Archive of Our Own ^beta

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.

Chapter Text

Within days, nearly everyone was back to pretending that everything was perfectly normal. After Nanami had delivered his succinct version of Gojo’s death and resurrection (“Gojo was dead, but he’s fine now”), Gojo had, apparently, given a more detailed account to Yaga to relay to the higher ups. Like most extraordinary stories, especially ones about Gojo, it spread, and a few versions got back to Nanami, each slightly altered from the last. The most alarming of these alterations to Nanami himself was the fact that he kept hearing his own name in them.

Nanami hadn’t seen so much as the top of Gojo’s head in the distance since the day in the wreckage, both by coincidence and his own design. Engaging with Gojo was tantamount to engaging with the gossip, so Nanami decided to avoid both. If Gojo had really wanted to find him, Nanami wouldn’t have been able to hide, so he assumed that they were on the same page regarding desire to see one another.

Gossip and collective delusions of normalcy aside, Nanami had bigger things to worry him. The possibility of social awkwardness with a revenant classmate was very low on his list of present concerns.

He shifted from foot to foot on the training field, despite being very aware that he was wasting energy and liable to telegraph his moves to his opponent by moving too soon. Haibara wasn’t doing much better, but also wasn't trying to, bouncing like a character from a fighting game in its idle animation with a broad grin plastered over his face.

Across from them stood Mei Mei, the very beautiful and very terrifying grade one student in her fourth year at the school. She barely had classes anymore, and Nanami had heard that she was already charging for her services as a sorcerer, choosing instead to pay the tuition at the school and making a tidy profit. He made a mental note to run the numbers in the next couple years as he anxiously spun his shortsword in his grip.

Yaga stood off to the side to observe and officiate the two-on-one, the first in a series of evaluations to determine the first years’ level, whether they had progressed since their mid-term evaluation before the break, had remained the same, or, worse, regressed. Based on this, Yaga would determine their curriculum through December.

Mei had been selected since Geto and Gojo were both special grades, too powerful for any information to be gleaned from Nanami and Haibara’s inevitable, near-instantaneous defeats, and Iori, Mei’s classmate, was a grade two whose techniques were not primarily conducive to fighting.

Nanami and Haibara were allowed to use any means at their disposal, provided they didn’t kill Mei or each other. Nanami was very concerned that the latter was much more likely than the former.

Three crows circled overhead above them, shadows faint on the ground in the early light. Any one of them could kill Nanami or Haibara in a single strike, if it hit. To counter this, Mei’s technique was modified to be slightly less lethal: She could use the three crows only for perspective. To strike, she had a flock of origami birds which Yaga had made and animated.

Neither Yaga nor Mei was entirely sure that being hit by Paper Bird Strike was guaranteed not to kill anyone. Nanami regarded the flock of paper birds, shiny black with gold and silver veins, angular and strange, with appropriate concern. Nothing about watching the inert birds, glossy works of art, spring to life and stretch their wings, cocking their heads with tiny glowing embers for eyes, made Nanami feel particularly safe.

“How is it already this hot this early?” Haibara asked as if they were all going to the convenience store. He jiggled a bag of rock salt in his hand like a gambler with a cup of dice, but twice as overconfident and three-times as ill-advised.

Nanami shut his eyes, a tension headache starting to pound like a needle in his temple.

“Please focus,” he replied, and winced at Haibara’s carefree laugh rang out. The voices of the crows above them crackled in response. Nanami’s already diminished hopes for this fight dwindled further: The crows were not laughing with them, but at them.

A combined tactic was still something Nanami and Haibara were… ironing out. Their respective techniques contradicted their personalities, particularly Haibara’s. Ratio technique forced Nanami to be a close range fighter, despite that he would’ve preferred to stay a bit further back for strategic perspective. Haibara’s technique was more effective at range, but he always wanted to charge in.

Nanami surveyed the battlefield. Mei had casually strolled to the eastern side of the circle. He estimated they had about ten minutes before the sun crested the building behind her and blinded them, unless they could force her in another direction.

“Go for the birds,” Nanami murmured to Haibara as they walked into the circle intended to represent a barrier. “I’ll go for Mei.”

“What?” Haibara scoffed, eyes locked on Mei and disregarding her flock. “No one’s going to be impressed if I blast a bunch of paper! Shikigami users, you attack the sorcerer, you know that. We should both go after her directly.”

“Haibara—” Nanami hissed, because these were not shikigami, but then Yaga blew his whistle, and it was too late to argue.

Nanami cut a large rift into the ground to Mei’s right, forcing her to leap in the opposite direction until their positions were reversed. Meanwhile, Haibara gave chase, opening his bag and flinging rock salt in an arc around him.

Haibara’s technique, Salt of the Earth, allowed him to manipulate that salt. Naturally, his technique’s efficacy was limited by the environment and the time of year. In the winter, when streets and sidewalks had been brined to reduce ice and keep cars and pedestrians alike from slipping, he had a virtually unlimited supply. Likewise, at the seaside, in restaurant districts, and so forth, Haibara could do quite well. The salt from a McDonalds dumpster could probably take out a small army of grade three curses.

In more rural environments and in temperate months, he was less well-armed, and had to make do with what he and Nanami could carry between them. Unfortunately for both of them, well-landscaped training fields at schools tended not to contain much salt, as the schools preferred their grass to be alive.

So far, he could only work with sodium chloride, though Yaga had him taking chemistry classes in the hope that, once he understood the ionic structure, he might be able to use other salts as well. The purer the salt, the less cursed energy he had to put into drawing it out and freeing it from contaminants that would slow it down or make his control more clumsy.

The uses he had mastered at that point were projectiles of salt itself, which could be exceptionally painful and had an exorcising effect on some curses, and coating objects in salt. Unfortunately for both of them, Mei was not a curse.

The most useful, practical tactic Haibara could’ve taken would have been to pick off all the birds, both paper and living, by projectile of salt or coating them in a layer to make them too heavy to fly. Instead, he charged at Mei, coating his fists in salt crystals and trying to punch and slash her, which was a shame, because few people were better at slashing than Nanami. Nanami scrambled to regroup before they’d barely begun, tried to find his lines, but he kept being blocked by his own partner and having to dodge out of the way of salt shrapnel or birds.

If only they could trade. Nanami could think of a myriad of ways to use salt in combat, but all Haibara could be enthusiastic about was doing direct damage. If only Nanami could care more about doing damage rather than wishing for an ability to tactically control the battle, if only Haibara could see how invaluable the defensive and tactical aspects of his abilities were, each of them could be a solid, if not extraordinary, talent.

Nanami couldn’t land a clear shot; Haibara’s tactic had Mei dodging so frequently and unpredictably that he couldn’t line her up. Going after the birds with his sword was as effective as chasing butterflies without a net, so Nanami’s only recourse was to try to strike at the birds with cursed energy alone, or continue to try to damage the ground itself to trip Mei up.

Nanami ran behind her to slash a rift in the earth just as she stepped back to allow an origami bird to get between her and a flying rock of salt, and for a moment he had a shred of hope that he might’ve hit her.

When Nanami looked back over his shoulder as he sprinted past, he saw her tiny grin as she pitched backwards. He immediately knew they were fucked. With no birds around him that he could see, he chanced a look upward, just in time to manage to lurch forward before the origami bird straight above him struck down on his head. Instead of shattering his skull or his neck, the bird struck his calf. From the bright flash of pain and the wave of nausea that rolled through him, he immediately knew that his leg was broken.

“Nanami!” Haibara shouted, and, distracted, did not see the second origami bird which had been hiding behind Mei and, now that she had fallen, flew with frightening speed straight into his chest. Haibara was knocked backwards like he’d taken a shotgun blast and collapsed.

Yaga blew his whistle. He raised a hand and all the paper birds fluttered slowly to the ground, while Ieiri and one of the assistant managers who helped in the infirmary ran immediately over to Haibara.

Nanami checked his watch. The whole fight had lasted less than six minutes.

Mei strolled past to retrieve the sword he’d dropped, then sat beside Nanami. Lying face down beside her felt even more vulnerable than just being hobbled. His brain knew the fight was over, that she wasn’t going to deliver a killing blow to the back of his head, but his body wasn’t convinced. He gritted his teeth and rolled over, physically holding his leg so as not to further aggravate the break, which felt slightly less defenseless.

“Sorry about the leg, Nanami-kun,” she said, setting the blade down right by his hand. Nanami didn’t reply, holding his breath until Haibara stuck his arm in the air with a thumbs up.

“I’m okay!” he wheezed. Nanami exhaled, then let himself punch the ground, though not hard enough to damage himself further. A self-inflicted boxer’s fracture after a fight in which he hadn’t landed a single blow on his opponent would be far too pathetic, even for this situation.

“You did pretty well,” Mei said, and Nanami couldn’t help the withering look he turned on her, despite knowing she was utterly immune. “You were clever to get the sun at your back.”

“I appreciate your encouragement, senpai,” he answered through his teeth, clenched both due to his frustration and the pain from his broken leg, “but that was a fucking disgrace.”

Mei shrugged and didn’t deny it. She took her hair down and put it back up, twisting it into a bun to keep it off her neck, the day only growing hotter as the sun got higher.

She looked over at Haibara being fussed over by the Ieiri and her assistant. Very few people could use reversed curse technique to heal other people effectively, so Nanami knew Mei could do nothing for anyone’s injuries. Coming from Mei, however, this little bit of companionship was the equivalent of hand-wringing sympathy from anyone else.

She turned onto her side to face him in a way he knew she knew accentuated her curves like a pin-up model. It was possible she was doing so to try to distract him from his pain and frustration, equally possible that she just wanted to lie down and look good while doing it.

“You’re not well suited as partners,” she said bluntly, cheek propped against her fist.

As much as Nanami had thought the same since he and Haibara had started at the school, he had hoped that he could figure out how to work the way that Haibara needed, to adapt to his preferences but still be effective. Hearing someone else say it was a painful sort of relief, like a dislocated joint popped back into place.

“It hasn’t been that long,” he still argued weakly. She tilted her head in abject skepticism, one silvery forelock falling across her face.

“If you keep trying to accommodate him, it’s going to end badly,” she disagreed, looking over at Haibara, who was now sitting upright. “That sort of stubbornness… for Haibara-kun to realize that his way won’t work, something terrible will have to happen.”

She was right. Nanami knew she was right, but Haibara, so far, had not wanted to hear it. She rolled to her knees and stood, brushed the grass off her uniform, then waved Ieiri off when she came to make sure Mei wasn’t injured. As if there'd been any chance of that.

“Nanami-kun?” Mei said. Her tone was pleasant and light, her smile ever-present as always, but her eyes were as hard and dark as her crows’.

“Do not let that terrible thing happen to you,” she finished, then went over to Yaga to provide her feedback. Ieiri stood, hands on her hips, looking down at him.

“I know,” Nanami sighed, squinting as she was backlit, looking like a grumpy angel of reluctant mercy. “We were awful.”

Ieiri shook her head, mouth pinched as she crouched down.

“You’ll make up for it in the individual,” she muttered. “This is going to hurt.”

It did hurt quite a bit as she felt over his calf to check the state of the fracture.

“Good news is that it’s not a spiral, and we don’t have to go through the misery of setting it,” she said, sitting back on her heels. She hovered her hands over the break, and Nanami could feel her familiar reversed cursed energy communicating with his cells, giving them the strength to heal faster, directing them where to go.

“Bad news,” she continued, as people who say ‘good news’ always do, “is that both the tibia and fibula are broken. I can get the process started enough so that you can walk on it again, but it’s going to take a few more sessions before I can get it healed completely. When are your individuals?”

“Four days,” Nanami said, “barring an actual assignment.”

Maybe next time the Higher Ups wouldn’t be so stupid as to send first and second years out on important assignments, given the death of Riko Amanai, but Nanami doubted it. Haibara wasn't the only one whose stubbornness was going to get people killed.

“Okay,” Ieiri sighed, doubtless going over her own schedule in her head, working out the timing to heal him as quickly as she could while still being able to attend to an emergency if needed. Nanami was tempted to tell her that this was plenty, but after their performance today, he would need to be near-perfect in the individual evaluation to stay where he was, let alone advance.

“How’s Haibara?” Nanami asked, because his leg felt like hell; he couldn’t imagine taking the same shot to the chest wasn’t serious. He’d been sitting up, but that didn’t necessarily mean he didn’t need to re-grow his entire sternum. Ieiri just shrugged.

“Soft tissue damage, and ribs are easier since they’re not weight bearing. His heart and lungs were bruised, but organs are surprisingly easy,” she answered. “Once he was stable he was completely fine. You actually got the worst of it.”

She tilted to the side so Nanami could see past her, and sure enough, Haibara was up and pacing around. Geto had appeared from somewhere; maybe he’d been observing and Nanami just hadn’t noticed him. It looked like he was trying to soothe Haibara’s obvious disappointment.

Nanami’s jaw clenched, trying to fight down the ugly urge to blame Haibara for just not being able to listen. Getting his feelings to be coddled by his favorite upperclassmen because he was disappointed in their performance wasn’t going to change anything.

“Don’t let that bother you,” Ieiri straightened up to block his view, forcing him into eye contact. “Geto tries to comfort everybody.”

He swallowed and looked down at his own hand, picking at the grass. He felt like such a hypocrite; Mei had just been soothing Nanami’s own ego and now Ieiri was indulging his bitterness as well as healing him.

“I shouldn’t be—” Nanami started, already feeling guilty for his uncharitable thoughts towards Haibara.

“Yeah, you should,” Ieiri cut him off sharply, mouth pressed into a thin line. “It’s normal to be upset when someone else’s thoughtlessness gets you injured, especially in this line of work. What gets you injured in training gets you killed in the field. Give it a second; Yaga’s going to tear him a new one.”

Nanami’s view of Haibara was now blocked by Geto walking over to them, but a moment later, all three of them winced.

“What the hell was that?” Yaga roared, and launched into a scalding lecture about how Haibara was the wrong kind of crazy if he thought that such a performance was acceptable. Geto reached down to help both Nanami and Ieiri up, one arm for each of them. They each grabbed a wrist and were tugged upright, Geto hanging on to Nanami slightly longer as he tested his leg. He let go when Nanami gave him an embarrassed nod.

“I’m fine, thanks to Ieiri-senpai, you don’t have to worry.”

“You’re not fine,” Ieiri grumbled. “Don’t tell people you’re fine or they’ll be as stupid as they usually are and then you’ll have two broken legs.”

Nanami had a brief vision of being bowled over by two large, overly enthusiastic dogs, one white and fluffy with blue eyes, one sleek and black, both completely oblivious to the possibility that their happy interaction could possibly be harmful.

“Yaga-sensei said you’re free to take a bit of a break before he gives you your feedback,” Geto said, glancing reluctantly back towards Haibara’s plight. “That’s going to take a while. Poor Yu.”

“‘Poor Yu,’” Ieiri snorted, glaring up at Geto, poking him in the chest. “Someone needs to get him to stop being a dumbass, and you encourage him no matter what he does. You watched that fight too. If that had been against a curse user, Haibara would be dead, and so would Nanami.”

Ieiri continued to stare him down, or up.

“I wouldn’t get there in time to fix either of them,” she added with a final jab to his sternum, and the color drained from Geto’s face. “They’d be on the slabs in the morgue.”

Nanami couldn’t make sense of Geto’s reaction. It certainly wasn’t a pleasant thought, but what other conclusion could he have drawn from the fight? For all that Geto wanted to be supportive, surely he wasn’t that much in denial about how badly the fight had gone.

“I’ll swing by around five to give you another hit,” Ieiri said to Nanami. “You going to be around then?”

Nanami raised an eyebrow at the sharp slap of Geto smacking his palm to his own face, but nodded at Ieiri.

“Stop making it sound like you’re dealing drugs,” Geto groaned, still ashen. “Smoking around your juniors is already bad enough; you’re a terrible influence.”

Ieiri merely flipped him off, and continued to Nanami, counting off on her fingers:

“Do not fall, jump, or kick with that leg until I see you later, and only run if your life depends on it. Senpai’s orders. I’ll see how far I can get tonight.”

