent for too long, he would ask some question or press close to add his hands to yours in whatever you were doing. Always afraid to ask for too much.
"Tsumiki is lost too?" you ask, even though you already know the answer.
His sister was possibly the only person in the world for whom Megumi would first think to live.
There's a murmured interlude on the other side of the phone. You force your feet to move, take you further up the slope, keeping the crash of the ocean in your ears. You can't blunder about blindly. The boundaries out here cut cell signal as easily as they do perception. No amount of boosting the bricky satellite phone's capabilities is going to fix that.
"She's one of the reincarnated players now," Maki says, and it takes a great of amount of self control not to break something or scream into the cold sea-salted wind.
Tsumiki who had never been sure if she wanted magic to be real or not, who let her brother go out with someone who was barely an adult, whom she forced herself to trust even when her brother returned with dull eyes and slumped shoulders. Tsumiki who wanted to believe that there was good in the world anyways, that maybe there was something sacred and precious about a world that would have thrown her away without a thought, the strongest of you all for keeping her heart alive.
"Yeah." You're trembling, insides gone shaky and cold. Distantly, you know this is shock and that you should get moving before Maki hears it. "I have a meeting with one of their captains in the morning, if I can make it in time."
Hokkaido is peaceful, readying itself for winter. In the morning, frost crackled across the windows of the wheezing, ancient car you bought for cash off some farmer at the coast. You had to abandon the car to walk the rest of the way to the barrier, but you were reassured by some bowing attendant, who had taken the keys with as much reverence as if they belonged to the seven geared monstrosity Satoru had bought for you, that the antique you'd arrived in would be well cared for as you braved the Ainu trials.
"Good luck," Mai says gravely.
"You too," you say quietly.
You hope that somewhere on the other side, Yuuji can hear you. You don't know what comes next for them, the plan insofar blown beyond hell, but they will need it when they go to bring the bodies back.
You share another long silence with her. You'd looked forward to teaching her. Only age and experience and the fading words of someone long gone had given you anything she didn't already have, but you'd looked forward to seeing her only get better, to tallying the matches between her and Yuuta and seeing if you could find Toge something that suited his gentle hands.
You'd looked forward to a lot of things.
The line goes dead with a tiny click.
One leaden step after another, you turn away from the cliffs.
It's too much. Surely all of this is more than one person will have to bear in their lifetime. No wonder sorcerers die young.
The giggle that escapes your mouth has you wobbling sideways, hand going to the rough bark of a tall pine spearing upwards. Its stripped trunk creaks higher above you. If you wanted, you could pull that movement through the trunk and shatter the whole thing from the crown to roots.
You grip your head, fingers tight against your scalp, heel of your palm pressed to your temple. Get it together. But all you can see are the kids, yours and not yours - bright eyed weekends at cafes and book shops with Tsumiki, sharing late evening teas with Megumi while he honed the focus needed to maintain his summons, their subdued delight when Satoru swung them high in his arms, the tug of a hand at your sleeve when you changed a record on the turntable.
The shaking in your body has to go somewhere and with your legs feeling weak, the tremors escape through your mouth, pilling together until they escape as an unstoppable laugh. Your other hand comes up to grip your head too, as though to keep your mind contained inside.
For the first time since that single terrible dream, you want Satoru out of the box, if only so he could lay eyes on Megumi and Tsumiki and tell you if there was any hope left at all. But just as quickly, you are again you're glad he's not, because he'd take it on himself to look their familiar bodies in the eye and lay them to rest.
Laughter is a poor wrapper for such a bitter pastille, but you can't seem to stop throwing it out in plumes of steam.
If you had been born without your curse, you'd never know about any of this at all. Even losing it all now to a sorcerer's inevitable end, from a place so far you cannot even imagine doing more than you already are, you should be grateful, you are grateful, that this was yours for even a moment.
You are your anger, and that empty, echoing, hollow place inside of you seems only to grow further with every gasping howl. Something worse is cracking loose. Your eyes sting with it.
There is no other world where you do not lose them. There is only this, and the sudden empty void where that boy and that girl, who you had once helped raise, have finally met their worse than normal ends.
Somehow, that thought is what is most unbearable, bad enough to cut sound from your throat.
Even though you want so badly for it to be possible (and so far away from where it happened maybe you can be allowed to want, just for a moment), even Satoru had said the odds of another vessel like Yuuji were incredibly slim, once in a thousand years slim.
If there was any single miracle in the world, it would bring back Fushiguro Megumi. But for all its magic, neither world he belonged to had ever trafficked much in miracles.
