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The waves meet shore every breath of a second where a single lone boy stares blank-eyed into an expansive sea as the world slowly mends itself back together around him.
The tang of dried green seaweed and bent brown reed stalks fought against the stench of smoke in the air, from the burning carcasses and trees and houses and thrones and everything. The city is no more, their livelihood ripped apart from their very eyes by people who still prayed to gods that promised benevolence but offered devastation instead.
Because even after all the prayers and offerings, it was still just a game to them.
It didn’t matter who played the pieces, as long as the gods who pulled the divine strings of life got their checkmate.
Megumi caught sight of a bird over the distance, turning on the wind, then flying back towards the shore where he watched it fade away into the milky hues of the horizon; a jarring, stark contrast from the burning haven on land.
The flight of birds were known to carry messages from the gods, but only skilled priests could read the language of wings. Vividly, he recalls the exact moment Ijichi’s skull cracked on the pavement, spilling blood all over the marble and the blood-curdling cry that instantly ripped through Nobara before Maki bundled her up in her arms. No one left to pass on the message, then.
He feels for the sand in his fingers, the ash in his lungs, reminds himself once in a while to breathe; just as he knows he would if he was still here.
Because deep in his gut, messenger and decoder of the olden language or not, he took on the flightless message and imprinted his own memorandum: that the single light in his life in their barren world was still thriving somewhere, the one who told him they needed only the clothes on their back, the air in their lungs, the small humble hut by the hill; that that was all they needed to live.
He knows it’s real the same way he knows the same boy who promised him all these things wasn’t lying deep in the wastes of the god-manufactured war, that he didn’t end up another pawn in the relentless pity party of the gods that happened every so often if their honour was so much as doubted and their fragile insecurities wreaked havoc in return.
In his silent gazing of the waves, Megumi tries recalling the last moment it all went haywire and the death-grip he had on Yuji loosened across the rumble; with Nobara having to fetch him from the make-shift evacuation center he was hurled into by the mass of townspeople and setting him aside and having the audacity to tell him lies.
It started simple at first.
Like how Nanami supposedly found a fragment of an emerald anklet by one of the more hopeless areas of the capitol, the same pendant they gave each other in their first year to signal that no matter how rocky the terrain would be from then on; they would always, always find their way back to each other.
If not that, then perhaps it was more fraudulent to think so, that it was the same man who took a wandering and lost Yuji who had nothing as his own; that it was Nanami who helped him gain his bearings in this life is also the one to coincidentally see him off in the next one.
Nobara, in an attempt to placate him, had added gently with tears still streaming down her face: don’t you think it’s at least fitting somehow, Megumi, that it was at least someone he knew?
Megumi doesn't even care to consider it. They were all lies.
Deceitful promises of a cathartic end to a cruel fate that was never in the cards for any of them. Nobara was lying. Everyone was burdened with the spirits of tortured souls and lingering ghosts in this godforsaken land they could no longer call home because the gods took away any semblance of belonging altogether.
Nanami didn’t find any body and the final count wasn’t going to be up until next week and even then—especially then—Megumi would not believe.
Some days after, Megumi is still staring into the deep abyss of the muted sea by nightfall, different fires set up all over the shore blanketing what is left of the city in a temporary break from their cold-stone weeping and have them take on some of the begrudging warmth at having made it out alive in spite.
There is a rustling of sandy grains somewhere to his right. Megumi doesn't even need to turn his head to know who has settled himself beside him. He grunts in a low voice raspy from misuse: “Archer.”
The sun god took on a human form for this interaction, but no amount of subduing himself into mortality can fan out the embers of his bright, blue eyes that weren’t found on any other human being. Snickering, he admonishes, “No son of Zeus has ever looked as grim as you do now, boy.”
Casually, Megumi notes that there are no stars tonight. A barren wasteland for an empty sky.
There hasn’t been a single glimmer in the sky for the three days they have set up camp by the sandy shores, weeping for their loss. It has been three days, too, that Megumi has not mourned with them.
“Not a good time, Gojo,” he uses the oracle deity’s given name, because the fire was burning out and the cold was starting to seep in and the god of light is one of the last companies he would ever want to be around with right now. “Tell the old man I’m not giving up.”
“On the contrary, kid,” the man-god-poet turns to pin the demi-god with a serious look. “He brought me down here to let you in on a tip. Toji has always had a soft spot for you, even if you don’t believe it.”
Megumi turns to regard the arrow-wielding immortal.
Gojo smirks, and some of his divinity pours out, engulfing the younger man in the process of throwing some bit of hope in his heart so desperate to cling for it.
“How would you like to pay a visit to your uncle Hades?”