Nanami nodded. Of all the older students, Ieiri was easily his favorite. She spoke plainly, wasn’t pretentious or arrogant, despite being, probably, the greatest jujutsu healer in history, and she sympathized with the younger students’ problems without treating them like idiots. He’d have to do something to show how grateful he was, even if it would probably mean Haibara trying to give him lessons in how to win her over again.

The fact that neither Nanami or Ieiri fell into the category of those who had the most conventional high school crushes was also another point in her favor. Neither of them were in any danger of getting the wrong idea about the other’s kindness meaning something more.

“Thank you, senpai. I suppose I should get something to drink,” he sighed, putting a bit more weight on his leg. It ached, but he always ached after training. What was one more pain? Ieiri’s face brightened.

“Could you grab me a bag of rice crisps and a yuzu soda?” Ieiri asked, digging in her pockets for change. “I should stick around here in case Yaga-sensei wallops Haibara-kun too hard.”

“Sure,” Nanami said, and waved off her money. “I’ve got it, don’t worry about it. It’s the least I can do.”

“You don’t have to do anything for me, dummy,” she scolded him. “I was doing my job.”

“Of course,” Nanami nodded, trying to hold back a grin. “Won’t happen again, senpai.”

“Brat,” she said fondly, then hurried back to the bench when they heard a dull thud and a yelp.

Nanami headed toward the vending machines at a slower pace than usual, both from exhaustion and the soreness in his leg. He’d hoped to get a little time to settle his emotions on the walk, but Geto fell into step next to him in three long strides. He looked back over his shoulder, then at Nanami.

“Are you sure you and Shoko aren’t dating?” Geto asked suspiciously. “She’s nicer to you than she is to anyone but Utahime.”

Ieiri was right. Gojo and Geto really were that oblivious.

“We are not dating,” Nanami replied, again, trying to keep the exasperation out of his voice, “and we’re not interested in each other like that. She’s a very good friend to me, and I try to make sure that I treat her like she deserves.”

Geto nodded, though, as always, he didn’t look like he quite believed it.

“She’d be lucky to date you, you know,” Geto added. Nanami snorted, because neither of them would be lucky at all if that were the case, and Geto poked him gently in the shoulder.

“I mean it,” Geto insisted. “You see everyone as a person, not just the carrier of a cursed technique. You don’t know how rare that is.”

Nanami ducked his head a little and shrugged. After a few moments of silence, trudging along, Geto spoke up again.

“Haibara-kun is sorry,” he murmured, hands in his pockets, like he was the one apologizing. “But you probably already knew that.”

All Nanami had the energy to do was walk and seethe.

“Haibara-kun is embarrassed,” he retorted, clenching his hands. He forced himself to relax his fingers as tensing one set of muscles made all his injuries feel worse, and continued.

“‘Sorry’ would mean listening to someone rather than running in and trying to beat every opponent to a pulp. Did you know he carried a knife made of salt around the entire time we were in the airport?” he snarled in disgust. “You would think in one of those chemistry classes he might’ve learned that salt’s too brittle for that!”

Nanami stopped and took a breath. He hated being like this, letting his emotions get away from him. He glared down at the grass, at the injury hidden by his uniform trousers, another pain from another failure.

“All I can do is cut things a bit better than other people,” Nanami said. “And I know how childish that sounds. But the higher ups all think his technique might rival the Kamo family’s, and he’s wasting it! I can’t change what my technique is, but he can change the way he behaves, change his strategy, and he just won’t.”

Geto was very good about letting people rant, the consummate active listener. He made soft, sympathetic noises in all the right places, and his face never conveyed so much pity that it was insulting, nor was it ever so deadpan as to make one think he didn’t care. Nanami thought it was almost a shame that he was a special grade, since he would’ve made an excellent teacher.

“And because he won’t change his strategy,” Geto finally spoke, “or lack of it, you got hurt.”

Nanami rubbed his forehead. Between heat and frustration, the spike of pain lancing his eye from before the fight even started was spreading and sharpening.

“I don’t care about getting hurt,” Nanami explained. “I care about how completely we botched things. The strategy was so obvious. He takes out the birds, I take out Mei. The paper ones first, since she wasn’t allowed to use the live ones for attacks. He could’ve done that with a few grams of the salt he had on him, but instead…”

Nanami sighed again, and resumed his limp back to the vending machines.

“What’s the point,” he muttered. “I know he’s your favorite, but he’s as cocky as Gojo and unlike him, Haibara doesn’t have the power to back it up. It’s going to get him killed.”

“Nanami-kun,” Geto said softly, “it did get Satoru killed.”

The haunted expression on Geto’s face was just another little weight added to Nanami’s snowballing feelings of guilt. He knew he should apologize for being callous, bitter, angry, resentful, basically a curse still stomping around in meat, when all Geto was doing was trying to be kind to him. Then, as if on cue, Gojo’s taunting voice and Iori’s outraged shouting carried over to them from the vending machine alcove, and every single emotion Nanami felt transmuted itself into irritation.

If Geto had not been there, and if Nanami was only getting refreshments for himself, he would have turned and walked the other way, but Nanami owed Ieiri this much. Plus, he’d been weak enough in front of Geto for one day; he wasn’t about to turn around just because he heard Gojo’s voice. Nanami gave Geto a sharp glance, and a raised eyebrow, since the killed man in question was alive and well, then steeled himself to go get the drinks and snacks.

It was oddly fitting, he thought, that the physical pain of all his salted wounds felt so similar to the irritation he experienced out of own impatience with others.

“I’m just saying, you’d make such a good assistant manager,” Gojo was saying, lanky form draped against the side of one of the vending machines. His back was to Nanami as he rounded the corner. “It’s not like curses are going to wait around for you to do your little rituals.”

“You’re so full of shit, Gojo!” Iori shouted over him.

“I’m just looking out for you!” he said, all false soothing sympathy.

“No, you’re just being a complete prick because you don’t want to help with evaluations!”

Nanami stepped into the alcove and stared at the glass of the machines, searching out Ieiri’s rice crackers and staunchly ignoring the bickering next to him.

It was the first time that he’d seen Gojo since their moment in the wreckage. From the glimpse Nanami had gotten, Gojo seemed entirely healed, blood and dust washed away, the earpieces of his sunglasses, black and shiny, poking out distinctly from his white hair. Good as new, not a trace of his pre-resurrection state to be seen. Metaphorical salt rubbed in alongside the literal salt currently in Nanami’s very current wounds.

“Why would I help?” Gojo laughed. The bright lights within the machine and Gojo’s loud drawl were adding layer after layer to his headache as he struggled to find the soda Ieiri had asked for while tuning out the shitty remarks he knew Gojo was about to make. Orange juice, ramune, ramune, water…

Right on cue, Gojo continued, even louder than before:

“Nanami and Haibara are almost as weak—”

“Hello Iori-senpai,” Geto spoke over him, leaning in the doorway, ready as always to try to mitigate Gojo’s non-stop quest to make an enemy of everyone he encountered. Nanami thought that it was a bit late for that with Iori, but nonetheless. Now Nanami had three voices grating on his ears and various cursed energies spiking all around him.

All he wanted in the world at that moment was a shower, a soak, and a coma. He would be lucky if he got a cold drink and five minutes to sit down. He glanced at the machine Gojo leaned on, which, of course, held Ieiri’s Yuzu soda. Nanami gave up for the moment and searched the snack machine for her crackers instead, and maybe something to settle his own stomach. Apparently his head didn’t want to suffer alone and had invited his stomach to be its companion in misery.

“Then again, Haibara might amount to something,” Gojo rambled, raising his arms up and cracking his spine. “That salt thing is kinda cool. Yaga said if he can fine-tune it enough, he can just move the salt out of people’s cells and they’ll explode. Implode? Whichever.”

“Shouldn’t you, of all people, know the difference between imploding and exploding?” Iori snapped, anxiously glancing past him at Nanami. Nanami shut his eyes for a moment to center himself. The damage control she and Geto were attempting to do to spare his feelings was more humiliating than anything Gojo could say. At least if he was alone with Gojo, Nanami could ignore him entirely, or make it clear that he didn’t give a shit about Gojo’s ‘I’m the strongest’ opinions about anything.

Nanami purchased the crackers, and then stepped to the drink machine with the yuzu soda for Ieiri and the iced coffee for himself, unfortunately much closer to his bickering upperclassmen. Maybe Iori would try to punch Gojo and Nanami would get knocked unconscious as collateral damage. He plunked in the coins and pressed the appropriate buttons for the iced coffee.

Geto stepped further in when he saw the drink fall and said,

“Nanami-kun, maybe coffee’s not the best—”

Gojo rolled his head and shoulders along the machine to turn and look at Geto, then down at Nanami.

“Woooooow. What the hell happened to you?” Gojo interrupted without a trace of actual concern. Now that Gojo was facing him, his proximity plus his height could only be described as looming. Nanami could see his own reflection in Gojo’s black glasses out of the corner of his eye.

Most of Nanami’s superficial wounds remained, and there were enough for him to look like he’d been hit by a truck. He could feel his cursed energy trying to pool in his broken leg, protecting the weak spot and pointing directly at it at the same time. There were crystals of salt and scraps of origami paper stuck to his sweaty skin alongside the dirt and grass, and he told himself did not give a single fuck.

“You idiot,” Iori hissed. She tried to kick Gojo in the back of the heel; of course, he stepped out of the way just in time and she nearly fell over. This only put Gojo even closer to him than before. Nanami could feel Gojo's little puffs of breath on his own temple and smell whatever fruit-flavored high-end organic lip balm he was wearing that day. He no longer smelled like blood and devastation. All in one piece, better than new.

“The evaluations?” Iori continued, like Gojo had actually forgotten and wasn’t just antagonizing her as well. “The ones you’re supposed to be helping with!”

Gojo’s eyebrows went up over his sunglasses, and he leaned to one side to grin at Geto over Nanami.

“Yeesh. You could’ve gone a little easy on him, Suguru!” he said, straightening and bending at the hip until his face was inches from Nanami’s, pretending to examine the cuts on his face. “They’re making first years test against special grades now? It’s like they want you to fail.”

Nanami thought he saw shadows flicker behind Geto, and definitely saw his eyes narrow in outrage at the accusation.

“You think I would–” he started, while Iori simultaneously hissed:

“They didn’t have to fight Geto! The first evaluation was a tandem against Mei Mei, which is why Yaga wanted you to be—”

“Yikes,” Gojo interrupted them both, turning his attention back down to Nanami. “You came out looking like that after a two-on-one with Mei Mei?”

Nanami’s hand clenched. There was no point in punching Gojo, none at all. Nanami wasn't even fast enough to land a hit on Mei. Against Gojo, he’d just break his fist on Infinity and Ieiri would have even more of his bones to heal, if Gojo even let him get that far.

“How’d you two fuck up so bad?” Gojo continued, tilting his head with a grin as he no doubt sensed the cursed energy concentrating itself in Nanami’s fist. “You’re definitely stuck at grade 3. Might even get busted down to four.”

“Satoru,” Geto said in warning, while Iori whispered at him to stop, like it was a secret, like Gojo hadn’t felt Nanami’s presence before he saw him, like every bit of this wasn’t on purpose.

Nanami took a deep breath and let the energy in his fist fade into nothing, then pressed the final button to order Ieiri's yuzu soda. He was about to crouch to pick up the drinks, but the moment he winced trying to bend his good leg, putting most of his weight on the broken one, Geto stepped in.

“Don’t, I’ve got it.” Geto put his hand on Nanami’s chest like he wasn’t sweaty and disgusting and moved him back from the vending machine, and also put himself between Nanami and Gojo.

And didn’t that just prove Gojo’s point.

Nanami turned from the wall of lighted drinks, the bottles waiting to be called on, dropped, and drained, not unlike sorcerers, and looked directly at Gojo.

The last time he and Gojo had looked at each other face to face, they’d both been covered in Gojo’s blood. Now, the only one sluggishly bleeding and filthy was Nanami, while Gojo was the same carelessly put-together Gojo as always, like everything that had happened was just Nanami’s delusion.

He reminded himself that Gojo's joyful reaction to seeing Nanami when he came back from the dead was the anomaly, the outlier. This casual cruelty, even if it seemed a bit more vicious than before, was the norm. He should consider this a sign that Gojo was himself again, which should be a good thing.

Nanami was cut up, and exhausted, and needed to figure out how the hell he was going to keep himself and Haibara alive, and he had no energy left for whatever game Gojo wanted to play, if Nanami even had a role other than to stand there and take it.

“You said it yourself, senpai,” Nanami said to his own dark reflection in Gojo’s glasses. “I’m weak. Please don’t waste my time with stupid questions.”

He took the drinks and chips from Geto and thanked him, then turned and left. Instead of Iori, it was now Geto furiously scolding Gojo, but in low enough tones that Nanami couldn’t hear it beyond the initial what’s-your-fucking-problem-Satoru.

Any hope Nanami had for a few minutes of solitude was dashed by Iori’s wooden-soled zori clacking against the sidewalk until she was beside him.

“Are you okay, Nanami-kun?” she asked, wringing her hands like she wasn't sure what else to do with them.

Nanami’s exhausted mind grabbed onto the first available tangent: Wearing white made so much more sense in this heat, and the loose material of her sleeves and trousers must’ve been so much more comfortable than the close-fitting black uniform he wore. The breeze-blocking height of the collar alone was a nightmare. Perhaps he should see if he could request that his summer uniform be a yukata.

“Don’t listen to Gojo,” Iori continued, glaring back over her shoulder towards the vending machines. “He’s awful, and he doesn’t know anything.”

Nanami didn’t hear any shouting or crashing, nor did he feel the spike in cursed energy that was the hallmark of one of Geto and Gojo’s fights getting physical.

“He didn’t say anything that I didn’t already know,” Nanami said dully. “He didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.”

“No, just…” Iori growled to herself, kicking at a stray rock on the pathway. “He’s always been like this, even though his last failed mission was the first time he’s gotten any stronger or learned anything since he’s been here!”

Nanami wondered if she was trying to convince him, or herself as she glowered at the ground.

“He’s only special because he was born lucky,” she added sullenly. As if that mattered. There was a degree of talent, of giftedness, so great that it exempted itself from the pressure to conform for the sake of harmony. Gojo, already beyond it, had launched even further past that degree in a maelstrom of blood, debris, and death.

“He was born the strongest, luck or not,” Nanami said, and there was little Iori could say to contradict that. They walked in silence for several meters, Iori’s desperate search for the right thing to say nearly audible on its own.

They trudged together in silence except for Nanami’s soft, uneven footfalls and Iori’s click-click-clicking along.

“Is there anything I can do?” she asked at last, which meant she hadn’t found that mythical ‘right thing to say.’ Nanami wondered if anyone in human history who had had to try to think of the right thing to say had ever succeeded. He doubted it.

Nanami paused. He didn’t see Haibara at the testing ground anymore, just Ieiri, Mei, and Yaga, waiting for him to return so that Yaga could scold him as well.

“Yes,” Nanami said, and turned to her. “Gojo said you knew about rituals.”

“Yes?” Iori asked, wary. Gojo hadn’t exactly been flattering her about them.

“Haibara has no patience, and so our fight against Mei-senpai was… tactically shit, if you’ll excuse me,” Nanami explained.

“I’m sure it wasn’t—”

“Iori-senpai,” Nanami cut her off, “it was bad. Ask Mei Mei if you want to know exactly how bad.”

Iori winced and nodded.

“Haibara’s only been interested in the immediate, close range, damage-based aspects of his technique,” Nanami continued. “Could you, possibly, try to talk to him? Given the purifying aspect of salt, I wonder if learning some ceremony might help him to understand his own technique better.”

Iori’s eyes grew huge and her jaw dropped in astonishment. Nanami could almost visualize the various characters superimposed over her face that would make an adorable emoji of her facial expression, and considered that he might be getting heatstroke, or was possibly concussed.

“Nanami-kun!” she burst out suddenly, loudly enough to exacerbate his headache further. “That’s so smart! I can definitely try!”

He managed an unsteady smile instead of wincing at her volume, hoping that Yaga might consider just growling at him in disappointment, rather than the roaring Haibara had gotten.

“I’ll ask Geto-senpai to suggest it to him,” Nanami nodded. “He’s the only one Haibara listens to, really, but if he puts it into his head, Haibara will try his hardest with you.”

