"Life's too short to even care at all"

Cough Syrup

Young the Giant

If I'm being honest, I hadn't thought this far ahead.

Planning was more Megumi's thing, from simple things such as dinner for that day to more complex missions that required actual thought more than just what I was going to wear. I was happy to be the follower as long as I got to be there and Megumi was less grumpy when I just went along with whatever he said.

But this was not a mission nor dinner after one, so there was no way he would help me plan out my date. Not the date itself, no, that was already something that Tama-kun found naturally to his personality, everything went well without any complex thinking on my end.

The date was sweet and kind, everything that should have happened for a teenage careless crush. He paid for my tea, I thanked him profusely, much to his chuckle, he and I took a photo strip together, and then we were walking and laughing as the sun set around us.

The golden hue of the world gave us a feeling of hope for a future, something I imagine many married couples look back to fondly during their dating days. This would would be the spot that Tama-kun would go back to and remember fully the time his love had blossomed out of a small happenstance, perhaps after graduation he would take me here at this spot where the quietness of the world surrounded us and he'd get down on one knee and—

"Uhm, Jun-chan." My attention left the dying sliver of golden light and it turned to the boy beside me. Long gone was our teas and instead there was a giddiness to replace the objects with our hands, but society doctrines dictated that we must refrain from such acts until the next date. "It's getting late, may I walk you home?"

Right, home.

Me.

Walk.

Him.

Me.

Home.

My facade fell for only a moment slipping into one of a momentary horror. It was only a second and I tried to look away as the panic seeped over me like creeping myrtle on a tree. I was suffocating and he was waiting patiently, if not mildly concerned. Somewhere behind me a dog barked happily and a kid giggled in glee, a mother telling her child to slow down, a splash of a rock in the cool stream next to us.

"Jun-chan?" His lips turned down and the ideas started turning behind those eyes. Those dark eyes that hadn't noticed the small, grotesque creature with rotting flesh flying next to us while we got our tea, the ones that blinked and disregarded my awkward clap while he ordered, the lips that smiled as if I was endearing in my awkward explanation.

"R-right, I—" there was only so much I could possible say and my fingers played with the end of my pink sweater with no words on my lips other than my teeth gnawing on my bottom lip with a prayer that I'd get the right thing to say without ruining the night.

"I don't—"

"Hafu-chan!"

This time the horror sat in deep rooted and the vines were no longer the only thing that suffocated me. My stomach dropped to hell as if I had eaten an engine and each intentionally sounded step closer made my face paler. My lungs couldn't work and the grip over my sweater's cuffs became violent. The dread, the embarrassment, and most importantly—

"Ne, ne. Where have you been, my cute little student?"

—the memory.

The arms around my shoulders was heavy as they crossed in front of me like a necktie, or maybe even a collar, and I grit my teeth as my cover felt blown. He was here, found me, and I'd be a fool to think he was none the wiser to my little escape. Megumi had definitely ratted me out. "This isn't Megumi-kun~?"

"Sensei— I tried to plead my case, tried to get him to hear me, but a soft pat on my head shut my lips up. His hand settled over my scalp and his fingers splayed out in a grip as he gently forced me to spin around to face him. He wasn't mad in an angry sense, never truly was, but I knew he would take glee out of my misery with my punishment to come. He still wore the blindfold but his lips were smiling too. "Please don't make me—"

"Clean up time! Do you need me to sing the song?" He teased me, as if I had a chance, but I knew he would. He was happily carrying his bag of sweets in one hand and motioning me towards my date with the other like the boy was nothing more than garbage for me to take to the bin. Gojo-sensei made a scene in clearing his throat with a fist to his lips like he was preparing to perform on stage. "Clean~!"

"Fine! God!" I threw my hands up angrily before facing the confused and minorly afraid teen. I suppose sensei found the world to be his stage. What would a non-sorcerer assume was happening here? His eyes were concerned on me, but the way they darted up to the masked Gojo was filled with that same awed fear we all have even if you couldn't see the energy that ruled our lives with an iron fist. Tamaki Aoki had no idea why he felt weighted, yet inspired, with the feeling of being sucked into a void. "For what it's worth I had a good time."

