Chapter 17: The Therapist's Trigger
The lavender in the air was supposed to be calming. It just smelled like rot to Megumi. Like something sweet trying to cover up something dead. She sat in the deep red armchair, her feet not quite touching the floor, and picked at a loose thread on the hem of her skirt. It was short, denim, frayed at the edges. She’d worn a thin, oversized grey sweater over her tank top, a concession to the office’s chill, but the fabric was so worn it was nearly translucent. She felt naked. Exposed. The books watched her from their shelves, leather-bound judges.
Dr. Arisawa sat opposite, a notebook balanced on her knee. She was older, maybe fifty, with kind eyes and a quiet voice that never rose above a certain gentle register. It made Megumi’s skin crawl. Kindness was a trick. It always was.
“How have the past few days been, Megumi?” she asked, pen poised.
“Fine.” The word was automatic, hollow.
“Sukuna mentioned you had a difficult morning last week. Before Yuji woke up.”
Megumi’s head snapped up. “He told you that?”
“He’s concerned. He’s your emergency contact. He said you were… distressed. He helped calm you down.”
A hot, sickly wave of something—betrayal? pride?—washed through her. He’d talked about her. He’d called it ‘distressed.’ Not ‘she sucked my dick and then cried.’ He’d sanitized it for the doctor. Protected her. Protected himself. The anchor. He was keeping their secret.
“He helped,” Megumi whispered, looking back at her lap. The thread came free with a tiny pull.
“How did he help?”
He put his hand on my throat and told me I was a good girl. “He just… talked to me. Got me to breathe.” She could feel the ghost of his palm against her neck, a brand beneath her sweater.
Dr. Arisawa nodded, making a note. The scratch of pen on paper was deafening. “You’ve described this fixation on him before. This belief that you’re destined to be with him. That you’re meant to be Yuji’s mother. In our last session, you agreed it might be… a fantasy. A coping mechanism.”
“It’s not a fantasy,” Megumi said, but the fire was gone from it. It was a dull, heavy stone in her gut.
“What does it feel like, when you think about it?”
“It feels… necessary. Like if I don’t make it real, I’ll dissolve. I’ll just float away. He’s… solid. He’s there.” She swallowed. “The static stops.”
“The static.”
“The noise. In my head. The bad thoughts.” She didn’t elaborate. The thoughts were pictures, movies. Sukuna’s hands, but different. Older hands. A woman’s hands, soft and scented with lotion, holding her down saying shhh, it’s love, it’s how we show love. Yuji’s trusting face morphing, twisting into something leering. Her own body, responding, wet and eager even when her mind was screaming. That was the worst part—the betrayal of her own flesh. The wetness that came unbidden, a cruel joke. She was always wet. In the grocery store. On the bus. Reading Yuji a bedtime story. It was a constant, humiliating reminder that her body was not her own. It was a traitorous, hungry thing.
“And being with Sukuna, in the way you imagine, silences those thoughts?”
“Yes.”
Dr. Arisawa put her pen down. She leaned forward slightly, her expression softening into something that looked like pity. Megumi braced herself. Pity was the precursor to pain.
“Megumi, I need to ask you something difficult. And I want you to really think about it.” She paused. “Is it possible that this pursuit of Sukuna, this need to make yourself… sexually indispensable to him… is actually a form of self-harm?”
The air left the room.
The words hung between them. Self-harm. They weren’t clinical or distant anymore. They were concrete. They were a scalpel slipped between her ribs.
Self-harm.
The lavender smell intensified, choking her. It wasn’t lavender. It was the glycerin soap she used to use, the one with the floral scent. The bookshelves seemed to lean in. The deep red of the armchair wasn’t fabric—it was a stain, spreading.
Dr. Arisawa’s face wavered. Her kind eyes sharpened, her features rearranging themselves, melting and reforming like wax. The neat grey hair grew longer, darker, falling in a soft curtain. The professional blouse blurred into a silk kimono robe, loosely tied.
It’s not her.
Megumi’s breath hitched. A high, thin whine started in her ears.
“You see, my little blossom,” the not-doctor said, and the voice was all wrong, it was syrup and poison, “you always did confuse pain with love. You’d come to me, so upset, and I’d have to make it better. You needed the correction. It was for your own good.”
“No,” Megumi choked out. She was shrinking, folding in on herself. The chair was too big. She was six. She was ten. She was sixteen and locked in the bathroom with the razor.
“You’re doing it again. Making yourself a nuisance for a man who doesn’t want you. Being a desperate little slut. It’s pathetic. You’re hurting yourself, Megumi. You always do. It’s the only thing you’re good for.”