Iori laughed.

“Nanami-kun,” she said, “remind me never to get on your bad side.”

Nanami wasn’t sure what that meant, but he neither wanted to endure the conversation required to find out or to keep the others waiting on him in the heat. The two of them continued back to the bench, Iori murmuring ideas on how to work with Haibara to herself the whole way.

From the look Ieiri gave him, Nanami looked significantly worse than before. She raised her eyebrow at him, but he just shook his head and over her snack and drink. He wasn’t going to whine about what an asshole Gojo was in front of Yaga. She put her eyebrow down and pursed her lips as she opened the can, a silent ‘we’re still talking about it later.’

Nanami set his iced coffee on the bench beside her, took a step back, then bowed to Yaga.

“I apologize for our terrible performance, sensei.”

“Stand up, Nanami-kun,” Yaga sighed, taking off his sunglasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose while Nanami straightened up. “I know you know that the result of that fight was not, primarily, due to you. I also know you know that it doesn’t matter.”

“Dead is dead,” Nanami agreed flatly, “and curses and curse users don’t care about playing fair.”

Nanami glanced back the way he’d come. Maybe he’d be a better sorcerer if he also didn’t care about playing fair. Gojo certainly didn’t. Yaga sighed again, deeper, and put his sunglasses back on.

“I have no one else of an appropriate level to match you with. Geto spoke with Haibara-kun, so perhaps that will have some impact on his future cooperation. I could see if Kyoto would be willing to send one of their own students currently ranked at grade three to redo the two-on-one test with you.”

Nanami swallowed. He knew very little about the Kyoto students, but he knew most of them were blue-blooded products of high ranking clans. He’d have better luck getting Gojo to cooperate with him.

“Thank you, Yaga-sensei, but I don’t think a retest would be appropriate. We don’t get to choose who we fight alongside anymore than we choose who we fight.”

Yaga peered at him through dark glass, face as stony as always.

“If you think that’ll win you any points with the higher ups, you’re mistaken,” he growled.

“Neither would getting special treatment by being given a re-test,” Nanami replied tersely, headache too throbbing and body too sore to stay polite. Fortunately, Yaga just let out a dry huff.

“You’re getting bonus points on your evaluation for recognizing that, in some situations, every solution is painful, and that no-win scenarios exist, Nanami-kun,” he said, getting up. “But be careful what opportunities you turn down. A jujutsu sorcerer is under no obligation to fight fairly against curses or curse users.”

Yaga began to pack his belongings.

“...is there no other feedback, se nsei?” Nanami asked, despite just having been told to take offered opportunities, one of which was definitely not being screamed at.

“You need to work on your ranged techniques for when you’re on your own, or when you’re both close range fighters,” Yaga replied at a normal volume. “I'll see what I can add to your curriculum to assist in that, but in the meantime, work on your skill with ranged weapons. That'll be all.”

Nanami was left standing before his three senpai: Ieiri fiddled with her phone, frowning, Iori was furiously jotting things down in a notebook, and Mei was contemplating him with her unsettling, serene smile.

“Mei, stop looking at Nanami-kun like you’re going to eat him,” Iori said without looking up at her.

“He’s too filthy to eat right now,” Mei laughed, standing. She leaned in and put her hand on his shoulder, purple nails lightly grazing the back of his neck. “However, if you ever need flying target practice, Nanami-chan, you know how to reach me. I’ll even give you a discount.”

Now that she was no longer getting paid to be there, she sauntered off. Nanami sat in her vacated spot on the bench and sighed, cracking open his iced coffee.

“Watch out for that one,” Ieiri said, still looking at her phone screen. “When you’re not around she calls you 'a good potential investment.'"

“Mei-san will marry an old billionaire who’ll just happen to crash his car when a bird hits his windshield,” Iori muttered. “She won’t eat Nanami unless he wins the lottery. You’re not secretly rich, are you?”

“Of course he is; mister big spender bought me a snack,” Ieiri grinned. “Thank you for the food, Nanami-kun. You should go clean up and get some rest. It’ll help you heal faster, and that salt can’t feel good.”

It didn’t, but it matched his mood.

“I should,” Nanami agreed, chugging down the acidic black coffee. “Thank you both for your help.”

“Oi!” Gojo’s voice brayed out, still far off by the vending machines. Nanami's shoulders seized immediately. “Let’s go get ice cream!”

Gojo and Geto had emerged from the vending machine nook and were loping towards where the three of them sat. Iori nearly snapped the pencil she was using, and quickly yanked the pages out of the notebook and returned it to Ieiri. She said goodbye to both of them and hurried off.

Nanami wasn’t in a position to hurry, but he got up as well.

“I’ll head them off,” Ieiri said, shoving the notebook into her bag and snapping her phone shut. “Geto texted me that I should keep Gojo away from you.”

“What would I do without the two of you?” Nanami sighed.

Ieiri stood and patted his shoulder.

“Probably be the second person to kill Gojo Satoru. I’ll see you tonight,” she said, then walked to intercept Gojo and Geto while Nanami headed back to his dorm.

Haibara was sitting outside his room when he got there, arms crossed on his knees, staring at the opposite wall.

“So. How much do you hate me right now?” Haibara asked. Nanami sighed, unlocking his door.

“I don’t hate you, Haibara,” he answered as he slid open the door and dropped his bag with his blade. “I just… I don’t know what to do. Did Geto give you any good pointers?”

Haibara sighed from his spot on the floor.

“Same as he always says. Same as you and Yaga always say,” he said, sounding every bit as dejected and frustrated as Nanami felt.

Nanami nodded, gathering a towel and shucking off his jacket.

“I’m going to shower. You can wait in here, if you want, or you can come too and we can keep talking.”

“As long as you don’t sing,” Haibara grumbled, but got up to follow Nanami anyway. Nanami didn’t particularly feel like singing, but he was glad that Haibara was coming along anyway. Some conversations were just easier to have while soaking.

Once they’d rinsed and gotten into the tub, Nanami soaked a wash cloth and put it over his eyes.

“Headache?” Haibara asked, ever sympathetic.

“Mnh,” Nanami grunted. “Iori and Gojo were arguing at the vending machines, and of course Gojo couldn’t keep his mouth shut when he saw me.”

Haibara shuddered sending ripples through the water.

“God, he’s scary,” muttered. Nanami snorted.

“He’s not going to do anything; he’s just an asshole.”

“He sure as heck seemed like he was going to do something to me!” Haibara argued. Nanami lifted the cloth from his eyes.

“What? When?” he asked. Haibara rubbed the back of his neck.

“He just like… appeared next to me when I opened my door and followed me in,” he said. Nanami sat up straighter, strangling the washcloth in his fist.

“What did Gojo say to you?”

Haibara groaned in embarrassment.

“Nothing I wasn’t already thinking,” he said.

“I’d like to know anyway,” Nanami insisted. Haibara swallowed.

"I shouldn't have brought–"

"Yu."

“Okay, okay! He said that if I was going to be so stupid and proud about how I fight that I was willing to get my partner hurt or killed that he might as well just kill me now,” Haibara mumbled, sinking further into the tub. “Because at least then there wouldn’t be two dead sorcerers.”

Nanami frowned.

“He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about,” he snapped, “and it’s not like he cares if any of us get killed, except that he might have to go on more missions instead of cramming his face full of sugar and being annoying.”

Haibara didn’t say anything, but his face twitched in a telling way.

“What.”

“I didn’t say anything!” Haibara protested. Nanami gripped the side of the tub and glared. “I just don’t think it’s true that Gojo doesn’t care about any of the other sorcerers dying.”

“Well obviously he’d be upset about Geto or Ieiri—”

“He said you’re his favorite,” Haibara blurted.

Nanami’s mouth hung open.

“What?”

Haibara shrugged uncomfortably.

“He said that I might be Geto’s favorite, but that you’re his, and that if I get you killed, I’d better get myself killed too, because it would be a lot better than what he’d do to me. You know how scary he gets with that creepy smile and the black glasses, and then he tips his glasses down and his eyes are worse. And then Geto showed up and said sorry about him and dragged him away.”

“Gojo didn't even see the fight!” Nanami protested. “Iori was yelling at him because he was supposed to help observe.”

“I don’t know!” Haibara exclaimed, big, seal-like eyes full of wet despair that he didn’t have an explanation. “I guess Geto told him how it went? Gojo’s really fast, he could’ve caught up to me after he saw you.”

Nanami groaned and ducked under the water. He stayed there until he had to breathe, then reluctantly surfaced.

“I’m Gojo’s favorite one to make fun of and that's all,” Nanami explained, pushing a hand through his hair to stop his bangs from dripping down his face and making him look like a sad wet cat (Gojo’s words after he’d been caught out in the rain that past spring). “He thinks you’re the one who has potential. He’s not going to do anything to you.”

“You didn’t see him,” Haibara shook his head, face haunted.

“I did see him,” Nanami said, “and believe me, he wasn’t concerned for my welfare in the slightest. You don’t have anything to worry about. I guess he didn’t get all of his assholery out of his system with me and Iori and still had some more to share.”

Haibara looked unconvinced, but nodded.

“Ieiri said your chest is going to be okay?” Nanami asked. Haibara nodded.

“How about your leg?” he asked.

“She’s coming back over this evening to do more,” Nanami answered. “Mei got both bones, but they were clean breaks. What did Yaga assign you to work on?”

Haibara groaned.

“I have an entire new class in battlefield tactics, my chemistry classes have been extended an hour per session, and I have to play chess with him daily.”

“Chess?”

“Every time he beats me, I have to fight three of his cursed corpses without any salt.”

Nanami snorted.

“That seems counter-intuitive, if he wants you to learn not to rush in one-on-one.”

Haibara let out a second, more feeble groan.

“It’ll be in the prison room, with my feet bound to the floor.”

“…Christ, he really was pissed,” Nanami sighed. “I didn’t get any chess or extra classes, but I do have to figure out a ranged tactic.”

Haibara nodded and sighed.

“Maybe archery? If you grew your hair out, you’d kind of look like Legolas from the Lord of the Rings movies.”

Nanami put the wash cloth back over his eyes.

“Oh, or shuriken! Or like… ninja throwing daggers!”

“…Haibara, are you picturing me as Naruto right now?” Nanami asked, exhausted to his marrow.

“…maybe. If you pushed the washcloth up over your forehead–"

“I will kill you myself.”

Chapter Text

After the bath, Nanami threw Haibara out.

“You said you weren’t mad!” Haibara pleaded. “Don’t send me back out there! I don’t know where Gojo is!”

Nanami rolled his eyes and snatched the towel Haibara had been anxiously wringing in his hands away from him.

“I,” Nanami said coldly, “am going to take a nap, because Ieiri-senpai said I needed to rest to heal. You’ll be fine; Gojo’s eating an entire ice cream parlor right now.”

“I can be qu—”

Nanami cut him off and herded him out the door.

“You will be quiet for two and a half to three minutes at most, get bored and start making noise, wake me up, and then I’ll have to strangle you. Come back in two hours and we can go try to train some more. Bring lunch.”

Nanami closed the door, locked it, and collapsed back to his bed. As soon as he heard Haibara’s footsteps peter out at the end of the corridor, he was out cold.

Haibara did as instructed, returning exactly two hours later with a beef rice bowl for Nanami and a pork one for himself. From there, little else was planned for the day. Yaga had to prepare the disappointing written account of the first years’ evaluations, so they were left to their own devices to train.

“Where are we going?” Haibara asked as Nanami took a turn for the library instead of the training fields.

Nanami didn’t answer him, just perused the stacks until eventually they walked out with three books on Western chess stacked in Haibara’s hands and two on archery crammed into Nanami’s bag.

“Can’t I just download a chess game on my phone?” Haibara pleaded, fiddling with said phone while trying not to drop the three books.

Nanami snatched Haibara’s phone without looking at it, or him, and shoved it into his own bag.

“Even if there is one, you’ll just try to beat your high score in Flicky. Do you even know how to play western chess?”

Haibara was silent.

“…do you even know how to play shogi?”

“A little?”

“Read the damned book. Or do you really want to be remembered as the sorcerer who was beaten to death by possessed teddy bears because he lost too many times at chess?”

Ieiri had forbidden Nanami from sparring with anyone, so they went down to the armory next. After several minutes of procrastination, aided by unhelpful references to various shonen series by Haibara, Nanami picked up a bow and arrows, a brace of throwing daggers and, god help him, shuriken, then shoved them all into a musty sack after shaking out several spiders.

How had he ended up at a high school with shuriken in the equipment shed?

“Ooh, a target!” Haibara piped up, holding a dilapidated canvas bag stuffed with straw on which some circles were still vaguely visible.

“Thank you; bring that, please. And I see you trying to ‘forget’ your books.”

Between them, they hauled all of it to the training grounds. Nanami found a tree at the farthest edge (farthest away from any classmates, anyway) and instructed Haibara to lean the target there.

Nanami set the larger archery book in the grass and weighed it down with one of the throwing daggers.

“Could you check my stance?” Nanami asked as he tried to knock his first arrow and pull it back.

Silence. Nanami looked over his shoulder to see Haibara halfway over to the benches where Geto was stretching while chatting with Ieiri. At least he hadn’t left his chess books behind.

Nanami pulled out his phone and texted Ieiri.

Please tell Haibara that if he doesn’t read those books I will make his trousers fall off in front of Geto-senpai.

Ieiri looked at her phone, snorted, and then held it up to Geto instead. Geto looked over at Nanami and waved, and then eagerly greeted Haibara and asked about the books.

He stared at the target, then at the bag, then at the destroyed turf of his earlier failure.

He put the bow and arrow back down and tried the throwing knives first, because they seemed the easiest, then the shuriken, which were actually less difficult to manage than learning the balance of the knives.

He would not be going with the shuriken. If he was going to die a horrible death at the hands, tentacles, or jaws of a manifestation of the misery and rage of humanity, he was not going to do it with fucking shuriken. That left the bow and arrow.

While he understood the principles of archery, he would need a proper teacher. There was only so much he could perfect stance and form from a book, no matter how large the pictures were, and arrows weren’t really the right tool to exploit the 7:3 weak point. The same was true of the shuriken and the throwing knives, all more designed to pierce than to slice or chop.

As a result, knives, stars, and arrows all peppered the dilapidated target and the tree behind it.

At least he was somewhat in the shade.

“Maybe throwing axes would be more effective, Nanami-kun.”

He jumped, not having heard Geto approach until he was only an arm’s length from his back, then staggered as his weaker leg twinged. Geto darted forward and grabbed his shoulders to steady him before he could do himself any further damage, actually lifting him slightly to keep the weight off his leg.

"Sorry," Geto said, squeezing his shoulders in reassurance as he settled Nanami back to his own feet. "Didn't mean to sneak up on you."

Nanami exhaled, his relief at not having fallen outweighing any annoyance at being startled. It was Geto; he didn’t do that sort of thing on purpose, at least, not to Nanami.

“Someone should get you a bell," he smiled shakily at Geto.

"As long as the collar matches my eyes," Geto grinned back, sliding his hands down Nanami's arms to make sure he was stable before letting go. "How's the ranged training going?"

Nanami turned and looked over at his handiwork.

“I’m not sure if it’s my technique or if I just need to practice more,” Nanami explained awkwardly, stepping back, confident enough in his footing now that Geto didn't need to worry about catching him. “So far, I have a much harder time keeping cursed energy in something once it’s left my hand.”

Geto nodded seriously, and Nanami went to gather the projectiles for want of anything else to do. Geto trailed after him, picking up arrows and pointy metal that had fallen short of the target.

“I have to confess, I don’t know that much about weapons, but I’ll see what I can find out. Maybe some sort of a whip?”

Nanami chuckled, then dropped what he’d retrieved into the bag, shouldering the bow as it wouldn’t fit.

“Haibara’s already suggested I grow my hair out and use a bow and arrow, and suggested shuriken and throwing daggers while picturing himself drawing little whiskers on my face. I guess now I have to get a hat and an archaeology degree, too.”

“Doctor Greenleaf-Uzumaki-Jones Kento does have a nice ring to it,” Geto smiled slyly. Nanami laughed harder in spite of himself and didn’t protest when Geto picked up the target while Nanami shouldered the bag with the weapons.

