Chapter 1
Megumi Fushiguro had not cast a shadow in nineteen days, and he had started counting them the way other people count days sober.
Not literally. The sun still did what the sun did. When he stood at the window of his room in the Jujutsu High infirmary, the light still laid a dark shape of him across the floorboards, long in the morning and short at noon. But the shadow was just a shadow now. He had not put his hands together since Shinjuku. He had not reached into it. He did not know what would come out if he did, and he did not know, more to the point, whose hands would be doing the reaching.
Shoko had stopped asking him about it after the first week. She checked his pulse and the healing scar along his collarbone, and wrote things on her clipboard, and once, without looking up, said, "It's your body. It's been yours for a while now. You know that, right?" and he had said yes, and she had nodded as if he had said no.
It was January. The courtyard below was white with a thin snow that kept almost melting and then freezing again overnight into a crust. Somebody had been shoveling the path to the main building, badly, in a zigzag. Megumi knew exactly who.
The knock came at four in the afternoon, the way it had come every day for nineteen days. Two short, one long. Yuji had made it up in the first week, when Megumi wasn't answering, so that he'd know it wasn't Shoko or Ijichi or one of the old men in suits who kept wanting statements.
"It's open," Megumi said.
Yuji came in sideways with his elbow, because his hands were full. A paper bag, a thermos, a plastic convenience-store umbrella dripping onto the floor, and under his arm a folded newspaper that turned out, when he set it down, to be wrapped around a small pot with a single sad green shoot sticking out of it.
"Nobara said you need a plant," Yuji said. "She said your room has, quote, the energy of a hospital corridor where people come to get bad news. I said it's literally a hospital. She threw a shoe at me."
"How's her eye."
"She says it looks cool. It does look kind of cool." Yuji put the pot on the windowsill and stepped back, considering it. "I don't know what it is. The lady at the shop said it's hard to kill."
"Good," Megumi said. "That's the only kind I should have."
He meant it as a joke. It came out wrong. Yuji glanced at him and didn't say anything, which was its own kind of saying something, and then busied himself unscrewing the thermos.
It was tonkotsu broth from the place near the station, the one with the cat. Yuji poured it into the thermos cap and handed it over and Megumi held it with both hands for the warmth and didn't drink it. Yuji pulled the chair up to the bed and sat on it backward, arms folded on the backrest, chin on his arms. The scars on his face had faded to pale lines. He had more of them now than he used to. They all did.
"Sorry about the path," Yuji said. "I was trying to do a pattern."
"It looks like a seismograph."
"It's a dog."
Megumi looked at him.
"I thought you'd look out the window and see a dog," Yuji said. "In the snow. It didn't come out right. I'll do it again tomorrow. Maybe I'll do a frog. A frog's easier, it's mostly circles."
Megumi put the thermos cap down on the bedside table very carefully.
He had not told anyone what he remembered. That was the thing. They all assumed he didn't remember, or remembered only in pieces, the way you remember a fever. Shoko assumed it. Maki, who had come once and stood in the doorway with her arms crossed and said "you look like hell" and left, which was the most comforting thing anyone had done, assumed it. Even Yuji, he thought, assumed it.
But he remembered. Not all of it. Enough. He remembered the inside of his own body like the inside of a house where someone else had moved the furniture. He remembered his own voice saying things in a tone he had never used. He remembered Tsumiki's face, close, and his own hands, and then he remembered sinking, deliberately, the way you'd let go of a ledge, because it had seemed like the only thing left that was his to decide.
He remembered the shikigami. His shikigami. Coming when they were called, by a voice that wasn't his, doing what they were told. Mahoraga's wheel turning over the ruins of Shinjuku. And the dogs: he could not be sure whether Sukuna had called them too, or whether his own memory had filled that in, and not knowing was worse. The dogs he had raised from the first shadow he ever touched, the one he had rebuilt out of grief when he was fifteen.
They had come when Sukuna called. That was the thing he could not get past. They hadn't known the difference.
