Chapter Text
Everything contradicted itself.
The dull crunch of already broken chips of concrete under his shoes could have doubled for the sound of breaking through the top layer of snow when it had melted just so, then frozen back over, but the late August sun was far too searing, the air much too humid, his face red from heat instead of cold. The fact that so many buildings on their campus were empty was usually eerie, and it always made him feel like a trespasser, but now that he stood among so many which had been utterly flattened, he was both grateful for how vacant they’d been, and felt even more out of place in the wreckage.
Nanami Kento had wanted to strangle Gojo Satoru so frequently in the few months he’d known him, but Gojo Satoru was supposed to be incapable of dying. Despite this, there Nanami stood, alive and well (as well as Nanami ever got, anyway), over a body.
Gojo Satoru wasn’t supposed to be able to be just… a body. He was supposed to be the strongest, and above the petty concerns of normal people.
Petty concerns like dying, and being dead.
Despite this, Gojo Satoru lay in the kind of devastation that only he could cause, prone in the shattered concrete he’d left in his own wake. At that moment, he was more holes than person. His left leg was a mangled mess, bone, muscle, tendon, all clearly visible. Nanami carefully rolled him over. Why was he being careful? What damage could he do that hadn’t been done already? Nanami was careful anyway, doing his best to lower Gojo's shoulder to the ground instead of letting it drop like the inert mass that it was.
Face up, he stopped being Gojo Satoru the concept, the strongest sorcerer, the body that couldn't possibly be a body, and became Gojo, Nanami's annoying classmate who had just turned sixteen at the end of last year. Nanami turned Gojo’s face up so that it wasn't half pressed into the grit. It was a terrible mess, covered in dust. Nanami tried to brush the shards of concrete from Gojo’s skin, but with every gentle swipe, another streak of red replaced the dust. The shards stuck to Gojo’s blood all over Nanami’s hands instead.
There was a small cut on Gojo’s forehead, but it looked… wrong. There was too much of a gap, and it wasn’t bloody enough. Facial wounds always bled and bled, looking worse than they were. It made a twisted sort of sense that this one was so much worse than it looked in the same, inverse way. Gojo had been stabbed in the forehead, where the bone was only six and a half millimeters thick. No thicker than the cardboard box full of books Nanami opened this morning.
There wasn't any knife he could find to give him an idea of the depth of the wound. The part of his mind which remained rational told him that those details didn't matter when the person was already dead.
He needed to report this to someone. He pulled out his phone to try to reach Yaga, or Ieiri. Instincts from his life before sorcery told him he should be calling the police, that this was a crime scene, but he ignored them as best he could. Nanami was vaguely aware that he was probably disassociating. He did that a lot, when fighting, when witnessing disaster, when regarding the dead.
His phone clattered from his hand onto the broken pavement as he felt cursed energy pulse within Gojo’s body, like a wave moving underneath a boat. It was a single weak throb, and then nothing for a full minute. The second pulse was stronger, the third stronger still, the lapse between them diminishing, each one the foreshock of a greater quake that was sure to follow.
This was, potentially, the worst case scenario: Gojo Satoru becoming a vengeful spirit. Nanami didn't know the circumstances of Gojo's death, aside from the fact that it had been brutally violent. A violent death on the heels of a failed mission was an ideal environment to create a vengeful spirit; Nanami had no idea if he could do anything to stop it now.
He took a deep breath, sat back on his heels, took out his wrapped sword, and looked at Gojo’s neck. A vertical line from the top of his head to his hip marking a point there between seven and three appeared, scoring just under the protrusion of the laryngeal prominence.
Gojo’s eyes snapped open before Nanami could raise the weapon. The horrible absence on his forehead healed, a line of silvery scar tissue left behind. The other wounds started to heal as well, but Nanami barely registered it.
Gojo’s eyes were different.
His eyes had always been terrifying, the few times that he had inflicted them on Nanami without sunglasses. They were an impossible blue, the color of inevitability, of inescapable gravity. One would think that such a color would be black, but no. Light, when moving toward the observer, was doppler-shifted towards blue. Gojo’s eyes were the blue of the light that raced towards a person who was already caught in a black hole.
Now, though, the color moved, spun, and its motion could not be comprehended, yet that color comprehended everything.
Gojo sat bolt upright with a gasp, blinking several times before his terrible gaze finally registered who was in front of him. Whatever reaction he was expecting, Nanami did not anticipate for Gojo’s hand to grasp the back of his neck with that unbeatable speed and pull him forward so that they were pressed close, brow to brow, breathing one another’s air. Gojo laughed, and laughed, and maybe this was the actual worst case, a Gojo Satoru at his full strength who had gone completely mad.