I tried to make it easy and the relief that blossomed over his face only thrilled me. I had been correct in my assumption that I would be everything I said I would. But the thrill didn't last long inside of me as I stepped forward and smiled up at him with soft eyes. Sensei was snickering at me, I know it, he made no chance at hiding his amusement at my detriment.

"Uhm, Jun?" Tamaki asked unsurely - my heart dropped along with the honorific he once used - but with a disgusting amount of hope while I leaned up towards his cheek. It must have looked like my uncle, maybe even father or brother had found me out and came to collect me, but here I was reassuring him of the beautiful moments we shared together that we were supposed to have forever. My right hand grabbed his shoulder to steady myself while I propped up on my toes and pressed my lips to his blushing, awe-struck face. Pink fled from my lips and over his head, caressing him into a gentle slumber with fluttering eyes and—

"Erase." My whisper was only a dream to him.

"Sensei!" I whined as we watched the confused teen walk wake from the bench and look startled at the beer can in his hand. He was quick to stand, wincing at a pain in his head he tried to grab, and tried to find more answers he would never find. Sensei snickered while he watched the cruel display, but I only huffed in outrage. "You ruined my date!"

"Oh, I'm sorry." I knew better than to find his sympathy to be true. He glanced over at me with hidden eyes and a mocking pout of lip. "I didn't know you had found the Cursed Object and was given free time by your sensei, why didn't Megumi tell me?!" His whine was deceptive as was the flail of arms as if he were given the worst news ever, before he broke character with a snicker behind his hand.

My teeth grit together and he let out a boisterous laugh at my distress, holding his stomach and even pointed rudely at my flaming face. I rolled my eyes the ground and allowed my gaze to penetrate the dirt, begging a new power to come through so that I could destroy anything and everything with a single glare. Sensei didn't get angry, he never raged at me, that would require him to actually care about me. That was something I have been aware of since the beginning, the distance he went for me versus others.

We were walking with him casually sauntering forward without a single care as if I wasn't wound tighter than the strings on a tennis racket. He'd snicker as we walked up the steps while I lagged a step behind and I'd let out a sharp exhalation to control myself. He paused for a moment at the top of the stairs and dread creeped up as he lazily turned his head towards me his lips were pulled back like a bow with an arrow lodged in.

"Come on, Hafu-chan. It wasn't like you were going to go anywhere with that." He teased like an older brother, but his words cut like a warden, letting the arrow fly into my frozen figure while he continued his walk forward and left me to damage. "Maa, I'm not sure why we even played clean up, he would have forgotten about you by the morning— " My sensei paused his step, slowly facing his front to turn his blinded attention to the thorny roses that sprouted in his path. His finger nudged a petal and the flower died instantly - replaced by a thorn - following down at his feet. "Flowers? For me?"

The shit eating grin he sent my way was enough, but he set his fingers in front of him casually, eyes on me with my hands still in front of me while he destroyed my flowers in a disarray of sharp neon blue and shimmering pink crashing through the wind.

"Guess he forgot the flowers, huh?" Sensei stepped onto the slowly degraded flowers, crunching them, with a hum and skip to his step. "Maybe the next one will remember you— I mean, the flowers."

My eyes twitched at the damaged school in front of us and the anger that I had been slowly dissolving instantly returned to half its original value. There was a hole in the wall - multiple holes in the outside wall - and an entire floor was slowly caving downwards with a groan of distress. The building cried a few bricks down its side before settling into a grim creaking. That would take more clean up then I could reasonably handle—

"Wow, how interesting is that?" Sensei asked, but I knew better than to answer or perhaps I was petulantly ignoring him - maybe both. The palm of his free hand laid over his cheek in mock fear. "What has Megumi gotten himself into? I hope he's not dead. If only his partner had been with him and didn't desert him in his most crucial time of need—"

"Okay, okay!" I grumbled loudly as I grabbed the lock to the gates fence and let my energy flow through it with a defeated groan. Quickly I tossed the now rusted, broken, and ruined device carelessly to the bushes. I winced at the loud crash and shatter, watching a window from the building fall to pieces before us. "Could you at least create a curtain for us?"