“Are you sure you should be carrying that?” Geto frowned. Nanami glanced at the bag over his shoulder. It was a bag of light knives, arrows, and frankly ridiculous little metal stars; none of it was especially heavy. He and Haibara must’ve looked like absolute jackasses if Geto was fussing this much.

“…it’s fine? I didn’t break my arm, after all. I appreciate the help you’re giving me,” Nanami said, rubbing the back of his neck with his free hand. Going over their awful performance reminded Nanami that he actually did need Geto’s help with something, just not the lifting of light bags.

“Speaking of Haibara, could you do me a favor and suggest that he ask Iori-senpai about her ritual techniques? It might help him realize that his technique can be powerful if he’s patient.”

Geto tilted his head up, thinking.

“Because salt is already used in ritual purification,” Geto nodded. “That’s a good approach.”

“I already asked Iori-senpai if she’d be willing, and she agreed, but the suggestion has to come from someone Haibara’s eager to listen to,” Nanami explained. “Clearly that isn’t me, or Yaga-sensei, so if you could…?”

Geto strode ahead of him a bit so that he could turn and look at Nanami head on, walking backwards ahead of him. His expression changed, his fox-like eyes creasing at the corners with his smile. Nanami had no idea what to make of it.

“Clever clever,” Geto murmured softly, like he’d discovered a juicy secret. “Who knew you were so manipulative, Nanami-kun?”

Manipulative seemed a bit extreme. Nanami’s ideas just generally sounded better coming out of someone else’s mouth.

“Do you expect me to believe you never ‘suggest’ things to Gojo in a way which makes him more likely to agree, senpai?” Nanami asked without a trace of shame. Geto ducked his head, bun bobbing slightly.

“Touché,” he said.

“And speaking of Gojo,” Nanami added, glad that his leg made their progress slow, since it made it less obvious when he came to a complete stop. “Haibara said Gojo threatened him?”

Geto shot a quick look over his shoulder. Haibara was still on the bench with Ieiri, and his book was in his lap and open. At some point, Gojo had arrived and was apparently ‘practicing’ teleporting, warping, whatever he’d decided to call it that day, which seemed to include a high percentage of appearing directly in front of or behind Haibara, who was frozen like a terrified rabbit. Ieiri sat beside him, fiddling with her phone, wholly indifferent.

Geto cringed and nodded.

“He wasn’t serious.”

“I know he wasn’t; he never is,” Nanami huffed. Gojo was staring down Haibara, neither of them speaking, but Nanami thought he caught a flash of blue iris furtively glancing their way. “I’m just confused by what Gojo threatened him about.”

“I only got there at the very end,” Geto admitted. “So… I’m not sure what exactly you mean.”

Nanami raised an eyebrow at the obvious lie.

“While I understand that Gojo wouldn’t actually hurt Haibara, the story I was told didn’t seem to suggest teasing.”

Geto said nothing.

“Please don’t make me try to get the truth out of Gojo right now, senpai,” Nanami asked. His voice was rough to his own ears, and it wasn’t on purpose to garner sympathy, which was much more pathetic. Apparently Geto thought so too, because he stepped closer to Nanami and sighed. At this distance, Geto blocked his view of anything going on at the bench, and there was no chance of anyone overhearing.

“Satoru seemed pretty annoyed when I told him how the fight went,” he confessed. “I shouldn’t have, but I was trying to get him to stop trying to get a rise out of you. When I mentioned that your leg had gotten broken but that Haibara was fine, he just vanished.”

Nanami grimaced, but he supposed that he should be a little grateful that he wasn’t the only one who Gojo abandoned mid-conversation. As much as Gojo liked to pick arguments, he also liked to get the last word in. Geto continued,

“When I didn’t see him heading the way you went, I assumed he was going to bother Haibara or buy a crepe, and Haibara’s was closer than the nearest cafe Satoru likes.”

Dependable Geto, level-headed and logical, at least when compared to Gojo.

“Meddlesome,” Nanami muttered, looking at the white-haired jackass in question. At least Ieiri was present, otherwise Nanami would have felt a bit guilty about abandoning Haibara to face Gojo and whatever his problem was alone.

Fortunately for Haibara, Gojo had gotten bored with playing with him and was now flopped out on the grass like a starfish.

“Geto!” he hollered, springing back to his feet so quickly that he might have just warped himself upright again. “Quit hauling little Tametomo’s gear for him and come spar with me!”

Nanami shook his head and reached out to take the target off of Geto’s hands. Geto tugged it back out of his reach.

“You can wait!” he shouted back at Gojo.

When Gojo complained, it was like watching most people do advanced yoga. He bent back so far that his hair nearly touched the ground because rolling his eyes was insufficient and groaned so loudly that it echoed off the nearby buildings. Then, instantly, he was beside them. He glanced at Geto, holding the target, then looked at Nanami. Gojo plucked Nanami’s bag off one shoulder, the bow off the other, before Nanami had even realized it.

As Nanami opened his mouth to ask what the fuck Gojo thought he was doing, Gojo tossed him over his shoulder like a bag of laundry and warped the entire ten meters that he and Geto had left to walk.

The experience of warping, Nanami found, wasn’t all that different from when he started depersonalizing. His consciousness felt out of sync with his body for several seconds as he reoriented himself spatially. One moment, he was standing and having a fairly normal conversation with Geto while Gojo, Ieiri, and Haibara were off in the distance, the next, Geto was ten meters away and Ieiri and Haibara were significantly closer and upside down.

Gojo’s arm was across the back of his knees, and Nanami’s vision was partially obstructed by his ass.

“Watch his leg!” Ieiri immediately snapped, jumping to her feet. “If you make it worse I will fucking skin you.”

Gojo rolled his eyes yet again, but at least this time he didn’t bend over backwards and knock Nanami’s head onto the ground.

“Relax, mama bear, jeez. I’m not gonna injure your precious cub. Look, he had to use his leg even less than he would have because I’m a genius!"

“Gojo,” Nanami growled, staring down at Gojo’s back. “If you don’t put me down, I will sever your spinal cord.”

Nanami was fairly confident that he could snatch a weapon out of the bag on Gojo’s other shoulder and make good on that threat, but when he started to stretch for it, he was annoyed to discover that Gojo’s shoulders were wider than they looked.

“There’re easier ways to make me weak in the knees, Nanami-kun,” Gojo said blithely, but he dropped the bag and swooped Nanami into a bridal carry like a deranged swing-dancer. Gojo held him there for long enough to inflict his equally deranged smile, and then set him on his feet with exaggerated care.

Even then, Gojo didn’t fully let him go, still holding Nanami by the waist, Nanami’s own hands still wrapped around Gojo’s forearms reflexively from all the sudden changes in position.

Nanami forced himself to make sure he was stable on his feet before he pulled away. He didn’t have a whole lot of dignity left, and having Gojo catch him a second time would put him at a deficit. Only once he was sure he wouldn’t fall did he step back, forcing himself not to embarrass himself more by sputtering about the indignity.

“Quit giving me murder-face, Nanami-kun,” Gojo grinned at him, tipping down his sunglasses to flutter his lashes. “You’re going to make me blush, too!”

He could’ve pointed out that his blood had rushed to his face from being held upside down, and that it was more likely that he was about to have a stroke from that combined with pure rage and that’s why his cheeks were red, but what would’ve been the point? Nanami picked up the bag and stalked away with Ieiri to where Haibara sat on the bench.

“You’re welc—!” Gojo was cut off as Geto threw the target he carried at Gojo like a giant frisbee. Gojo raised a finger in time for it to split into two slices, each whizzing past him like two comets trailing old straw.

The sneak attack distracted him long enough for one of Geto’s serpent curses to burst through the ground at his feet and knock him on his ass. The serpent might not have been able to touch Gojo through his Infinity, but it managed to cocoon him and then rise off the ground on its coils.

“It isn’t fun being picked up without warning, is it?” Geto called up to him. The curse didn’t hold on for long, Gojo forcing its grip out by expanding Infinity slowly. In a few hops, hands in his pockets, of course, he stood on the serpent’s head, just far back enough that it couldn’t whip around to bite.

“It’s too hot to go all out,” Gojo whined. “Besides, I’m gonna feel like an asshole if I destroy any more of your curses. Let’s just go hand to hand.”

Geto crossed his arms, drumming his fingers on the crook of his elbow. Nanami knew the feeling: There was always a catch with Gojo, but the temptation of possibly getting to punch him in the face was irresistible.

“Fine. No Infinity?” Geto agreed, walking towards the rest of them with a strange intensity of purpose.

“No Infinity,” Gojo agreed and stepped off the head of the serpent as casually as if the light at the crosswalk had just changed, descending to the ground unharmed.

“I should return all this to the armory,” Nanami said, trying to decide if it was worth it to try to retrieve the destroyed target from the rubble. Haibara’s hand darted out and grabbed his wrist, the other clutching a children's book on how to play chess like a holy text.

“Please don’t leave me alone with Gojo!” he whimpered. Gojo was currently twisting out of Geto’s clinch hold and using one ridiculously long leg to hop up and over Geto’s shoulder. He seemed to have entirely forgotten that any of the rest of them existed, including Haibara.

“I’m not, Ieiri and Geto are both here, too,” Nanami sighed. Ieiri raised her eyebrows, snapped her phone shut, and pulled a drink from her bag.

“Don’t look at me,” she shrugged, cracking the tab. “I’m not getting into the middle of that.”

Nanami didn’t actually expect her to physically intervene, but hoped that she might at least say something.

“Then why don’t you just come with me and help me carry this crap?” Nanami suggested instead, for all that he’d told Geto that it wasn’t heavy.

“But…” Haibara started, eyes huge and dewy and sorrowful.

“But you want to see Geto fight,” Nanami sighed. Ieiri elbowed him in the hip.

“If this is the time Gojo finally gets his ass beaten, do you really want to miss it?”

Nanami scowled, and Ieiri smiled her evil little cupid bow smile. He dropped the bag and slumped back to the bench.

“It would be a shame to miss that,” he said, like he hadn’t found Gojo dead less than a week prior.

They watched the nonsense for a minute or two in silence, when Nanami finally asked,

“Ieiri-senpai, was Gojo checked out after he came back to life?"

"Checked out?"

"By you? Or a doctor?" Nanami pressed. “He had a knife in his brain, and just since this morning, he’s mocked me for being weak, which is normal, threatened to kill Haibara because I’m supposedly his favorite, which is not normal, and now… whatever the hell that was. Did he heal wrong?”

Ieiri sighed and patted Nanami on the shoulder.

“He got checked out,” she said. “Not a brain scan because the school is too cheap to buy an MRI or a CAT scanner and Gojo wouldn’t hold still long enough to use it anyway.”

She tipped her head back and looked at the sky.

“He’s always been crazy,” she continued. “Maybe losing the Star Plasma Vessel and getting really badly hurt for the first time made him crazier. He’s not going to hurt Haibara on purpose unless he turns curse user, and as for tossing you around…”

Ieiri grimaced, trying to think of something to give Nanami hope that getting picked up by Gojo was a one-time thing that would certainly never repeat itself.

“…it’s Gojo,” she shrugged. Nanami had already resigned himself to being subject to this new whim of Gojo’s until he got bored of it, so all he could really do was sigh.

“It is, in fact, Gojo,” he agreed.

The three non-combatants watched the half-hearted spar with varying degrees of enthusiasm, all of them wilting in the August heat. It didn’t take Geto and Gojo long to get bored of it, whatever snit they’d been in insignificant compared to the humid air. Geto did not, sadly, beat Gojo's ass, though he did at one point get the jump on him and drag him across the field hard enough to leave bright green streaks in his white hair.

Nanami had hoped that the end of the spar would mean that they, separately, could all individually go about their respective days and accomplish whatever solo tasks needed to be done, but when Geto returned with the remains of the mangled target, Gojo immediately snatched up the bag of weapons Nanami needed to return. Instead of walking towards the equipment building, Gojo started ambling towards the building where math classes were held. Ieiri fell in beside Gojo, some sort of conversation occurring in voices too low for Nanami to hear, while Geto and Haibara kindly kept pace with him.

“Green is a good color for Gojo, don’t you think?” Geto murmured quietly. Nanami gave him a sidelong smile and Haibara burst into a terrified titter, quickly stifled when Gojo glanced back at him.

“What are you two so grumpy with each other for anyway?” Haibara asked.

Haibara might not have noticed Geto’s tiny hesitation, but Nanami did.

“It’s just the heat,” Geto lied. “It’s been a stressful couple of weeks. Everything will settle once it cools off.”

Nanami let the lie go. There was no tactful way for Geto to say what anyone with sense knew was the truth: “We failed in our mission and the sheltered little girl who never really got to live was murdered in front of me. Gojo died, I was close to dying, too. We thought we could do anything, and now I know that’s not true. At least, it isn’t for me.”

The stairs into the math building had shade at this time of day, at least, and it was close enough to the vending machines to grab more drinks to try to avoid heatstroke. It would’ve been a perfect respite, if it had been quiet.

It was not quiet. Gojo had decided to regale them all with the story of his apotheosis last week.

The first version of the story any of the other three had heard had not been from Gojo, but from Nanami. Nanami’s stripped down version consisted of the facts as he knew them. “I found Gojo dead, but he came back to life,” in a group text. It was natural that Gojo, having lived the experience that Nanami had only observed, would have a more detailed version. Gojo also didn’t have much regard for whether any of those details were consistent, true, or remotely plausible.

“With the prodigal Zen’in’s vile blade through my throat, I knew I had to change strategy!” Gojo exposited, pacing back and forth like a coach in a locker room, trying to inspire his team to rally for a victory. “I turned the Six Eyes inward towards my very soul! I felt their gaze crash upon the Infinity within me, and achieved the epiphany of cursed energy multiplied by itself to heal instead of destroy!”

“Yeah, like I told you, idiot,” Ieiri had rolled her eyes and told him for the fiftieth time: “Fwoosh, then fwish. Duh.”

Despite Nanami’s affinity for numbers, the degree to which cursed techniques seemed to follow the same principles as pre-algebra annoyed the shit out of him. Negative energy multiplied by negative energy became positive energy. If that were true, then shouldn’t the general woes of humanity multiplied by various and sundry environmental disasters, the economy, isolation, loneliness, empathy fatigue, everything, be spawning angels instead of curses? It made logical sense in the most symbolic way, but Nanami found it philosophically ludicrous.

Also, the pain in his head which had abated from his time in the tub and the relative quiet of training by himself returned like his own personal vengeful curse as a result of the logic and the impromptu monologue.

“All was darkness, until I saw just the tiniest prick of light.”

“Oh good,” Ieiri deadpanned, “you died and found your dick.”

If Nanami hadn't been dreading the next part of the story, or rather, how Gojo would tell it, he would have choked trying not to laugh. Geto snorted, and Haibara made a small squeak, mouth pressed into a thin line as he held his breath to avoid bringing Gojo’s attention back onto himself.

“Fuck off,” Gojo chirped sweetly, then continued. “I was outside of space and time, looking upon the singularity at the very beginning of creation at the moment it exploded. Everything rushing towards me, away from me, streaks of red and blue light, and then… then…"

Gojo vanished. Nanami’s shoulders immediately seized, Haibara whipped his head around, Gojo’s antics having spooked him so much that he’d apparently sooner give himself whiplash than be surprised again.

Nanami felt Gojo’s energy reappear right behind him and turned. Gojo fell backwards, back and legs straight, like he was doing a trust fall. If it had been anyone else, Nanami would’ve scrambled to catch them, but Gojo fell in slow motion until he was elegantly sprawled, face up, on the stairs a little above where Nanami sat, his head resting beside Nanami's left hip.

It could not possibly have been comfortable, but Gojo was probably using Infinity like a memory foam mattress. Likewise, Gojo's view up Nanami's nostrils couldn't have been flattering.

As stupid as this whole display was, something in Nanami’s chest twisted up, hard and acidic and right next to his heart. Gojo, hair a wild halo against the concrete. His eyes reflected the sky, or maybe the sky reflected his eyes, who the fuck knew anymore, stared up at Nanami above him with that strange mania. All that was missing was the blood, the debris, and a tiny sliver of bone that Nanami had taken great pains to keep both safe and secret.