The small wooden table between them, holding a box of tissues and a glass of water, became the vanity table in her bedroom. The glass was the bottle of perfume she’d break, trying to use a shard to dig the feeling out of her veins.
“Stop,” Megumi whispered.
“He doesn’t love you. He pities you. He uses you. And you let him because you think you deserve it. You’re harming yourself. Over and over. Just like you did with me.”
“STOP!”
It wasn’t a word. It was a raw, animal sound ripped from the base of her throat. She launched forward, her hands connecting with the edge of the table. It wasn’t heavy. It flipped, crashing onto its side. The glass of water exploded against the leg of Dr. Arisawa’s chair, showering them both in cold water and jagged shards.
The noise broke the spell.
Dr. Arisawa jolted back, her real face snapping into place, eyes wide with shock and alarm. “Megumi!”
But Megumi was already moving. She stumbled out of the chair, her vision tunnelled to the door. The world was a roaring, crashing cacophony. The static wasn’t in her head—it was the room, it was her blood, it was the scream still echoing in her lungs. She yanked the office door open and fled into the cool, sterile hallway.
She ran. She didn’t know where. The carpet muffled her footsteps. Doors lined the hall, discreet numbers on plaques. Safe spaces where people unpacked their pain politely. She wasn’t polite. She was a feral thing, leaking terror.
Her legs gave out halfway to the elevator bank. She slid down the wall, her back scraping against the textured wallpaper, until she collapsed in a heap on the floor. She pulled her knees to her chest, wrapped her arms around them, and began to rock. Forward and back. Forward and back. The rhythm was ancient, instinctive.
The sobs came then, great, heaving things that tore at her diaphragm. They were silent at first, just violent shudders, then they escaped as choked, wet gasps. She cried for the girl in the kimono. She cried for the hands that weren’t Sukuna’s. She cried for the therapist’s shattered glass and the ruined session. She cried because the doctor was right. She was harming herself. She was a open wound, begging for salt.
Poison. You’re poison. You ruin everything you touch. You ruined her, you’ll ruin Sukuna, you’ll ruin Yuji. A broken, dirty thing. No one can fix you. No one should even try.
The intrusive thoughts came not as words, but as certainty. They were facts engraved on her bones. She was contamination.
She didn’t know how long she sat there. Time bled. The hallway was empty, a quiet purgatory.
Then, a presence. A shift in the air. Heavy footsteps on the carpet, approaching fast.
She didn’t look up. She kept rocking.
The footsteps stopped. She saw his shoes first. Expensive, polished leather. Then the hem of his dark trousers. He stood over her for a long moment, saying nothing. She could feel his gaze like a physical weight.
Slowly, he lowered himself. Not sitting, but kneeling on one knee in front of her, bringing himself closer to her level. He was still so much bigger. A mountain blocking the hall.
“Megumi.”
She flinched at her name. Kept rocking.
He reached out, his movement deliberate. His hand aimed for her shoulder, to still her, to anchor her like he’d promised.
The moment his fingers brushed the thin wool of her sweater, she recoiled violently. She scrambled back, her head hitting the wall with a dull thud. Her eyes, wild and swimming with tears, finally focused on him. The look in them was pure, undiluted terror. Not of him, but of herself reflected in him.
“Don’t,” she rasped, her voice shredded. “Don’t touch me.”
Sukuna’s hand froze in the air. He withdrew it, letting it fall to his knee. His expression was hard, closed off, but a muscle ticked in his jaw. “The doctor called. She said you had an episode. That you ran.”
“I’m poison,” Megumi whispered, the words bubbling up from somewhere dark. “She said… she said I was hurting myself. With you. She’s right. I am. I’m… I’m broken. All the way through. You can’t glue this back together.”
“That’s not what therapy is for,” he said, his voice low. “It’s not about glue.”
“It’s about seeing the rot!” she cried, her volume spiking in the quiet hall. A door down the corridor opened a crack, then quickly shut. “She made me see it! I’m… I’m replaying it. I’m trying to make you… make you do what they did. Because it’s familiar. Because I don’t know how to want anything else.” She hugged herself tighter, nails digging into her own arms through the sweater. “I’m trying to destroy myself, and I’m using you to do it. You should… you should let me go. Before I pull you down into it. Before I… before I do something to Yuji.”
The last part was the deepest shame, spoken in a breathless rush of horror. The worst intrusive thought, the one that came when she was tucking him in, his small hand trusting in hers. A flash of something ugly and wrong. It made her want to peel her own skin off.
Sukuna went very still. The air around him seemed to grow colder. “What did you say?”