But sensei had already left me to do all the work much to my haughty stomp. Alone and almost forgotten, left to carry out a continuation of my punishment without support. He knew I couldn't do it and would only add it to my report that we hadnt done so.

"Self-righteous, God-complex having idiot, cockblocking, ignorant asshole—" There was no doubt that the white-haired man was still listening, perhaps even mocking me in the bushes with giggles and a puppet of fingers, but my arrogance was forgotten as soon as my head snapped up to the loud scream from my classmate and immediately my feet were racing forward. It wasn't very often the gloomy, dry, calculated Megumi showed vast amounts of emotion at once...

And I was missing it!

The situation was new.

Megumi on the ground, struggling to stay off the ground and bloodied, and a pink haired boy without his shirt on. The context could have definitely been explained a little better, but Megumi was quick to make my hand sign in signal and I was once again a follower happy to have instruction.

My fingers touched together in an upside down heart and dark pink glimmered rapidly from my cursed outlet over to the unaware boy. He gawked out in a shout as vines grew around his body, racing each other to take over the most of him starting from each leg, creeping over his hips and around his torso. His arms laced behind him in a lock after an impressive attempt to curl them away and his lack of balance sent him to his butt.

"H-hey, what the hell?!"

"That's my line." I grumbled out while walking past the teen nonchalantly towards my beaten up classmate nearly gasping for breath. He's rarely so far from composure and I almost wanted to take a photo as proof of the occasion. The others would find it—

"What's this?! What's going on?" Right, the captive with the rather concerning amount of cursed energy that made even me take a step back. I gave him a once over with a frown, crossed one pink covered arm over the other, and tilted my head to examine the red, raging, void-like energy that tried to break out, fiercely, angrily, familiar—

"Oh, aren't you that kid from earlier who tossed that heavy thing?" My fingers snapped as I remembered where I recognized him from. His lips parted and I nodded, ignoring the aghast look as the vines thickened slowly by the inch. "Right! But, this... you didn't have that energy before."

"Right that's me." He said it so plainly as if he were already tired of me, but the stress in his voice was still present with the tension he had forced himself to struggle under. A vine started to slither around his neck and he, much to my surprise, freed an arm with a crack of a vine to grab it in panic. "What- what is this?!"

"Kudzu." My answer was swift and bored like a professor as I played with the pleated braid over my shoulder, watching in amusement as the boy tried with all his bulging muscles and superhuman strength to pull the vine away from his neck centimeter by tortuous centimeter. "A beautiful and useful vine with all kinds of benefits. You can eat every single part of it, use the leaves as medicine, the roots are like potatoes, and the seeds are nice in salads." The giggle left me before I could help it, he'd tried to eat it, but spat it out with a horrified blegh.

The glee found me and elated me, pushing my head into the clouds as I took a few steps to watch the boy wraith below me where he truly belonged. My smile was sweet, enjoying it - him - and it grew as he made a failed attempt at my feet.

"There are hundreds of acres lost to the vine in the world. It suffocates, consumes, destroys everything in its path. Rapidly it grows into something unmanageable and with each attempt to remove it, it grows quicker, stronger, choking violently everything around it until everything bows to it—!"

"You're so dramatic." Megumi interrupted my near frantic speech and my hands dropped to my sides, my chest rising and falling quicker than pre-speech. He grabbed onto the elation I had reached and yanked it backwards, sweeping my feet metaphorically from under me as he casually took control. "He ate it."

I swirled around, power lost and forgotten, to stare wide eyed at my classmates. He ate it. He ate it? He ate it? Ate?

He?

Ate?

It?

"It would have been prevented if you hadn't ran away to flirt around!" He defended in what I secretly could identify as a probable truth although I had said nothing. My stare continued as my mind tried to comprehend the new knowledge and gauge what to do, what action to take. "Soru!"

"He ate it?" I clarified with a jab of thumb to the teen who had managed to free his other arm but now had to fight against two vines trying to kill him. That teen who had so spastically raced away from his school, who paid no attention to my hint to stop struggling, and so annoyingly kept snapping my vines. "Like, it went in his mouth and he just..." I trailed off, still struggling to find words to use for the realization that was slow hitting.