“I woke up,” Gojo said, so reverent and soft that Nanami was fooled into reflexive eye contact. “The first thing I saw was Kento-kun’s angelic face over mine.”

Nanami’s jaw clenched. The thing twisting in his chest dug its claws in, piercing something that let loose a torrent of shame at ever having believed that Gojo could be reverent about anything.

“Heartbroken, tears in his eyes!” Gojo lied and lied, and the claws in Nanami’s chest twisted deeper with each word. “I’ve never seen anything more beautiful.”

The others had to twist to look at the two of them, as none of them could openly defy the laws of physics and sit facing up the stairs. Ieiri was glaring daggers at Gojo, Haibara’s gaze flicked back and forth between them like an action hero’s sidekick trying to decide which of two bombs was going to explode first, and Geto was looking right at Nanami. He had one hand resting on the opposite knee, and even at that distance, Nanami could see his knuckles were white, his tendons standing out under thin skin.

Nanami looked down and away from Gojo, studying the slight dip in the stairs where hundreds of steps, up and down over time, the same paths out of habit, had eroded them. He wished he knew what anyone wanted from him at that moment.

“The tears were from all the dust from where you decided to collapse part of the campus,” Nanami corrected Gojo, glancing up towards the new gap in the architecture, “if there were any at all, which I doubt.”

Gojo smiled at him upside down and put his sunglasses back on, blocking his eyes completely.

“You were too shocked with grief to remember correctly,” Gojo cooed. He tried to reach up to pat Nanami’s cheek, more inexplicable contact out of nowhere. Nanami ducked away from his hand before he made contact and scowled.

Gojo included Nanami’s presence in the story from the beginning, as Nanami understood it, based on the questions he’d faced from Yaga after the fact. Every person he heard it from second, third, fourth-handedly after that, Nanami’s role in the story seemed to increase in duration and importance, and now, he understood why. Nanami could picture Gojo repeating it any time someone got close enough to hear him, exaggerating Nanami’s role more each time he told the story.

Nanami had gone from acquaintance-bystander- incidental-witness to fawning-sidekick-junior to grieving widower turned observer-of-miracle. Until now Gojo had never had an opportunity to interact with him during the retelling, and as much as this was still a one man show, Gojo couldn’t resist a prop.

Undeterred by Nanami’s clear disinclination to participate, Gojo brought up his other arm for a second attempt. His manic expression had shifted to something inebriated, like he was hallucinating trails from his own fingers and who knew what from Nanami’s face. Gojo’s fingers drifted closer, but from the way Gojo looked at him, Nanami felt invisible, like Gojo’s mental state had rendered him immaterial, a mirage, like his hand would pass right through Nanami’s face.

If Gojo touched him, Nanami was irrationally certain he would shatter, dissipate, be reduced to a single point of matter by Blue, scattered to atoms by Red, or just erased from existence by Gojo’s new, horrifying trick, “Hollow Purple.”

This time, Nanami slapped Gojo’s hand away in a crack of skin against skin. Infinity hadn’t been up, and Nanami wasn’t annihilated. Gojo’s face was guarded by his sunglasses but they did nothing to conceal a crease in the chin, a deepening of the corners of the mouth, a slightly different cant to the eyebrows, flickering confusion-outrage-hurt. It was there and gone so quickly that Nanami would’ve dismissed it as something he’d imagined if the thing in his chest hadn’t torn itself out of his throat.

“I thought I was going to have to finish you off, you idiot,” he heard himself snarl.

Nanami snapped his mouth shut so hard that his teeth ached. The silence that followed ached even worse. He hadn’t told anyone that. He hadn’t intended to ever tell anyone. That thought didn’t belong in anyone’s head, the idea that Gojo dead could be even more dangerous as Gojo alive.

“I thought you were becoming a vengeful spirit,” Nanami forced out at last. “I… your cursed energy just started pulsing, and I thought you were dead, and…”

Gojo’s slapped hand hung in midair, and the other three stayed very quiet. Nanami kept opening his mouth, struggling for words then swallowing them back down, because there wasn’t a way he could think to explain what that moment had actually been like. He didn’t have a dramatic monologue prepared. All Nanami had was depersonalization and the memory of blood and dust and a tiny shard of bone, of resurrection and madness and then… of everyone acting like everything was perfectly normal, including Gojo.

“That’s right,” Gojo mused. He let his hand drop to the stairs, centimeters away from Nanami’s thigh. “You did have your weapon out. So why didn’t you?”

Nanami looked away from all of them.

“You hesitated,” Gojo pressed as he propped himself up on his hands, closing the gap. Nanami could feel the gravity of his gaze even behind the dark lenses. He could feel the stares of the other three, frozen on the knife edge of whether to try to intervene or to let the scene play out in the hope of some catharsis.

“If I’d manifested as a vengeful spirit,” Gojo continued, and Nanami swore he could feel Six Eyes analyze every movement of every muscle in his face, “I definitely would’ve slaughtered you and thousands more people, but you didn’t go in for the kill. Why not?”

What did Gojo want from him? An apology for not killing him, an apology for considering it, despite the circumstances? Something he could make a punchline from? Validation, deference, reverence, what the hell did Gojo want?

“You woke up in time,” Nanami murmured at last, glaring off into the distance to try to ease the weight of Gojo looking at him. It wasn’t necessarily a lie if he himself didn’t know the reason. It was still a factual statement: Gojo had woken up before Nanami had swung his blade. Whether or not Nanami would have swung it if he hadn’t woken was immaterial.

There was no point in mulling over what didn’t happen. It was done, Gojo was alive, what else needed to be said about it?

Apparently a great deal.

“Nanami!!” Gojo gasped in delight, his mood teleporting to an entirely different location with no transition in between. A cheerful Gojo was quasi-normal, but a happy one was cause for concern. Nanami looked back too late to prevent himself from being tackled, the edge of the stair bruising his spine as Gojo threw his entire weight on top of him.

“You do like me!” Gojo laughed in his ear, far too loudly for their proximity. “You like me so much that you’d still like me as a vengeful spirit! You hesitated in the final blow because you couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing me again!”

All the tension snapped, the thing in Nanami withdrew its claws. It was like the moment a veil came down after defeating a curse, and the air started to move again, the sky became its normal color, and things might not be safe, but they were safer than before.

“I definitely won’t next time,” Nanami grumbled, trying to squirm free while Haibara, Ieiri, and Geto very notably did not fucking help. “I won’t just cut you, I will mince you!”

“Sure you will,” Gojo patted his cheek now that he couldn’t escape, and god, Nanami hated him. At last, after squeezing half the life out of Nanami, bruising his back, disheveling his clothes, and mussing his hair, Gojo let him up.

“Silly Nanami-kun,” Gojo added, smiling briefly at him before turning his beneficent gaze back towards the sky. “You could only ever cut the distance in half. Well. Into thirty or seventy percent. But no matter how many times you do, there would still be more to go. Whether it’s you or Achilles or death, there will always be a little further to go.”

Nanami looked over at the others. Ieiri and Haibara had elected to ‘act casual.’ Haibara was trying to look as chipper as ever, scrolling through celebrity gossip on his phone and showing the occasional article to Ieiri, who was struggling with her lighter, which sparked but wouldn’t catch. Geto…

Geto was staring at Gojo like he wanted to close the distance, but had realized, since that awful day, that even he would always have at least halfway left to go.

“Nanami, do you have any matches?” Ieiri sighed as she gave up on her lighter. He was the reliable backup for things like chapstick, bottles of water, feminine products, and fire. She often told him that he’d make a great father, which always made him blush.

Nanami swallowed and made a show of patting his pockets and checking his bag like he hadn’t thrown them out to make a little home for the memento mori of the omnipotent idiot in their midst.

“Sorry,” he said, having searched every possible location far too thoroughly. “Must’ve dropped them someplace.”

Nanami didn’t drop things, and Ieiri knew it, but didn’t call him on it.

“Hey, Nanami,” Gojo said, unable to bear not being the center of the universe for thirty seconds. “Words aren’t enough. Let’s show them. I’ll play dead, and you cradle me in your arms like you want to be cremated with me.”

Nanami plucked Ieiri’s useless disposable lighter from her fingers and threw it at Gojo’s head. It connected with the invisible wall in the air, inches away from his brow. Behind that wall, Gojo smiled his cruel, unpunchable smile.

Haibara looked up at Nanami and must have read his mind.

“I hope Yaga-sensei doesn’t hurt his hand,” he said, seeming genuinely worried that their sensei might get a boxer’s fracture trying to discipline his now-invulnerable problem student. Geto chuckled and produced a lighter of his own.

The silence got a little more uncomfortable, and Nanami’s semi-broken leg twinged. He stretched it out ahead of him and hissed as the sharp ache reminded him that he had had a really long fucking day.

Gojo’s head snapped towards Nanami at the sound, and then locked onto Haibara. The ash on Ieiri’s cigarette grew long as she scowled at Gojo.

“Hey idiot,” she snapped, reaching into her bag and withdrawing a scalpel. “I thought I told you if you made his leg worse I was gonna skin you.”

Haibara looked from Gojo to Ieiri and finally to Nanami, and blurted out in panic,

“And then what happened, senpai? You didn’t finish telling us about the second fight!”

Gojo brightened, a deceptive sunbeam between storm clouds, while Nanami’s eyes widened in shock.

“Traitor,” he mouthed silently at Haibara, who gave him a sheepish but somehow unrepentant smile.

“I’m so glad you asked, Haibara-kun,” Gojo simpered. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Where was I? Ah, of course: Nanami-kun’s beautiful face, grief giving way to wonder at the miracle of my resurrection.”

Nanami tried to convey with his eyebrows that Haibara would pay dearly for this.

“His tears shone like diamonds. It’s a shame none of you can see his eyes like I can, there are so many colors in them, not just brown, there’s green, and gold, and the color of barley tea—”

“Which is brown,” Ieiri groaned.

“—and the wind picked up, and it blew his hair even further to the left. Sakura petals fluttered behind him—”

“It’s nearly September!” Nanami snapped, but Gojo ignored him.

“—the same tragic rose as the blood-stained tears pouring down his face. I wanted to remain there forever, just looking at him, to brush his tears away, but how could I? With a threat to all of us like Zen’in Toji on the loose, how could I rest when I knew that I was the only one who could stop him and protect Nanami-kun, and the rest of the world?”

Nanami glanced over at Geto. His bland smile remained steady, but his skin had paled. Nanami wanted to kick Gojo in the ribs. He might’ve grown more powerful, but for Geto, the outcome of a rematch against Zen’in Toji would’ve been just the same.

Nanami couldn’t kick Gojo, couldn’t stop him, and it wasn’t Nanami’s place to point out his cruelty to his best friend, so he did the only thing he could, and got up, descending the stairs to go back to his dorm.

Chapter Text

“Nanami! Where are you going?” Haibara called after him.

“Too much sun,” Nanami paused and turned back to answer. “Headache. I’ll be fine.”

This seemed to satisfy Haibara, thank god. Geto frowned and started to rise, but sat back down when Ieiri muttered something too quietly for Nanami to hear. Gojo, meanwhile, slid his glasses down his nose and locked eyes with him before Nanami could look away again and raised a single eyebrow to express his skepticism. Nanami turned back around, letting Gojo’s gaze analyze the back of his head instead. Gojo was such a damned hypocrite; if he could act like his death and resurrection hadn’t affected him at all, then it was only fair that Nanami got to do the same.

For the first time all day, he finally got to walk someplace by himself, without being escorted by fretting classmates, escorting negligent ones, or being forced along for the ride by the one who defied the laws of physics for his own amusement.

When he got back to his room, he kicked off his shoes and removed his jacket, then crashed face-first onto his bed. He just lay there for a bit, half-smothering himself in his pillow before finally rolling onto his back. He pictured the chest under his bed and all its contents, the uniform jacket which had been tossed into the incinerator, the swath of destroyed campus, and pressed the heels of both hands against his eyes, hard enough for flashes of color to appear.

In the past week, he’d spent two nights sleeping in an airport, found Gojo dead, watched him come back to life, and miserably failed his first assessment of the term. Then, because that wasn’t enough, he’d been tormented even more than usual by Gojo’s violently swinging mood, from contempt to care to casting Nanami as some pining ingénue, because all of them had failed and the real heroine, an innocent middle school girl, was dead. And the godforsaken term had only just started.

He uncovered his eyes and looked at the ceiling, tracing the crooked path of a crack in the plaster.

He could go back to Denmark. Be a sorcerer there. His grandparents would certainly welcome him. But his parents were here, in Japan. The ratio of sorcerers to the rest of the population was much lower in Japan than back west. If Nanami left, and something happened to his mother and father, he knew he would surely come back as a curse himself. He stretched his hand up toward the ceiling, contemplating his own bones, veins, and the cursed energy that flowed through them. Maybe he’d be a curse powerful enough that they’d have to send Gojo Satoru to get rid of him.

He dropped his arm and put it out of his mind. It took a few moments to conjure the will, but eventually he got up long enough to drag the box of books close enough to his bed to go through it. He could barely remember what he’d ordered.

Ah. Right. The Game of Contemporaneity, which he’d purchased as a personal challenge, and definitely wouldn’t be attempting in his current state of mind. The Blue Fox… his Icelandic-Danish dictionary was all the way across the room and he wasn’t getting up again, and he was so brittle that he wasn’t sure if he could take the frustration of not knowing a word. The Ungodly Farce seemed too close to home based on the title alone. Finally, he settled on The Book of Tea.

He achieved about thirty minutes of peaceful reading before someone knocked on his door. He shut his eyes and sighed.

“It’s not locked.”

It was either Ieiri or Geto. Haibara wasn’t capable of approaching quietly, and Gojo wouldn’t have knocked. Nanami looked up, and it turned out to be both of them. He twisted around to sit up on his bed.

“Did something happen?” he asked, resigned to being dragged back into the social fray. “Did Gojo start up with Haibara again?”

“No, nothing like—” Geto started, only for Ieiri to shove past him, kick off her shoes, and flop onto Nanami’s bed herself, wriggling around until her head hung off the edge.

“Are you okay?” she asked, regarding him upside down.

“Of course, I wasn’t anywhere near the actual fight,” Nanami swerved around her actual question. “You know Gojo just lies for fun.”

Geto made a small noise, some sort of involuntary displeased grunt.

“He’s just… distancing himself from it. Coping,” Geto said, coming in to lean against the wall, like he wasn’t just as bothered, if not more, by Gojo’s blithe retelling of a tragedy of failure as a self-aggrandizing adventure when the bodies were barely cold. Like Gojo had a good reason and it was Nanami's fault for not seeing it. Nanami’s brittle state finally cracked.

“If you’re here to apologize for or defend Gojo’s bullshit, then please leave,” he snapped. “You can’t apologize for someone who isn’t sorry, and how he copes isn’t any concern of mine.”

“We’re not here for that,” Ieiri said, glaring hard at Geto. “I’m not, anyway, and if you are, Suguru, then Nanami’s right and you should get the fuck out.”

Geto blinked, and shook his head. Nanami was just as startled. Ieiri was always the first to duck out of any confrontation between Geto and Gojo. The fact that she had just sworn at Geto on his behalf was oddly touching.

“No,” Geto said, grievance sliding away into the same fatigue that weighed on the other two. “Sorry.”

Nanami sighed and slid to the floor with a thunk, then shuffled til he was perpendicular to Ieiri. He leveled his own exhausted gaze to meet Geto’s, and sighed again.

“I get that he's your best friend,” Nanami conceded. “I get that apologizing for him and trying to explain him is a habit at this point. I just don’t know how you’re not tired of it. I’m so sick of people trying to explain Gojo Satoru to me, when he doesn’t care to understand anyone else.”

“It takes time,” Ieiri shrugged, shoulders a little closer to the floor. “And he’s kinda inescapable, and he’s in our year, and we think he's worth it. But if you don’t, then that’s fine, and he only has himself to blame. I just want to know if you’re okay.”

Nanami shut his eyes. He heard Geto slide the door shut and sit down beside it. They both stayed quiet until he spoke up again.

