Bad Timing | Satoru Gojo | Toji Fushiguro | Jujutsu Kaisen

Chapter 36

"I'm sorry about choking you earlier, I just...." Megumi murmured, his hands roughly rubbing over his face as he cradled it. "I just lost it."

"Come on now!" I breathed out a chuckle, and my ribcage tugged in pain with it but I ignored it. "Have you seen the shit I almost do to you out there? I had it coming!"

He looked up, his lips lifting into a weak smile, then he shook his head. "It's still so unreal to me, Ania, all of it." His hand waved at me. "You were only a stranger to me a few months ago, then a teacher, and now, you're almost like a... what, another step-mom?"

This time I fully laughed, shaking my head at him as I lifted my knees up against my body, my back rested against the headboard of the bed, where Megumi was sitting cross-legged at the foot of it. "Maybe, at one point when I was with your dad, yeah." I wrapped my arms around my torso to suppress the pain.

"Fucking weird."

"Tell me about it!"

Megumi kept looking at me for a moment, his eyes narrowed as he rested them intently over me. Like he was trying to see me clearly again, fathom me, or just the thoughts inside his head. Then finally, he asked. "Why did you take my family's name, you know, his name?"

My teeth chewed on my lip for a second, then I just shrugged. "Because I was his, that's what I thought back then."

"And now?"

Good question, I wanted to say but kept my mouth shut. And now? What changed? Was I still his? Do I wanna keep his name? So many questions unanswered, and Megumi didn't wait for me to sort and go through them because he was already asking again.

"Do you still love him?" His pale cheeks flushed again when he said this and he averted his gaze down. "Even when you are with Satoru now?"

"Yeah, I do." I nodded slowly, then smiled. "And I don't think I'm still with Satoru, not anymore."

Megmui's shoulders slumped as he breathed out a deep sigh. "It will just get more complicated, won't it?"

"Yup." My eyes were aimed at my knees as I talked. "But I was just dumb, back then and until recently. I never learned, not until now, not until I took the long way down to understand it correctly."

"And what is that?"

Before I know it, the outlines of Megumi's body were blurring in my vision and pools of hot, salty tears were gathering in my eyes. I breathed out heavily. "That love is way more heavy and painful than loss. That holding on to a ghost, a past, of others just because we loved them once doesn't do us good. We have to let go, at some point, and let life move on and us with it."

Shaky and blurry memories of what happened and what I thought at Shoko's infirmary formed in my head. And for a second, I felt like I wasn't talking to Megumi anymore, but to Satoru. "We shouldn't keep running and searching for a mirage image of something that had ended and long gone. It's not only hard, but it fucks the life you're too caught up with the past to see how good it is..."

"Here." I looked up when I finished talking and saw Megumi reaching for me, a piece of tissue in his hand. Only then that I felt the streams of tears gliding along my cheeks. "I'm sorry." He whispered.

"It's okay." I took it and wiped my eyes, then cleared my nose. "I'm sorry, too."

"Is this what happened with Gojo? Did you struggle with your past?"

I breathed out slowly, my eyes now fixed upon the damp tissue in my hand then nodded. "Yes, ironically, both of us did."

"What do you mean?" Megumi's eyes narrowed at me again, and only then that I remembered what I wanted so desperately to do. To talk to Satoru. But it seemed I, again, was too caught up with finally talking about my past with Megumi that it slipped right out of my head.