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“Do you really have to go?”
Megumi stiffened, the hands hovering by his knapsack wavering in their rigorous packing of bare essentials for the journey he would embark on. The days were going to drag and the nights would be cold, but he would make it home: that much was a non-issue.
Turning, Megumi fixed Yuji with what he hoped was a comforting smile. “I’ll be fine. Yuuta made it back once, remember?”
Yuji narrowed his eyes, scoffing. “Barely. And no sooner than he had come in, Inumaki had run out in his stead making him run about again. Surely I don’t need to remind you, Megumi, that we’ve been short a soldier and a cook ever since.”
“I know, okay, ” Megumi sighed, turning back to stuffing barks of wood he hoped would last a full night of fire in the satchel. “Which is exactly why I have to be the one to do this. Toji left me in charge.”
Yuji pushed himself off the make-shift straw bed they fashioned out of old rags of clothes and then stitched together. He paused directly in front of him, still silent, prompting Megumi to look up at him. “What?”
He doesn’t reply. Not for a few moments, but still, his gaze holds: arresting and comforting all at once.
Childish as he was when it came naturally, Yuji was the backbone of steel that had kept them upright the moment they first heard the trees whisper.
Yuju had kept Megumi, more than anyone, grounded in his very core. Above water with a steady foundation he could feel the ground beneath him, still, rumbling and not shattering with every step.
Yuji did not need to tell him about the horrors he would face and the horrors he would chance upon—knowing all too well he already knew. Nanami had been told of what happened to Haibara beforehand, who had gone before him; and it had spooked one of their strongest soldiers so much he didn’t come back from it ever.
Nanami was, to Yuji, the father he never had.
He did not need to tell him all about this, either, because Megumi had known without the need for telling.
Megumi sighed, shoulders sagging ever so slightly under his unyielding gaze, as the reality of their situation threatened to break his own engineered indifference.
“I know you’re worried, but I will make it back,” Megumi promised; and then added more carefully: “I always do, don’t I?”
They had lost too many, the oldest of them swiped beneath the very soiled ground they trekked on every day come the night’s hollering; but too many, too, they had to keep fed and clothed and survived.
They had to keep going somehow, didn't they?
There had been many rumours about that forest.
Some ludicrous and other-wordly, but mostly in the vein of: flesh eating biological abominations shunned into exile, nymphs of deceiving nature who lured travelers into demise with their spellbinding lullabies and vicious claws, long-vined branches twisting and tangling villagers until their very last breath.
What they were certain of was, however, only this: every time they sent someone out to check exactly what it was that lurked behind the trees, there had been no one back to tell the tale.
It wasn’t until they lost the absolute last of the eldest council, Getou, to the wailing tree nymphets that their predecessors had begun slowly scouting the area beyond the backwoods.
And so began the slow roster of sending barely grown teenagers up the murky depths of the woodland, until, blessedly: Yuuta had returned.
The first true success of what had seemed like a hopeless damnation of their souls. He was bloodied and lost most of what had made him so profoundly human, but clawed back to the village he did.
Inumaki was gone the very next day, but, in a last-ditch effort to save his friend: Yuuta snuck out of bed rest and followed him back in.
That was a week ago. They couldn’t afford to wait any longer.
Toji had been the village leader, and by succession after the whispers had gotten to him, too, Megumi stood next in line to keep up order.
When Maki wakes up the next morning, she would find a parcel filled with strict orders on what to do next signed by the last Fushiguro on the door of her shared hut with Nobara.
“Spill even a single drop of blood in the forest,” Yuji warned. “And the tree roots will tear you to shreds.”
Megumi smiled to himself, positioning the duffel sack more snugly into his shoulder as they walked side by side towards the village entrance. The biting chill of dusk was palpable in the air and Yuji was stalling.
“I know,” Megumi said in a lighthearted tone that showed no real processing of the warning thrown his way. “No sleeping under riverbanks, right? And what was it Yuuta had also said—ah, yes, singing to keep the sirens away. Anything else, sir?”
Yuji stopped dead in his tracks, no traces of amusement in his voice. “I’m serious, Megumi.”
Megumi couldn’t help it then. He laughed.
He began chuckling, out loud and unapologetic and somehow feeling free for the first time in forever. Something about marching straight to his death should have struck terror right into his heart, sure, but somehow he found the absurdity of their entire situation amusing.
Megumi was adamant to make it home, after all, the when and what and how were just peripherals; he wouldn’t entertain any other outcome.
Yuji, obviously, already had. And then some.
Yuji who had, for the whole duration of his slight breakdown, stayed rooted in his spot staring at him incredulously. Not even a ghost of a smile alighted his face.
Megumi shouldn’t have found it endearing, but he did, so maybe he was really going insane?
Megumi breaks the short distance and closes the gap between them, linking their fingers together and resting his forehead against his. Breathing in the chilly air and taking on some of his growing anxiety into him, Megumi tries to ignore the pang in his heart when he registers the glassy in Yuji’s eyes.
“What is a few days, to us who have shared a lifetime?”