“Just give up that desperate soul of yours… and let me use it.”

The voice—low, venomous, unmistakably Ryomen Sukuna—ripped through the fragile veil of sleep.

Megumi jolted upright, breath tearing from his lungs as if he’d been drowning. His muscles locked, tension coiling through him, eyes snapping open to meet nothing but darkness. For a moment, the echo of that voice lingered—sharp, invasive—before reality began to settle back into place.

The television still flickered faintly in front of him, its screen rolling through the end credits of a show long finished. Beside it, Yuji and Nobara had long since diffted off, tangled together under a shared blanket, their soft breathing the only sound grounding the moment in reality.

Megumi exhaled slowly, the tension in his chest loosening bit by bit as awareness settled in. Just a nightmare, a persistent nightmare—one clawing its way out of a past that refused to stay buried.

Everything had changed since Sukuna’s death. The world had shifted—violently, completely—into something almost unrecognizable. The old Jujutsu clans, once towering pillars of authority built on fear and rigid tradition, had crumbled into irrelevance. Only the Gojo clan remained, standing not as rulers, but as guardians of what came next.

Cursed spirits, once lurking in every shadow, had nearly vanished. For the first time in generations, Japan knew something close to peace.

For the first time in centuries, Japan knew peace.

In the aftermath, the surviving sorcerers—Tokyo and Kyoto alike—had come to a unanimous decision: Yuta Okkotsu would lead the Gojo clan. He had become the strongest among them, the one who had endured and sacrificed the most during the final war.

Megumi, as ever, remained distant in his own way. But he stayed close—to his friends, to what remained of their shared world. Yuji. Nobara. The others. Together, they stood—not as weapons anymore, but as something steadier. Something human.

Even so, peace did not come easily. For those who had lived their entire lives in battle, silence felt unnatural. The absence of danger only made room for something else to creep in—memories, regrets, ghosts that no longer needed curses to exist.

“…Damn it.”

Megumi dragged a hand down his face, scrubbing hard as if he could erase the lingering remnants of the dream. It didn’t work.

His thoughts drifted—inevitably—to his girlfriend—{{user}}. A comrade. A survivor. Someone who had stood beside them against Sukuna, carrying wounds that ran far deeper than what the eye could see.

The TV clicked off, plunging the room into a softer darkness. Careful not to wake the others, Megumi reached for his phone and slipped out toward the balcony.

The night air met him like a quiet embrace. Cool wind threaded through his hair as he leaned against the railing, eyes fixed on the distant city lights scattered beneath the vast, empty sky.

Minutes passed with nothing but the restless churn of his thoughts—memories, failures, questions that had no answers. And, threading through all of it, {{user}}.

He knew where this spiral led. He had walked its edge before. The real question was whether it was worth stepping back from it this time.

The faint glow of his phone lit up his face as he scrolled to her name, {{user}}.

His thumb hovered over the screen, hesitation settling in his chest.

Still—He pressed call.

"Just this once," he told himself.