“He doesn’t care about anything,” Nanami muttered, “and, fine. He doesn’t have to. He doesn’t have to do anything, apparently.”

“Even die,” Geto finished his thought. Nanami swallowed hard, because that both was and wasn’t what he meant.

“I’m not upset that Gojo didn’t stay dead,” Nanami explained, because Gojo had been dead, or close enough to it that it made no difference. “But why do I care that he died when he doesn’t?”

Why do I, Nanami had asked, not why should I, thus showing his whole hand.

“Had you ever seen a dead body before that?” Ieiri asked. She had, in varying states, as they all knew. Triage after a disaster didn’t allow for the convenient hiding of the dead while the barely-living were tended to. Nanami shook his head.

“Not like that.”

The images were already blurring in his mind. Something like that should’ve been burned into his memory in perfect, horrifying detail, but he wouldn’t have been able to tell them how many wounds were on Gojo’s leg, how far the torrent of blood had reached around his body. The only parts Nanami could still picture with perfect clarity were the wrong-looking wound on Gojo’s forehead and the emptiness in his eyes which were supposed to contain infinity.

Nanami shook his head to rid himself of the images.

“Not… reduced to meat like that,” he continued.

He heard Geto exhale hard; he’d nearly been in that state himself, butchered by Zen’in.

“Not someone my own age,” Nanami continued, because for all Gojo's condescension, they were only seven months apart. “And when I started to feel the cursed energy picking up in the body, I thought for sure that, with a death like that, he was coming back as a vengeful spirit. And that would be it, wouldn’t it? Gojo as a vengeful spirit would probably be the end of the world, everyone I’ve ever known, dead, not that I wouldn’t be the first to go.”

Nanami opened his eyes. Because of how they were sitting, he met Geto’s troubled eyes first, his expression more lost than Nanami had ever seen it. Ieiri twisted around to sit upright to listen more intently, or maybe she had just given herself a headache.

Nanami didn't want to dump this on them. Hell, Nanami didn’t want to be this vulnerable with anyone, but there was no one else. Haibara would just try to put a cheerful spin on it, discussing it with Yaga might have serious repercussions, Iori hated Gojo enough already, Mei Mei would blackmail him later, and Gojo himself was out of the question for every possible reason. Nanami couldn't keep the words in, so he let them out to the only two people who might understand.

“I had the ratios lined up,” he whispered, picturing the exact spot across Gojo’s bloodied throat in his mind. “I was going to take his head off before the vengeful spirit could manifest. He just woke up before I did. Otherwise…”

Otherwise, everything might have been different, if Nanami could have followed through. He’d never know if he would have been able to. He ran his hands through his hair and pulled, two fists full, neck tense, like he could pull the thoughts out if he just yanked hard enough.

“And it should be done. Talking about it, I mean. He would’ve come back just the same, killed Zen’in just the same, nothing would be any different. It’s not enough that he has to include me in his story when it doesn’t matter that I was there, he fucking embellishes. I was just a piece of the background, but he has to make me a prop, a caricature to give him a noble motivation, because he won’t just say that he killed Zen’in because Zen’in killed him first, and because he learned something new and wanted to try it out.”

Nanami’s eyes were stinging. He shut them tight again. There was enough pouring out of him, and he would not make Gojo's story any more valid by crying while talking about the incident.

“He makes it sound like I mattered, and I didn’t. It’s just a better story that way, because it’s funny to make me something else, because it’s more fun for him to be cruel about it. It doesn’t matter what actually happened, or what I actually did or didn’t do or feel or say, because the only thing that’s real to him is himself.”

He heard the soft noise of cloth against cloth as Ieiri slid off his bed and sat next to him. Her warmth and the smell of smoke that lingered on her all the time these days were a stronger presence than just the sight of her would've been. Her head tipped to rest on his shoulder.

“Satoru is a jackass,” she agreed, and even Geto made a small noise of assent. “It’s not fair to you. And yeah, it’s mean of him to pretend that just because he’s invincible that finding him dead wasn’t a fucked up thing to happen to you.”

Nanami swallowed hard, and forced out the words:

“He’s different now, or am I imagining it?”

“No,” Geto answered, nearly before Nanami had finished the question. “You're not.”

God, Nanami was sick of talking about Gojo. Geto must’ve been too, because he said:

“Tell us something about you. Something that has nothing to do with us, or here, or…”

Geto trailed off before saying ‘Gojo’, but his face looked like he was desperate for anything Nanami would say next. Nanami blinked for a moment. He hadn’t thought about the version of himself that existed before and outside of this place, that carried on in spite of it, in… he wasn’t sure how long, before today. He, like the hypocrite he was, had convinced himself that it didn’t matter.

“Did you know there are sorcerers in Scandinavia?” he blurted out. He looked over at Geto, desperate for approval all at once, for an indication that yes, this is the sort of thing that he wanted Nanami to tell him. Geto’s mouth fell open, just slightly.

“I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I don’t know much at all about curses or magic outside of Japan,” he shrugged with a tiny, sheepish smile. He leaned in, though, chin propped up on his interlaced fingers like there was nothing he’d rather hear about.

“Me either,” Ieiri said, elbowing him gently. “You’ve been holding out on us.”

“It’s not that interesting,” Nanami backpedaled.

“Nice try,” Ieiri cut him off, and Geto was finally smiling like he meant it.

“It doesn’t have to be interesting,” he said, lying on his side on the floor like the reclining Buddha, but with the slightly more sinister edge of blocking the main exit. “I want to hear all about it.”

Nanami wanted to provide another disclaimer, that he didn’t tell stories like Gojo, painting an exciting picture, but he was pretty sure it would be written off as false modesty. So, he just began with the obvious:

“It’s different than it is here. There’s no formal school for it, we don’t have some council higher ups, there’s not the same family rivalries. There’s a little international competition, just for pride, but nothing like here.”

He had no idea why he’d chosen this part of his life to share. It wasn’t important, it made no difference in how powerful he was compared to the rest of them, but it was deeply personal. He just needed something to ground himself, to remind himself that Geto was right, and that Nanami existed outside of the ratio of power in which he was nothing and Gojo was everything.

“I wonder if every place’s curses are different. Ours have seasons. Denmark is furthest south, so it’s not so bad, but further north…”

Nanami swallowed and trailed off. He wasn't used to being the focus in the room, even one without Gojo in it. But Geto had asked, and Nanami found that his memories were adamant about being shared.

“This time of year, the sun rises at four in the morning and doesn’t set ‘til eleven in Aarhus. Five whole hours of night. But in winter, it’s the opposite. Rises at nine, sets at four. If you keep going north, the effect increases. Even for the people who live there year round, it’s a strange change. In winter, there is so little light, and in summer, so little darkness. It does make the peaks and kinds of cursed energy a bit more predictable.”

“Oh,” Geto raised his chin as the calendar clicked in his head. “That's why you weren’t here this past break!”

Nanami smiled, just a hint of one, pathetically grateful that someone other than Haibara had even noticed his absence.

“Midsummer and midwinter are important times for clearing curses, so I visit to help,” Nanami explained. “Summer is easier. We have enough people that we can go hunting for curses in groups rather than waiting for them to cause problems, and so we go around in small teams to clear them out.”

“And winter?” Geto prompted.

“Winter, all the teams go north, above the circle, to unpopulated places. We shoo the animals out of an exclusion zone with a barrier, and at the solstice, we call the curses to us. The strongest ones can’t resist. It’s the most dangerous time for us, but it means less work and less death the rest of the year.”

Ieiri stayed, her head against his shoulder, and Geto remained across, and they just let him talk, asking questions about his childhood, about how sorcery was different in Scandinavia, asking him to show them things sometime.

“If there are enough sorcerers there, then why do you go back?” Geto asked. “Why don't you take a real break instead of more work?”

A sharp bark escaped without Nanami’s permission, and once it had, he couldn’t stop laughing, curling in on himself and dislodging Ieiri. When he could finally talk again, he said,

“There are more, but most are weaker, maybe because of that. Very few of us would be considered higher than a grade two.”

His chest shook with more laughter, silent this time.

“Would you believe that I also go back out of obligation, because, to them, I’m likely to become one of the strongest?”

Ieiri started laughing as well, not mocking him, but in some sort of solidarity.

“I bet Satoru wouldn’t last ten minutes above the arctic circle,” she giggled. “Right, Suguru?”

“Eaten by a polar bear,” Geto smiled gently. “No doubt about it.”

Nanami snorted at that.

“He’d be fine. An arctic fox would decide he’s her cub and he’d finally be among his people,” he said. “All white-fluff and trouble.”

“So that means you’re going back there at the end of the term?” Geto asked, his smile fading as he picked at a thread on his trousers. Nanami nodded.

“The school agreed to let me go early, so I’ll be flying back the second week of December. I’ll need time to get over the jetlag before midwinter.”

He could hear the longing in his voice. He didn't mean to let it show, but being there with the other cunning folk, gathering on the small, frozen islands where no humans lived anymore, sleeping in the abandoned mining camps and calling the curses of the north to come duel them in the darkness, he felt almost like he belonged. It must have shown on his face too starkly to be ignored.

“…are you going to come back?” Geto asked, still fiddling with the loose string. Nanami nodded, like he hadn't just been thinking about how much he’d like to go back there.

“I’m needed year-round here. They probably wouldn’t miss me much if I didn’t go back for the summer solstice, but… it’s just good to be there every now and then, get a different perspective.”

Geto didn’t look particularly satisfied by that answer, but it wasn’t like Nanami had any others available. Ieiri huffed and scooted around, grabbed Nanami’s broken leg, and plunked it into her lap.

“Don’t get all mopey. Nanami-kun loves us too much to stay gone forever,” Ieiri declared, and then started up on healing Nanami’s leg a bit more.

“You’d better,” Geto said to him, his attempt at a stern expression breaking pretty quickly into a smile.

Every second of the day up until now had dragged on, but time sped up now that stress had given way to contentment. Eventually, Ieiri declared that Nanami could now run, but still no kicking or sparring until she’d finished up at least one more session.

“I’m starving,” she declared once she’d pushed Nanami’s leg off her lap. Nanami looked at the clock and only then realized that it had been hours.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said. He leaned across to the minifridge, checking his stash of snacks. “Do you want an apple? Oh, here, Geto-senpai.”

Nanami handed him a bottle of barley tea. Geto took it, but seemed perplexed, so he explained,

“For the heat. You mentioned it had been getting to you?”

Geto’s confusion gave way to a soft smile, and he held the bottle up to the narrow blade of sunlight leaking past the window shade.

“Huh,” Geto murmured, peering at the illuminated drink. “Gojo was right about something for once.”

Nanami had no idea what that might mean, but barley tea was known to help prevent overheating. Gojo was the opposite of a stopped clock, hands spinning wildly around the dial, but Nanami supposed that they must pass over the correct time every now and then.

“Keep your apple; it’s time for dinner,” Ieiri declared and got to her feet. “Nanami, get changed. We’re all going out.”

Nanami looked away from Geto to peer up at her cautiously.

“...all?”

She sighed and looked down at him.

“The more you avoid Gojo, the longer things are going to take to get back to normal; we both know that Haibara won’t go without you, and he’ll shrivel up and die if he can’t socialize in a group for more than a day.”

Nanami let out a long, despairing sigh. Ieiri responded by prodding his hip with her toes.

“Mei and Utahime are going to be there, too. You’ll have a buffer. Get up. You’re going. If you’re not dressed by the time we get back, I’m dragging you in your uniform.”

Nanami looked at Geto while debating internally whether to allow himself to look as downtrodden as he felt at the prospect of even more social interaction. Geto looked at him, then at Ieiri, opening his mouth—

“Geto agrees with me,” Ieiri said, not looking up.

And that was that. Nanami wouldn’t put Geto in the position of throwing Ieiri under the proverbial bus, or Ieiri in the position of being thrown, so that left him with only one choice. Geto got up and shrugged, twisting the cap off the bottle.

“Are we going anywhere that requires any sort of dress code?” Nanami asked, then got to his feet once the other two were back in the hallway.

“You ask that like it’s going to have any impact on what you wear,” Ieiri laughed, already sticking a cigarette in her mouth to light once outside.

“It might!” Nanami replied with the mild indignation of the accurately called out. Ieiri looked up at him and raised an eyebrow.

“Okay,” she shrugged. “Wear something slutty.”

She somehow managed to shut his door in his face before he could say anything more. The last thing he saw was Geto’s serene expression contorting as he choked on his tea.

When the coughing and laughing faded into silence, Nanami considered running and hiding, but he was fairly confident that Ieiri would then turn it into a game for Gojo in retaliation. “Catch the Cranky Kohai” or “Nab Naughty Nanamin” or something equally alliterative and obnoxious, no doubt with a finders-keepers clause of some sort. He levered himself off of his floor and opened his wardrobe.

Chapter Text

As far as he knew, none of the clothes he owned qualified as ‘slutty,’ and he was sure (pretty sure) that Ieiri wasn’t serious, so he decided that he’d opt for comfort.

He rinsed the sweat off of himself in the washroom; this time of year, he felt like he needed a shower every time he went back inside. Usually he would fuss with his hair a bit, make sure that it dried stick-straight, but he couldn’t be bothered and let it air dry after a few swipes with a towel.

He picked out a favorite band t-shirt with an interesting logo, part heart, part pentagram. He needed to get a new one; after his last growth spurt he'd had to cut the crew neck collar out so that it didn't feel like it was choking him. Still, it matched his most worn and shredded jeans, originally black, now faded to a charcoal gray. At least all the holes would help keep him cooler. Plain canvas sneakers; he’d forgotten that Haibara had swapped the white laces out for purple with tiny yellow lightning bolts.

He put them on anyway, since he didn’t have the time or patience to try to find different ones, let alone unlace and re-lace them.

His socks were plain, black, and not remotely slutty.

He went to brush his teeth, looked at himself in the mirror in the washroom and realized he might’ve fucked up.

He was still peppered with scratches and bruises from the evaluation, Ieiri having focused on the more immediate problem of his broken leg. He looked like he could’ve come directly from the rough dancing of a mosh pit. He sighed around his toothbrush and lifted an arm to sniff himself. He only smelled his antiperspirant, for what little good it would do in this weather, so at least he didn’t smell like he looked.

He finished brushing, mentally choosing a different outfit. The moment he opened the washroom door, he locked eyes with Ieiri, on her way to his room to pick him up.

Once, he’d visited his grandparents in Denmark, a belated trip for his ninth birthday to watch a total solar eclipse. As he stood there, holding onto the arms of his special glasses to keep them in place, too large to stay up on his small nose, he’d watched the black disc of the moon slide slowly into place. It was beautiful in a sinister way, the blaze of the corona flaring off the darkness, revealing the extent of the sun. It was so lovely, but dread seemed to flood over him as the sky dimmed into not-quite-night.

The way Ieiri’s smile slowly overtook her face and the dark delight that filled her eyes filled him with that same sort of dread. The beauty mark below her eye even mimicked the way Venus had appeared alongside the eclipse at totality.

“I just have to change–”

“You look changed to me,” she grinned, then tilted her head and fixed her eyes on his collarbone. “Is that a hickey?”

Nanami glanced down, then pinched the bridge of his nose. His headache peeked its face around a corner in his mind, wondering if it was already time to come back.

“No,” he sighed. “That’s where I took a chunk of rock salt the size of a tangerine flying at a high rate of speed, doctor.”

Ieiri burst into cackles; Nanami was spitefully satisfied that she failed to catch her unlit cigarette as it fell from her mouth, then mildly disgusted as she picked it up and stuck it back in anyway.

“Get your bag if you’re bringing it,” she ordered, following him as close as a shadow at half past noon, anticipating his attempt to dart into his room and get the door closed.

She stuck her foot firmly against the edge of said door the moment he got a hand on it.

“Nice try,” she said. “Get your bag and come on.”

Nanami glared.

“I could just change right in front of you,” he pointed out. She gave him a slow, unimpressed blink. Right. She had seen it all before while healing him, and was categorically not interested in anything he had to offer.

“And I could text Gojo to teleport up here and grab you before you do,” she shrugged. “You look fine, and I’m starving.”

Nanami glared harder. Threatening him with Gojo was an unexpected heel turn, and one he truly didn’t appreciate. Ieiri groaned.