"...Yeah." It seemed to pain Megumi as well, his eyes were a familiar haunted shadow as if he were once again about witness the death, or rather near death, of someone close to him. It was middle school again and we were in the hospital, his sister was there too, but she wasn't sitting next to us.

"So, are you going to do it or should I just go ahead..." my voice trailed off in suggestion as my fingers touched each other, but my eyes remained on Megumi who flinched.

"No." My eyebrows shot up but he didn't rescind his decision, but his eyes were clearer as ours met. He stood from his crouch and I watched his body slowly take back itself in less harsh breaths, but I paused at the familiar hand signs that he messily, reluctantly shoved together. "I can..."

"Megumi..." My warning would do nothing to him, the decision was unmade in his eyes, but his body continued with the nuclear preparations. I tried to reach out, but he was so far away, even though my hand had met his shoulder and he—

"What's going on here?"

He stopped, shoulders dropping and eyes closing in unashamed relief like tap water over a burn.

"As if you don't know." My voice cut in as I turned towards our sensei with crossed arms and accusations fired up in my eyes. There he stood, hand in pocket and other hand holding his shopping bag of sweets as if we were meeting up after a trip to the mall.

"Oh man, Megumi, you got the shit beat out of you, man!" Sensei ignored me as he so usually does, but appeared next to me with an arm around my shoulder as if I hadn't been raging at him an hour earlier. My lip curled up in disgust, but the snicker he let out in time with the rise of his phone made me pause. "I can't wait to send this to the second and third years." He declared like a toddler.

"Can I get a copy too?" I asked politely, sweet as sugar, as I looked over the phone to see a frowning, beaten Megumi frozen in time.

"No—" Megumi demanded.

Beep, beep.

A painful grin widened across my face as I took my flashing phone out of my pocket and giggled at the image now stored on my phone, never to be forgotten, even as Megumi closed his eyes in resignation. It was quickly made as my Home Screen and his profile photo without even a second thought.

"Now then, where's the cursed object?" Sensei asked and didn't look up for even a moment while he presumably sent out the images of Megumi's tragic beating to all who knew him. My phone lit up again with a message from Maki about the image and I too fell into a fit of texting as I ignored the outside world. "...Megumi?"

"He let that idiot eat it." My pink manicured pointer finger laid out the culprit, while my eyes remained glued on the screen and my other thumb continued to type away. It was rather interesting at how long he had fought against the plants that tried so hard to suffocate him, even if he could stop it at anytime, but there was now dead foliage around him that stacked higher and higher with each second as he tore them off faster than they could decay into dust.

"...huh?" Sensei paused as he stared at the pink haired teen who blinked over at us after tearing a rather large portion of Kudzo from his body. Gojo-sensei morioned lazily over to the boy. "Hafu-chan, could you...?"

With a sigh, I finished up my final message and sent it with a click, rolling my eyes in time with my phone settling into the pocket of my sweater. My fingers made my upside down heart and the Kudzo became like steel against his body, a material he once could struggle against becoming unmovable within a few seconds. He was forced upright to encounter sensei face to face with a choked gasp of surprise.

"...wow, you really did eat that thing, didn't you?" Sensei chuckled as he walked backward and shook his head as if he had heard the funniest joke from a toddler. "That's hilarious. You can let him go, Hafu-chan."

"But sensei—?"

"Guess who still has clean up duty~!" Even Megumi spared me a glance of what I translated as the sympathy I so deserved. But I relinquished my hold on the teen with a dejected upside down heart in front of my chest. "Now then, can you give us 10 seconds?" Megumi eyed the dessert bag in his arms with distaste and even I had to hold back from judging the words coming out of sensei's mouth about the delicious food. I'd bet a thousand yen that the man didn't even get us any—

"Look out!"

Eyes snapped up and widened. My instincts outweighed my distaste as my hands dropped to form a heart on the ground and my breath caught in my throat at the overwhelming all consuming energy headed straight for us. I didn't bother with sensei - every sorcerer for themselves - and quickly passed as much energy as I could through my body into ground below. "Shield!" I nearly screamed desperately and the roof began to mold below me.