“What a fun sight to wake up to!” Gojo laughed, the drying blood on his hand dragging through Nanami’s hair so hard that he winced. “Nanami, Nanami, Kento-kun, I figured it out. I figured it all out.”
”You were dead,” was all Nanami could think to say. Gojo smiled, wide and weirdly content, and he rocked his head gently back and forth against Nanami’s.
"Death will always have halfway more to go before it gets to me, Kento-kun. Now, as much as I love it when you pay attention to me, I have a rematch to get to.”
Gojo got to his feet, backlit by the sun, his hair a corona of white flame. He leaned down and placed a gentle hand on Nanami’s cheek, like Nanami was the one who’d been hurt.
“Don’t get in my way, okay?”
He tapped Nanami on the nose with one bloodied finger and vanished.
Nanami just sat there for a moment, in the concrete, in the blood, because, despite the violence of killing curses who were trying to kill him, nothing in his experience had prepared him for… whatever this was. He watched his body get up off the ground, and then his feet took him back to the safer part of campus without his conscious thought, back to his dorms, back to his room to drop his bag, into the washroom, where he ran out of steps to take.
When he went to wash up and looked himself in the mirror, his skin and hair were streaked a muddy red-black with Gojo’s blood, and there were still fragments of concrete on his face. He picked the larger ones off, not wanting to damage the school’s plumbing by washing them down the drain, and stopped.
There was one fragment stuck to his cheek, too thin to be concrete, the wrong shade of pale. Nanami picked it off and washed it, careful not to lose it down the drain.
It was a fragment of bone, the same size and shape as the mark of scar tissue on Gojo’s forehead, about six and a half millimeters thick.
Nanami wanted to laugh, because there was absolutely no etiquette for this situation. Did he just… throw it away? Burn it in a cremation fire? Return it to its owner?
He put it in his water glass to separate it from the concrete chunks. He stripped down, showered, washing away the remaining blood and grit. When he emerged and wiped the steam from the mirror, he was completely unharmed, not even a scratch from the concrete.
The bone still awaited in his water glass. He left it there and got dressed in sweats. It was still there when he looked at it a third time.
He dried it off, and put it on his bed, the white standing out against the dark blue pillowcase. He cut out a large square of the lining of his ruined uniform jacket (the school had asked what modifications he would like on his uniform, and he hadn’t wanted to stick out by requesting nothing at all, so he just asked for the lining to be blue. He didn’t specify, and the blue chosen at random had been a deep blue with a hint of green), finding a patch that didn’t have any blood on it. He dug the matches he kept for when Ieiri’s cheap lighter inevitably ran out of butane out of his pocket and dumped out the box. He dampened the heads in the sink and then threw them out.
He sat on the edge of his bed, careful not to dislodge the shard, and folded almost all of the cloth until it was a small cushion in his fingers. He put it into the matchbox, placed the bone shard on top, and folded the last bit of fabric over the top.
The lid slid home, but it still didn’t seem like protection enough, like enough of a secret. Nanami was not prepared to discuss or explain why he’d kept this literal piece of his classmate when he didn’t understand why he was doing it himself.
He pulled the small black trunk from under his bed and unlocked it with the combination (no sevens, no threes, no multiples of either. He wasn’t that obvious.) and lifted the lid.
The item at the top of the chest was a copy of his favorite Murakami book, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, both because he treasured it and because he hoped that, if it was broken into, someone would just assume it contained books. Beneath that, there was his back-up weapon, a cursed-object hatchet in a leather holster, a tiny album of family photos, and, at last, his grandfather’s sweater, thick and dark gray with rings of glacier-blue patterns across the chest and shoulders.
Nanami unrolled the sweater from its tight bundle carefully, and removed a tiny object from the center, further wrapped in a threadbare handkerchief.
Inside was another piece of bone, carved into the shape of a lynx. It was a gift from his Danish grandfather, who had no idea how old it was, other than older than his own grandfather. Decades of being handled had turned the bone the color of dark honey, and it felt warm and alive every time Nanami held it. He let himself indulge for a moment, then folded it back in the handkerchief. He put the matchbox next to the shrouded lynx in the sweater, and repacked the chest.
Nanami didn’t ask the lynx to keep an eye on the contents of the box, to look after this little shard of a person who didn’t even need it, but as he clicked the lock home, he thought it in spite of himself.