Chapter 6: The Morning After
The first thing he noticed was the silence. It wasn't peaceful. It was a thick, smothering quiet that amplified every hesitant beat of his heart. The distant hum of the city was gone, swallowed by the hour or the mansion's profound insulation.
Megumi opened his eyes. The chandelier was off. Gray predawn light seeped around the edges of the silk curtains, painting the room in tones of ash and regret. He was on his side, curled tight. A deep, throbbing ache radiated from his core, a persistent echo of the night. His throat was sandpaper raw. His jaw felt unhinged.
He stretched a leg. The sheets, cold and stiff in patches against his skin, pulled. They smelled overwhelmingly of sex, of sweat, of them. And underneath it, the faint, sharp ghost of expensive whiskey.
He was alone.
The space beside him, where Sukuna had finally sprawled after the shower, was empty, the velvet duvet smoothed down as if no one had ever been there. The other side, where Toji had passed out snoring, bore only a deep impression in the pillow. Satoru’s sunglasses were not on the nightstand.
Megumi pushed himself up. The movement sent a flash of pain through his hips, a tender protest from overused muscles. He winced, pulling the sheet with him. The marks were everywhere in the dull light. Purple fingerprints bloomed on his thighs. A ring of bruised skin, a perfect negative of teeth, marred the inside of his arm. His neck was a landscape of darkening souvenirs—hickeys, bites, the burn of stubble rash.
He brought his fingers to the worst one, just above his collarbone. He pressed. The pain was sharp, clarifying. Real.
Then he saw it. A single piece of thick, cream-colored stationery, torn roughly from a notebook, placed on Sukuna’s pillow. His own monogram was embossed at the top. The writing was a slashing, aggressive script in black ink.
Good girl.
We'll be in touch.
-S
That was all. No explanation. No promise of when. No thanks.
Megumi picked it up. The paper felt expensive, trivial. He read the three lines again. Good girl. The words from the bathroom, the final patronizing stroke. His stomach twisted, but not with revulsion. A hollow, yearning ache opened up beneath the physical soreness. It was sharper than before, because now he knew exactly what could fill it.
The emptiness of the mansion crashed back in, but it was different now. It wasn't just empty of people; it was empty of them. Their laughter, their commanding voices, the heavy weight of their attention. The silence here was no longer just lonely. It was an indictment.
He slid out of bed, the cool air hitting his soiled skin. He limped to the massive attached bathroom. The lights were off, but the faint scent of their body wash—something cedar and brutal—still hung in the steam-damp air. Three damp towels were heaped on the marble floor. They’d used his things. They’d left their mess.
He didn't clean it up. He stood before the gilt-framed mirror, a pale, painted ghost in the gray light. He looked wrecked. His hair was a wild tangle. His eyes were shadowed, his lips slightly swollen. The bites on his neck stood out like violent jewelry. He traced the line of his throat, down to the tender swell of a breast, over a nipple that was still sensitive.
He looked used. Thoroughly.
A strange, fractured sound escaped him. It wasn't a laugh. It wasn't a sob. It was the noise of something settling into a new, uncomfortable shape.
He shuffled back into the bedroom. His phone was on the floor, near a discarded whiskey bottle, its screen dark. He picked it up, turned it on. No new messages. No missed calls. The lock screen was a generic nature photo he’d never bothered to change.
We'll be in touch.
When? The uncertainty was a live wire under his skin. Was it a polite brush-off? The kind of thing you said to be rid of someone? Or was it a genuine promise, a sentence hanging over him, waiting to be enacted?
He crawled back into the bed, into the cold, scented hollow they’d left. He pulled Sukuna’s pillow to his face and inhaled deeply. Cigarettes, that cedar soap, the undeniable, musky scent of the man himself. It was foul. It was intoxicating.
He clutched the note in his other hand, the paper crinkling in his fist.
The dawn brightened, painting the expensive room in sterile, clear light. It illuminated the empty bottles, the crumpled sheets, the lone, marked-up boy in the center of it all. He didn't sleep. He waited. Every soft creak of the ancient mansion made his heart stutter. Every minute that ticked by on his phone without a notification made the hollow inside him yawn wider.
He was theirs now. He knew it in the marrow-deep ache, in the way his eyes kept darting to the silent phone. The real horror, the one that crept in as the sun fully rose, wasn't that they had taken him. It was the dawning, pathetic terror that they might not come back to take him again.