“I’ll heal the not-hickey before we go down there,” she offered, and Nanami sighed. That was probably the best deal he was going to get, so he grudgingly stepped forward, keeping an eye on Ieiri’s phone in her hand the whole time.

She poked his collarbone when he emerged. He forced himself to relax a little once the bruise was gone.

“It’s going to be fine,” she assured him as they made their way down. “It’s not like anyone else is in uniform, and the fanciest place we’ll be going is a convenience store.”

Easy for her to say, she was in a simple sundress which would’ve been appropriate nearly anywhere. Nanami went back into his room to make sure he had everything and was about to plead his case one last time when Gojo appeared between them, half-in, half-out of the doorway.

“What’s taking so lonnnnng?” he demanded. His head thunked audibly on the frame as he glared at the ceiling, apparently demanding answers from the gods, or the roof shingles. “If I get low blood sugar, I will not be responsible for my actions.”

Gojo was dressed in a black t-shirt and jeans. He would’ve blended right in nearly anywhere, if he wasn’t so nonsensically tall, didn’t have a dollop of whipped cream for hair, and wasn’t wearing sunglasses indoors.

“When are you ever?” Nanami asked reflexively, still stalling as he dropped his bag onto his bed and picked out things he didn’t think he’d be needing. The archery books certainly weren’t necessary, a new box of matches was, he wasn’t going to carry around enough water bottles for that many people, et cetera.

“Impatient ass,” Ieiri added. Gojo straightened up like a reed and blew a raspberry at Ieiri. He turned to Nanami, his mouth already open to argue or insult, and stopped.

“You’re not in uniform,” he said. Nanami looked at Ieiri, then back at Gojo.

“...no. Neither are you. Is that a problem?” Nanami asked. “Ieiri-senpai said that we weren’t going anywhere fancy.”

“Y—” Gojo started to say something, then stopped, scanning Nanami’s room. His head tilted in puppyish confusion, like he was hearing something that neither Ieiri nor Nanami could.

The fact that it was entirely possible that he could be doing exactly that made the whole situation more concerning. Nanami looked at Ieiri, who glanced at Gojo, shrugged, and kicked him. He startled back to life like his mouse had been jostled and his screensaver shut down and picked up right where he left off.

“No, it’s not a problem,” Gojo scoffed, locking back onto Nanami. “I just thought you were born in that uniform, you know? And then you shed it like a snake every time you outgrew it. I almost didn’t recognize you in...”

Gojo trailed off there, like he wasn’t sure how to describe jeans and a t-shirt.

“Gojo, you should’ve told me you had a sunburn.”

Gojo was the one who’d stopped talking, so it wouldn’t be called an interruption. Ieiri made up for the lack of rudeness by standing on her toes and flicking the shell of Gojo’s ear.

“Ow!” Gojo yelped, covering the ear and glaring. “What was that for?! I don’t have a sunburn, what the hell?”

“Huh. That’s weird, your ear’s red so I thought you did,” she shrugged. Nanami took the reprieve to finish zipping up his bag. His phone buzzed on the side table.

“It wasn’t red before you flicked it, you demon!”

“So weird! I didn’t flick the other one, but it’s red too!”

Nanami tuned them out, unlocked his phone, and saw a text from Geto.

Geto-senpai: Do I need to come rescue you?
Nanami: No, we’ll be down in a moment.

Nanami looked up. Ieiri was now holding Gojo by both ears, and they were still bickering about whether or not they’d been red before or after she had started ‘examining’ them. Nanami cleared his throat, raised his phone, and snapped a picture.

“The others are waiting for us,” he said, looking at the result. Ieiri’s face was as mildly amused as it always was, but Gojo’s was completely absurd: His mouth was open so wide it looked like he was trying to bite Ieiri’s wrist to free his ear, and his glasses were knocked halfway off his face revealing one and a half of his eyes.

“Send me that,” Ieiri said, letting Gojo’s ears go. “C’mon, I’m starving.”

Gojo pouted and stepped out of the room, and Nanami followed, resigned to the fact that there was no scenario in which he could get into a plainer outfit. Once they were all in the hallway, Ieiri removed her foot from blocking the door and let him close and lock it.

Gojo kept glancing back at him as they walked down the hallway and down the stairs, and Nanami couldn’t help but hunch his shoulders a little lower each time, holding the strap of his bag like a very narrow nylon-web shield.

After the fourth glance back on the stairs, he couldn’t help himself.

“What do you keep looking at?” Nanami demanded, halting exactly where he was and bracing himself on the railing in case Ieiri ran into him, which she did.

“Nothing!” Gojo answered too quickly. “I’m just making sure miss grabby back there doesn’t try to yank my ears off again.”

Ieiri, aided by the height differential between the stairs, set her chin on Nanami’s shoulder, turning them into a two-headed demon.

“You sure you’re not sunburned?” she asked. “You’re getting pink again.”

Gojo just huffed and started back down the stairs, this time keeping his face unflinchingly forward.

“I can go back upstairs and change,” Nanami muttered to his newfound second head. “It’ll take me all of five minutes.”

“You. Look. Fine,” Ieiri repeated. “Bring it up again and I’m going to bite you.”

She stood back upright. Gojo, who had already rounded the landing to the next flight down, shouted back,

“Would you two quit cuddling and hurry the hell up?”

Nanami growled.

“Maybe we should just say we’re dating,” he muttered. “It might get them to shut the hell up and get off our backs about it.”

“Ew,” Ieiri replied blithely, and that settled that.

Downstairs, Geto and Haibara were playing the hand slapper game, Haibara trying his best to beat Geto's special-grade reflexes. Iori and Mei were discussing where to head first.

Haibara and Iori's clothes resembled their uniforms, both having requested modifications that suited what they would normally wear. Mei, like Ieiri, wore a sundress which she somehow made seem mildly scandalous, her hair braided and pinned atop her head in a silvery crown. Geto's hair was entirely loose, and he wore a short-sleeved button down printed in neon colored triangles and squiggles over a pair of what looked like swim trunks.

"Mm, Nanami-kun," Mei greeted them. "Casual clothes suit you as well."

There was a sharp crack as Haibara struck Geto’s hands when he looked over at the three of them.

“Loser,” laughed Gojo, while Haibara grabbed Geto’s hands, babbling apologies.

“Wait, Shoko!” Iori exclaimed, eyes gone huge. “Are we going to a club? Or a show? I’m not dressed for that!”

“Yes, Utahime,” Gojo grinned. “We’re all going to a rave. Don’t worry, we’re all going to strip down to our underwear, take a bunch of drugs, paint each others’ naked bodies with glow-in-the-dark paint, and then wake up in Amsterdam missing our kidneys.”

“We’re going to Ameyoko,” Ieiri said calmly, poking away at her phone, “where absolutely no one will care how we’re dressed. I’m not regrowing fourteen kidneys.”

“Really?!” Gojo exclaimed, desire to torment forgotten at the prospect of a trip to a literal candyland. He picked Ieiri up off the ground in a bearhug. As usual, she showed no reaction, continuing what she was doing on her phone.

“I figured it was the best way to keep you from being a dick to everyone since your mouth would be full the whole time,” she said, unable to shrug.

“Mean,” he replied, but his grin was undiminished, and he rubbed his cheek on her hair like a cat who hadn’t seen their human in days and had forgotten to act aloof.

“That’s me. Put me down or I’ll put my cigarette out on your face.”

Gojo put her down, because even he was capable of wise decisions, occasionally.

The drive into the city was uneventful. Somehow, Haibara, Iori, and Nanami wound up in a cab with Ieiri, while Gojo, Geto, and Mei wound up in the other. Nanami didn’t understand the shuffling, negotiating, and full bodied sleight of hand that seemed to produce that result, but he wasn’t going to question it. Mei seemed entirely immune to Gojo’s Gojoness.

They all piled out at the entrance, and as Ieiri predicted, Gojo was far too immediately mesmerized by the sugary options to antagonize anyone. Nanami didn’t have much room to talk, eagerly going from international stall to international stall to get doner kebab, arancini, stuffed grape leaves, and a sampler of dim sum dumplings.

“Wow, you have no roots at all!” the girl, about their age, at the dim sum vendor beamed at him.

Nanami blinked. It was relatively rare for him to get comments on how he didn’t appear “fully Japanese” these days, but he’d never heard it phrased quite that way before.

“Your hair, I mean!” she laughed as she put this and that into a box. “How often do you bleach it? And what do you use; it doesn’t even look fried!”

“Oh!” That made more sense. Her own hair was a riot of pastel colors, so sharing techniques made sense if she thought that he dyed his.

“Ah, I don’t,” he shrugged. “I’m part Danish, and somehow the blonde won out.”

“Lucky!” the girl groaned, dragging out the ‘y.’ “I have to bleach mine all the time and the blue and purple fade so fast! You should try some color! You’d look so cool with…”

She hummed, considering him as he tried to be polite and not gaze longingly at his dumplings.

“Purple, I think! And green! A purple and a green streak in your bangs; it’d be awesome.”

“I…” Nanami genuinely didn’t know what to say to that. “I’ll think about it?”

He flinched as a hand landed on his shoulder.

“Naaaaanami-kun,” Gojo drawled behind him. “Are you buying sweets for me?”

“I think you’ve bought all the sweets there are to buy, Satoru,” Geto’s voice came from his other side, “and it’s rude to interrupt others’ conversations.”

“Huh?” Gojo squawked. “Geto, you’re interrupting our conversation right now, you big hypocrite!”

“I’m so sorry,” Nanami sighed to the vendor with a small bow. She laughed brightly.

“It’s not like I’ve been very polite myself!” she answered. “Besides, you didn’t order any sweets; that won’t do!”

She lifted lids of the other steam baskets, tongs flashing as she filled a second container while behind him, Geto and Gojo continued to argue (rudely) about manners.

“The sweets are on the house,” the vendor continued, then held a finger in the air, “if!”

She snatched a photocopied menu out from underneath a fuchsia ceramic poison dart frog and scribbled her name, Ito Ima, and a phone number. Next to it, she quickly drew a little face and, clicking the other colors in the pen, gave the face streaks of different colored hair.

“You give my number to your hot friend with the silver hair,” she grinned, folding up the paper and holding it out to him, wiggling it like Nanami was a cat she was trying to lure into playing.

He blinked at her, then up at Gojo, the back at her again.

“He’s… you can give it to him yourself?”

This time, when she laughed, she folded herself in half, shaking the counter so hard that the drinks on display rattled and threatened to fall.

“Not him,” she cackled when she popped back up. She pointed the paper over Nanami’s shoulder. He glanced back to see Haibara, Ieiri, Iori, and Mei taking pictures in front of a travel agency ad.

“Ahh,” Geto said, shooting a smug grin at Gojo. “Mei-san. Of course.”

“Mei-san,” Ima repeated dreamily. “What’s her first name?”

“It’s… also Mei. And I can certainly do that,” Nanami agreed, taking the paper, “but it’s only fair to warn you, she’s a shameless gold digger.”

Ima grinned and drummed her fingers on the cash drawer.

“I can work with that,” she grinned, then handed him the bag, complete with an extra box on the top. “Thank you! Come again! With her, next time!”

Nanami thanked her in return and made his way back to the others, Geto and Gojo close behind.

“Mei-senpai,” Nanami said, offering the paper, “the young lady with the colorful hair over there asked me to give you her number.”

“Oh?” Mei purred, taking it and looking over Nanami’s shoulder. As he glanced back as well, Ima was wiggling her fingers in a flirty hello to Mei, who gave her a wink in return before putting the number safely into her clutch.

“Who cares!” Gojo crowed. “There are much more important things to discuss! Like the fact that when she asked Nanami to give her number to her ‘hot friend with the silver hair…’”

Oh no.

“Nanami-kun thought she meant me!” Gojo finished, hands out like he’d just done a magic trick. Everyone else just stared blankly at him.

“Satoru,” Geto sighed at last, “you know you’re attractive.”

“Pretty heteronormative of you, Nanami-kun,” Ieiri smirked. “How disappointing.”

“Your face is the only attractive thing about you,” Iori grumbled.

Haibara, meanwhile, was clearly just happy not to be included. Nanami held onto the selfish hope that Gojo might latch onto the fact that Iori had just called him attractive, but it was dashed almost immediately.

“Not important!” Gojo thundered imperiously. Geto groaned as people around them quieted and started to stare.

“The moral of this story,” Gojo announced gravely, “the great, immutable truth at its center, is that…”

Here, Gojo spun, nearly smacking Iori and Haibara in the face as he flung his arms wide before putting both hands on Nanami’s shoulders and saying, directly into Nanami’s face, of course:

“Nanami-kun thinks that I’m hot.”

That was definitely not a moral, Nanami thought as Gojo smiled at him.

“Or,” Geto, voice of reason, added, “you were the ‘friend with the silver hair’ right in front of the girl who was saying it to him.”

Gojo frowned at Nanami as though he’d been the one to propose that theory, but dropped his shoulders and went back to bickering with Geto. The argument continued without Nanami’s input, Gojo and Geto debating the semantics, Nanami’s eyeline, and so forth, while Iori adamantly maintained that Gojo was not hot, merely tall, which were frequently confused but absolutely not the same thing. Mei threw in occasional comments to infuriate the others and keep the whole thing going so that she could enjoy the free show.

Nanami didn’t have to say anything as he ate and walked, sharing with Haibara and Ieiri. They were amazing, the bao bun so fluffy and the barbecued pork inside so rich, the sesame balls light and crispy and the red bean paste within warm and not too sweet, though Nanami still preferred the white bean.

“Nanami-kun,” Gojo whined as he planted his chin on Nanami’s shoulder, keeping in lockstep behind him so as not to be dislodged, “Geto and Utahime are bullying me.”

Nanami chewed, swallowed, and replied:

“How terrible.”

Gojo ignored the complete lack of sincerity, digging his pointy chin into Nanami’s collarbone.

“Make them stop.”

“And how would you propose that I do that?” Nanami asked. He knew he shouldn’t take the bait, that he should just elbow Gojo in the gut and refuse, but delicious food always put him in a more pleasant frame of mind.

“Settle it and tell them you think I’m hot, of course!”

Nanami glanced out of the corner of his eye to find Gojo glancing back, eye visible from the gap on the side of his sunglasses.

“Or settle it and tell him that you don’t,” Geto added from behind them, Iori chiming in with her agreement. Nanami regarded Gojo’s pout.

“Which answer will actually allow us to drop this?” he asked.

“The truth, of course!” Gojo gasped, fluttering his eyelashes.

Nanami sighed and thought about it for a moment, popping a fried shrimp dumpling into his mouth. It had, admittedly, never occurred to him that Ima the vendor might have meant anyone but Gojo. Ieiri would have a field day teasing Nanami about internalized homophobia. He thought about Gojo’s objective attractiveness, then Gojo’s subjective attractiveness to Nanami personally.

Which begged the question: Which Gojo? The half-mad, resurrected one who’d filled him with fear and confusion? The arrogant asshole who’d mocked him for his weakness? The meddling one who’d threatened Haibara, the playful one who’d teleported him across the field, the dramatic one who’d made up so much of Nanami’s role in the story?

Were any of those Gojos even the real one? Did it even matter? Gojo was undeniably beautiful; everyone knew that.

He swallowed, took another dumpling from this haul, and looked at Gojo.

“Gojo-senpai, I do think you’re attractive,” Nanami admitted. Gojo lit up, opening his mouth to declare victory, and Nanami took the opportunity to take the dumpling, another one made of soft bao with little pink decorations to make it look like a pig, and stuck it between Gojo’s teeth before he could say anything.

“You are most attractive when you’re not talking.”

Gojo grabbed onto the bun and bit it, swallowed, and then pointed at Nanami.

“Say ‘Gojo-senpai, I think you’re hot’ and I’ll finish my food in silence,” he demanded. Nanami sighed again, looked up at the heavens, and gritted out,

“Gojo-senpai, I think you’re hot.”

Gojo immediately beamed and finished the bun in two bites, which then led to a debate about whether ‘Gojo’s food’ meant that one specific bun, or all the food Gojo had purchased so far, which was two tote bags worth of sweets.