"Sensei—!" Megumi tried to call out but I didn't try.

"—it's going to be my snack for the bullet train!" Sensei continued to rapidly talk, but I didn't listen.

"Shit shit shit." I chanted three times with growing fear as evil crashed in before us into a cloud of smoke and my eyes closed to protect myself from the debris attempting to make me blind. What good was a blind sorcerer anyways? The rubble around us began to settle with the dirt just in time for me to make out the face inches away from me. My shield had just barely grew to my elbows in front of us and froze at the four eyes that cursed my view.

He was suffocating, too much, present, and far away, there yet gone, and oh so painfully all consuming like a black hole. Yet a blessing and a curse he didn't look at me, he looked through me.

I was nothing to the thing in front of me and even the slow climbing of bricks wouldn't stop those red eyes from finding me, suffocating me, ending me, destroying everything that I was—

"I think it's the whip cream inside."

—tiny.

Do you know the feeling of being small? Like you're a cockroach amongst men, or even a cockroach amongst Gods? That knowledge that anything you do won't matter because you are truly just another bug in the world and the universe will continue on with or without you?

Sensei had a way of making anyone feel that way. The way he moved while Megumi and I watched in fake safely behind a wall of bricks forged from the building below us. My hands remained on the ground shaking as I'm reminded just how useless and unnecessary my existence was.

"-7. 8. 9." Sensei stood before us without a sweat or spec of dirt unlike me and Megumi. My outfit was already stained with grey and ash, dully the pink into spots that would never truly come out without damaging the threads. "Wow, so you can control him."

And I am once again reminded how easily forgotten I am.

"What did you do to him?" My shield dropped back into the building, but I bristled at the obvious concern in Megumi's voice. When did this kid gain such an emotion?

"Relax, he's just passed out." Sensei waved the concern off, but the glee in his voice edged on knowing elevation. Knowing that the state of the teen concerned Megumi and there wasn't much in the world that could say that they've ever had such an impact on the stoic boy. "He may have potential as a vessel."

Gojo-sensei was an intentional person. He didn't do very much, if anything, without having a calculated reason. While he seemed like an idiotic baboon with a death wish, there was always something going on in the mad mind of his. Which is why he specifically turned to Megumi.

"Now, what do you think we should do with him?" My teeth clenched and fingers fisted into my palms beside me, while Megumi struggled to answer the question. The conversation continued without me and I was forced to stand there like a decoration.

"Now then, I'm going to take care of this mess." Sensei jostled the sack of potatoes that was Sukuna's apparent vessel before finally, finally shifting his body to include me. "Ah! I forgot about you, Hafu-chan!"

"I've been here the entire time—!"

"Do I have to start the clean up song?" He asked patronizingly with a grin on his covered face. I could see his eyebrows move up and down in suggestive detail. "Megumi can stay with you to make sure you clean up this mess. Then, you can help Megumi feel better for leaving him to nearly die to a thousand year old curse!"

"...but sensei, I don't have the energy for all of that." I tried to appeal with a familiar dread sinking in my stomach but the smile never left the silver haired sensei. Instead, he shrugged and began his descent away. "Sensei!"

"Should have thought about the consequences before you broke the rules!" He called out casually as if we were good friends saying goodbye after a night at the movies. He even waved his hand before making his sign to teleport. "Ciao~!"

It was Megumi who moved first, recognizing the punishment for what it was and had the tiniest amount of mercy as he sighed next to me. "Come on, Soru-chan." He rarely uses such honorifics, he must have gotten banged up pretty well, concussion maybe? "It'll be easier to carry you if you're on the first floor at least."

"And here I thought you were caring about me!" I grumbled, but followed my classmate all the same to the stairs. At each point of destruction I grew warier and warier, to the point where my forehead laid against the brick at the door in apprehension.

"This... this is going to suck."

————

A/N: I watched the anime then the movie then read the fanfiction and now I'm obsessed so guess what yo guys get? A fanfiction, yay!