"I don't think I can," he said.
Yuji lifted his chin off his arms. "Can what?"
"The shadows. Ten Shadows. I don't think I can use it anymore." He looked at his hands, which were his hands, the knuckles chapped from the dry air. "They obeyed him. Like he was me. If I call them now I don't know what they'll be. I don't know what I'll be. What if I put my hands together and it's still his. What if the dogs come out and look at me and they're waiting for him."
Yuji didn't answer right away. He didn't say "that won't happen," which Megumi was grateful for, because neither of them knew that. He didn't say "it wasn't your fault," which Megumi had heard so many times in nineteen days that it had stopped being words and become a sort of weather.
Instead he got up, turned the chair around the right way, and sat on the edge of the bed, close enough that their shoulders touched.
"You know what I did, the first week after Shibuya?" Yuji said. "After he used me for, you know. All that."
Megumi knew. Everyone knew. Half of Shibuya was a crater.
"I couldn't make a fist." Yuji held up his right hand and curled it slowly, and opened it again. "Like, physically I could. But I'd start to and I'd get this feeling, like, what if he's in there. What if I punch something and it's his punch. So I just didn't. For days. I carried stuff with my arms like a forklift. Choso thought I'd hurt my wrists. He kept trying to put ice on them." He laughed a little, without much in it. "It's stupid. A fist."
"It's not stupid."
"No. I know. That's not why I'm telling you." Yuji turned his hand over, palm up, on his own knee, between them. "Know how I got over it?"
"How."
"I didn't. I just did it anyway one day because Nobara was being annoying and I had to flick her forehead. It was a really small fist. Like, half a fist. And it was mine." He shrugged. "And then the next one was a little bigger."
Megumi looked at Yuji's open hand. It was a big hand, square, with a long pale scar across the base of the thumb from the Culling Game, and calluses he hadn't had when they were fifteen, and it was resting on his knee like it had nowhere else to be.
"You can do half," Yuji said. "Nobody says you have to do the whole thing. Do half. I'll be right here. If something weird comes out, I'll punch it." He paused. "Gently. If it's a dog. I'm not punching a dog."
"You'd punch a dog if it was trying to kill me."
"Yeah, okay. I'd punch a dog for you. But I'd feel bad about it."
Megumi breathed in. The radiator ticked. Outside the window, in the courtyard, somebody's crooked shoveling was going blue in the late light.
He raised his hands. They were shaking, a little, which he noted the way Shoko noted things, without judgment. He did not make the full sign. He brought just his thumbs together, the base of it, the beginning, and held it there, and felt the shadow under the bed stir like water when you put your fingertips on the surface.
Nothing came out. Not quite. But at the edge of the bed, at his feet, the shadow lifted, just slightly, into a shape. Two ears. The suggestion of a muzzle. It held for perhaps three seconds and then sank back down into an ordinary shadow, but before it did, it turned toward him. Not toward the door. Not toward anything else in the room. Toward him, the way a dog turns toward the person who said its name.
Megumi lowered his hands.
He didn't realize his face was wet until Yuji put an arm around his shoulders and pulled, gently, the way you'd pull somebody back from the edge of a platform, and he went, and pressed his forehead into the side of Yuji's neck, and stayed there. Yuji smelled like snow and broth and the cheap laundry soap from the dorm machine. He didn't say anything. His thumb moved slowly back and forth across the top of Megumi's arm, through the sleeve.
"That was half," Megumi said eventually, into his collar.
"That was a good half."
"It knew me."
"Yeah," said Yuji. "Of course it did."
They sat like that until the light went out of the window and the plant on the sill was only a dark shape against the glass. At some point Yuji's hand found his, on the blanket, and Megumi turned his own palm up to meet it, and neither of them said anything about that, either. There would be time to say things. That was new. He was still getting used to it.
"Tomorrow," Megumi said, "do the frog."
He felt Yuji smile against his hair.
"Mostly circles," Yuji said. "Easy."