“Not like that!” she sobbed, understanding his sudden, rigid fear. “I would never! I love him! But my brain… my brain is sick. It shows me… bad pictures. It tells me I’ll corrupt him just by being near him. That my sickness is contagious. And it is. Look at you. You were… you were normal. Before me. Now you’re here, on the floor of a psych office, because I can’t keep the chaos inside my own head. I’m leaking it everywhere.”
She was spiralling, the words tumbling out in a chaotic flood. “Let me go. Fire me. Change your number. Get a restraining order. I’ll… I’ll find another way to finish it. But not near you. Not near him. Please.”
She was begging him to abandon her. It was the most loving thing she could think to do.
Sukuna watched her. He saw the absolute conviction in her tear-streaked face. She believed every word. She believed she was a doomed, toxic organism. And part of him, the rational, self-preserving part, knew she might be right. This was a bottomless pit. He could throw everything he had into it and it would never fill. It would just swallow the light.
But then he saw the girl who made dinosaur pancakes with blueberry eyes. The girl who remembered Yuji’s favourite bedtime story without being prompted. The girl who, even now, was trying to protect them from the monster she believed lived in her skin.
He let out a long, weary breath. It was the sound of a man stepping off a cliff.
“Get up,” he said, his voice flat.
“What?”
“I said get up, Megumi.” He pushed himself to his feet, towering over her again. He held out his hand, not to touch her, but as an offer. A command. “You’re coming home.”
She stared at his hand as if it were a snake. “Did you not hear me? I’m—”
“I heard you. You’re a mess. You’re suicidal. You’re scared you’re going to hurt my kid. I heard it all.” His hand didn’t waver. “None of that changes the fact that you have a job to do. Yuji expects you for dinner. He helped me make the meatloaf. It’s probably a fucking disaster, but he’s proud of it. So get your ass off this floor and do your job.”
It was the most Sukuna thing he could have said. No comfort. No platitudes. No ‘it’s going to be okay.’ Just blunt, practical obligation. An anchor in the form of dry, likely inedible, meatloaf.
The absurdity of it, the sheer normalcy, was a life-raft. The chaotic flood of self-loathing hit a wall made of mundane responsibility. She stopped rocking. Her sobs dwindled to shaky hiccups.
Slowly, unsteadily, she uncurled. She placed her small, trembling hand in his. His fingers closed around hers, engulfing them completely. He didn’t pull her up gently. He just pulled, his strength effortlessly lifting her to her feet. She swayed, lightheaded.
He didn’t let go of her hand immediately. He held it, his grip firm, anchoring her to the solid reality of the hallway, the fluorescents, the scent of floor cleaner instead of lavender.
“The doctor…” Megumi mumbled, looking back toward the office door.
“I’ll handle it. Wait by the elevator.” He let go and strode down the hall, his posture radiating a don’t-fuck-with-me energy.
Megumi shuffled to the elevator, leaning against the wall. She heard the low rumble of his voice through the door, too muffled to make out words. A minute later, he emerged, his face grim. He punched the elevator button.
They rode down in silence. The elevator music was a chirpy instrumental. Megumi watched their reflection in the bronze doors—a giant and a ghost. Her eyes were swollen, her mascara a disaster. His expression was unreadable.
In the underground parking garage, the click of his key fob echoed. He opened the passenger door of his black SUV for her. She climbed in, the familiar scent of leather and his cologne wrapping around her. It was safer than lavender.
He drove in silence for several blocks, weaving through the early evening traffic. The city lights began to blur past, streaks of gold and white.
“I’m not going to fire you,” he said suddenly, his eyes on the road.
“You should.”
“Probably.” He adjusted his grip on the wheel. “But I’m not going to. And you’re not going to quit.”
“Why?” The question was a plea for meaning.
He was quiet for a long time. “Because you’re right. You are trying to destroy yourself. And you’re trying to use me to do it. I see that now.” He glanced at her, his profile sharp in the dashboard lights. “But you asked me to let you go so you could ‘finish it’ somewhere else. That’s not happening. If you’re going to self-destruct, you’re going to do it where I can see you. Where I can… manage the blast radius.”
It was the coldest, most unromantic version of care she could imagine. He wasn’t saving her. He was containing her. He was accepting his role as the keeper of a dangerous, unstable thing. It was, in its own fucked-up way, a commitment deeper than any love letter. He was signing up for the shrapnel.
Megumi looked at him, truly looked at him. The exhaustion around his eyes. The set of his shoulders, carrying a weight that wasn’t his to bear. He was in it. All the way in. Not as a lover, but as a warden. A lifeline made of barbed wire.