They wandered around for a couple more hours, flicking the occasional flyhead or other gradeless curse out of existence. To them, it was mostly habit, but Nanami still registered every time someone’s shoulders or expression relaxed, all the people who took a deep breath like they hadn’t for a while, and felt a little less useless. As the tiny curses were swept away, the mood of the crowd elevated overall.

Nanami wasn’t particularly good at reading people, but he saw how relatives, friends, lovers, strangers, all seemed to smile at each other more easily and fondly, regarding one another with more kindness and empathy. He imagined them years from now, looking back and asking each other, “do you remember that time in the market, that one August? What a perfect night!” It was such a small thing, but the effects might ripple, this light of contentment burning away at a bit of the resentment, fear, and sorrow in the hearts of this crowd, leading to curses the seven of them exorcised by ensuring that they’d never be born. The misery of the day had shifted into a more blessed evening.

They picked up things that they wanted or needed from the retail stalls. Nanami picked up some more ordinary shoelaces while Haibara and Geto bonded over ugly neon shirts. Iori bought incense, and Ieiri a carton of cigarettes. Gojo stopped at nearly every gacha machine that they passed, giving the ones he didn’t want to passing children, throwing the ones he did into his bag of candy. Lastly Mei, for a twenty percent surcharge from the rest of them, managed to use her beauty and more mature aura to purchase an unreasonable quantity and variety of alcohol, which they then fed to one of Geto’s curses, bottle by bottle, to smuggle back to campus later.

When the crowds got to be a bit much for all of them, they retreated to the nearby park with ice cream cones. It was cooler, seated on the edge of the fountain, and the temperature had dropped now that the sun was down.

“Hey, Nanami-kun,” Gojo said, ice cream long since devoured, along with one tote bag’s worth of sweets. “Watch this!”

Nanami, against his better judgment, indulged Gojo’s perpetual urge to show off and watched, idly licking his ice cream. Gojo grinned and tipped backwards into the water, Nanami jumping up just in time to avoid the splash.

“What are you doing, you idiot!” Iori stage whispered, looking around frantically for any cops who might take issue with someone having a dip in the fountain. Gojo popped back out completely dry, the water sliding away thanks to Limitless. He shook his head, the water drops that were never on him in the first place flying every which way.

Nanami was less amused, having not avoided the splash after all.

“C’mon, let’s head back,” Ieiri declared, standing and stretching. “Today was a long day and I want a drink or seven.”

Chapter Text

It was easy to find a place to drink; a demoralizing number of buildings on the campus had been empty for years. Easy to find, but only if you were in a group. For some reason, the school was somehow an incredibly difficult place to find somewhere to be alone, as Nanami had learned. Whenever he desperately wanted to just be alone to resolve the cognitive dissonance of constantly feeling alone, despite the presence of the other students, Haibara found him, or Gojo just happened to stumble across his hiding place.

They found an old conference room on the side of a building facing away from the rest of campus so that no lights would give them away. Ieiri sat farthest from the door, ranked highest due to having the best tolerance, the rest of them strewn around without much order. Gojo was still sipping his first chu hai, likely also his only one, while the others were on their second or third drinks.

Ieiri and Nanami were on their fourth. Ieiri had a carton of orange juice on her left and a bottle of vodka on her right. Nanami had a fifth of whiskey in front of him, about a quarter of which was gone, and a bottle of Coke as a chaser which he'd barely touched. Ieiri was almost entirely unaffected, near as anyone could tell, while Nanami was finally approaching buzzed.

“Thank you,” Nanami murmured to her, the alcohol bringing all his fondness to the surface. “You’re my favorite.”

Ieiri laughed happily at that.

“You’re so sweet when you drink,” she grinned at him. “How do you keep it all inside the rest of the time? I'm surprised it doesn't give you indigestion.”

Nanami ugly-snorted at that.

“You see me around people who are either much sweeter than I am,” he gestured his bottle first towards where Iori, Geto, and Haibara were passing around a comically large bottle of cherry flavored rum while playing a game of slapjack.

He then shot a wary look towards Gojo, who sat across from Mei at a corner of the table.

Nanami was in the liminal state in which his bliss from exotic food was fading, but the new bliss from alcohol hadn’t fully set in, and in the gap, anxiety settled. Mei and Gojo whispering turned that anxiety into full-fledged paranoia, and Nanami just couldn’t stop glancing over at them.

From the shocked expressions on Gojo’s face and the increasing stack of bills over on Mei’s side, she was info brokering. Nanami vaguely wondered how much of Mei’s blackmail and gossip material was actually true. He finished his thought:

“Or people it’s suicidal to be sweet around.”

Mei looked over at them and her smile widened. She leaned in towards Gojo, her hand obscuring any hope of reading her lips. When she sat back, Gojo was staring hard at them, his glasses lowered just a fraction. Mei looked delighted as she plucked his wallet from under his hand and took out another two bills, while Gojo’s mouth was pinched, eyebrows tilted in a puppyish expression of distress.

“Hell,” Nanami groaned. “What the fuck did she tell him?”

“It’s Mei,” Ieiri shrugged, swigging the vodka first, the orange juice second, and swishing them together between her teeth like mouthwash before swallowing. “Who knows?”

Gojo gagged a little at her display and looked away, just as she’d certainly intended. Many days, this one currently included, Nanami considered telling Ieiri that he wished that they were both straight, or that she was a man or he was a woman so that they could get married. Fortunately, he wasn’t that drunk yet.

“I mean,” Ieiri continued, and the beauty mark below her eye always reminded Nanami of a silent movie star, especially when she fluttered her eyelashes and cocked her mouth into a wicked little smile, “you could always just go ask her.”

Nanami didn’t delude himself that the fact that Mei considered him a ‘good potential investment’ and might or might not want to eat him meant that she’d be any less stingy with him, or negotiate less ruthlessly.

“I probably can’t afford that,” he replied. Gojo had gotten over his disgust and was unsubtly watching them out of the corner of his eye while Mei counted his former money.

“You could always ask Gojo.”

Nanami glared at Ieiri.

“I definitely can’t afford that.”

Ieiri set aside her vodka long enough to flick him in the forehead, then relaxed back in her executive chair to lecture him.

“Okay. One:” she gestured at him with the vodka bottle. “You have to know that he'd pester you less if you didn't react so much.”

“I don't react!” Nanami seethed, taking another sip of his whiskey. “I barely speak to him!”

“Yyyyyyeah,” Ieiri grinned, batting her eyelashes again. “You don’t say much, but your cursed energy goes brrrrrr.”

The noise his cursed energy supposedly made was accompanied by a vigorous shaking of the orange juice. Perfect. Apparently when Gojo annoyed him, his cursed energy sounded sloshy. Of course, Ieiri wasn’t done. At least she was keeping her voice low enough that (probably) only Nanami could hear.

“And two: Satoru only pesters people he cares about like that. Like Utahime, he bothers her when it’s convenient, and Haibara could be anybody. But this is how he was to us when we met last year. Suguru actually fed him to a curse once because he was being such a prick.”

Nanami squinted at her.

“So he annoys me because he ‘cares’ about me, and I should react more but also less. No chance of him just… growing up?”

“Nope.”

Nanami gently thunked his forehead onto the table and lay there. Ieiri patted his head softly.

“Hey, party chairwoman,” Gojo’s voice brayed, rising and slapping both hands to the table. Nanami dragged his whiskey bottle closer to his head. “Did you break Nanami-kun already? I want to play games.”

“Yes. I am broken. Passed out cold. No games for me,” Nanami muttered into the cave of his arms, uncaring whether anyone heard him.

“Don’t come to me with problems, Satoru-kun!’ Ieiri barked, every inch the displeased company president. “Not unless you have a solution in mind! Otherwise, what good are you to the Ieiri-Nanami Inebriation Conglomerate?”

Nanami tried to hide his laughter, but he knew his shoulders were shaking.

“Something to say, Nanami-san?” Ieiri demanded, thumping the table.

“Nope,” Nanami said, too quietly for anyone else to hear, raising his face just enough to expose one eye to her. “Silent partner.”

Ieiri maintained her stormy manager-face for five seconds before deteriorating into gasping laughter.

“This is so unfair!” Gojo whined, flopping into a chair and spinning while he pouted, staring up at the ceiling. “Nanami-kun is telling jokes and Shoko is hogging them! I wanna hear Nanami being funny!”

“Then maybe you should let him speak once in a while,” Mei suggested, reaching for his wallet again.

“Why are you taking more money?!” Gojo complained, though he didn’t bother physically stopping her.

“My valuable advice isn’t free,” she shrugged, taking another two bills out.

“Spin the bottle?” Geto smirked, idly spinning an empty beer bottle on the table. Iori gagged, snatched it, and put it into a recycling bin that probably wouldn’t be emptied for ten years.

“How about King’s Game?” Haibara suggested. Nanami didn't understand why he would do that to himself, but Nanami was frequently baffled by the things Haibara, and most other people their age, considered fun. At least it was better than spin the bottle, he supposed.

“Gojo will just pick the king’s token every time,” Iori said, glaring over at the man in question. Gojo’s head immediately snapped up to glare at her.

“First, how dare you suggest that I would cheat?” he said. “Against someone like Geto or Mei, sure, but you? What would be the point?”

Then, some idiot piped up:

“Someone can pick for Gojo.”

Nanami thunked his head on the table again for being that very idiot. He heard himself saying the words before he even thought about it, and this time, he’d spoken loudly enough for the room to hear, not just Ieiri.

“Perfect!” Haibara grinned before Nanami could backtrack.

"Fine with me," Gojo relented, seemingly entirely content with this outcome. "But only if Nanami picks for me."

Nanami raised his eyes just high enough over the horizon of his arm to send Gojo a suspicious scowl.

"Why," he prompted. Gojo grinned.

"Was that even a question?"

Nanami just raised his eyebrow.

"Okay, okay!" Gojo laughed. "You're the only one I can trust not to cheat and give me something terrible who these brats will also trust not to go easy on me."

Nanami hated that Gojo was probably correct. Sparing Gojo or subjecting him to something worse than chance would serve up would be proof that Nanami cared either way, an unbearable indignity.

"Do we even have anything we can use–" Nanami started, hoping against hope that this nonsense might be stopped due to lack of chopsticks. Haibara held up the deck of cards, and all Nanami could do was sigh.

Ieiri held out her hand and Haibara delivered the deck with both hands and a formal bow as though presenting his business card. She carefully went through the deck and selected a King, and cards ace through six, examining the backs to make sure they were as identical as possible.

“Rules,” she pronounced, setting the rest of the deck aside and idly shuffling the chosen seven. “One: No leaving behind or looking for residual energy. If you do that, the penalty is donating half your clothes to Yaga-sensei for doll material. Two: Rules will be established for any challenges as needed, same penalty applies to cheating. Three: If you cheat twice, the clothes you’re wearing here and now are included in the half you give up, and you walk home naked. Four: If you throw up or pass out, you’re out. Five: Nothing more serious than kissing when people are drunk. Six: Nanami chooses for Gojo. Seven: I can declare more rules at any time to keep things fun or stop someone from being a huge asshole. Questions?”

Gojo’s hand shot into the air like a know-it-all grade schooler.

“Yes, Gojo?” Ieiri called on him, despite the fact that no one else had indicated that they had any concerns.

“Yes!” Gojo chirped. “What if I’m king? Does Nanami-kun still choose for me?”

Ieiri, Geto, Iori, and Nanami all said “yes” with varying degrees of emphasis.

“Okay, but then Nanami would never choose himself, so isn’t that unfair to the rest of you?” Gojo reasoned, all sweetness and light and false impartiality.

Nanami’s lower eyelid twitched. He was about to point out that Gojo disproportionately tormented him the rest of the time, so really, this would be a rebalancing of the scales, but Haibara, sadly, had a helpful idea.

“Oh, Nanami can just give Gojo-senpai a number every round before we look at our cards!” he beamed. “If Gojo is king, he’ll already have his number, and if he’s not, it doesn’t matter.”

Nanami shut his eyes and sighed, then sat up. Ieiri passed him the reduced deck first. He slid the few cards over each other and then picked one for himself and one for Gojo without looking.

“Four,” he said and slid Gojo’s card to him. The remaining cards were passed around the table until they made it back to Ieiri. They all glanced at their cards, and Geto smiled placidly as he flipped his to show the King.

“Hmm… two and six, I think, should trade clothes. Haibara laughed, and Iori groaned.

“I’m keeping my underwear,” Iori grumbled. After some negotiations, the rest of them put their heads down on the table, eyes shut and shielded, while Iori and Haibara stood back to back and swapped articles of clothing.

“What is even the point of this jacket, Haibara-kun?!” Iori complained, though she was laughing. “Why does it have buttons and no holes?”

“I like it! It’s fashionable!” Haibara defended. “How the heck do you tie this thing?”

Nanami let himself smile now that no one could see it, schooling his face back to indifference when they were given the all-clear.

His composure immediately shattered the moment he saw Haibara.

“What?!” Haibara demanded over Nanami’s heaving laughter. “It’s not that different from what the priests wear!”

He planted his hands on his hips and glared, and it was as though he’d swapped attitudes with Iori along with the clothes.

“For shame, Suguru-kun, you’ve killed your poor junior,” Mei smiled.

“Looks like you might’ve killed Shoko too,” Gojo snarked. Nanami, still trying to breathe, glanced over at Ieiri, whose face had gone pink in a way that had nothing to do with drinking.

“Haibara-kun, are you eating enough?” Iori asked, sounding genuinely concerned. “I can barely sit down in these.”

Iori twisted to look behind herself, and Nanami saw the source of Ieiri’s difficulty. Iori was surprisingly curvaceous under the loose shrine maiden clothes. He choked down his remaining laughter and tapped Ieiri’s foot with his own under the table.

“Geto-senpai was king, are we dealing to the right?” he asked. He stood up to gather the cards, which also conveniently blocked Ieiri from the others’ views while she composed herself.

“You’re my favorite,” Ieiri whispered as she pressed the orange juice carton to her face to cool it down.

“Which makes it our lovely shrine-maiden’s deal,” Geto agreed, taking the deck from Nanami and handing it to Haibara when he resumed his seat. Haibara never remained sullen for long, and was already praising how breezy and comfortable the miko was as he shuffled. He passed the deck to Nanami on his right, who once again pulled two cards and slid one to Gojo.

“Three,” he said to Gojo.

“Ooh,” Gojo grinned, catching his card under long fingers. “Does that mean you’ll be my seven, Nanami-kun?”

“You’d better hope not,” Ieiri, who had gotten her face back to a color that was plausible from alcohol alone, pointed out. “Our seventh card is the king.”

The last card came to her, and they all took a look.

“Lucky me,” Mei smiled. “Hmm… Would anyone like to buy the crown off me?”

“No,” Ieiri said immediately. “Forbidden.”

“Ah well. Then… six, kindly give me all your money.”

Gojo groaned in despair and just threw his wallet back to her, out of which she pulled his remaining cash. Iori narrowed her eyes.

“Why are you carrying around that much money, Gojo?”

“It’s all small bills for the vending machines,” Geto explained. Mei frowned.

“It’s true. There’s not much here.”

Nanami’s eyelid twitched. There was at least twelve thousand yen in her hands now, and that didn’t include the larger stack that she’d taken previously.

“Well if you don’t want it–” Gojo started, only to have her laugh in his face, of course.

The cards were gathered and, since they would be passed to Gojo, were now passed to Nanami.

“Oh come on, I’m not even allowed to shuffle?” Gojo whined, and was ignored. Nanami refrained from smiling, rearranging the seven cards as randomly as he could. He slid one to Gojo first, and then handed the rest of the deck to Ieiri.

“One,” he said to Gojo this time. Ieiri took her card and passed the deck back to him, and around they went.

To Nanami’s infinite dread, Gojo’s smile spread wide across his face. He tipped his head down to make his glasses slide and aimed those stupid blue eyes of his at Nanami like an idiotic child shining a high-powered laser pointer at a plane, hoping to blind the pilot.

“Nanami-kun, we should go play pachinko,” Gojo purred at him and flipped over the King. “You’re my lucky charm. Now who’s number one?”

“Ah!” Ieiri held up a finger for silence, then aimed it at Gojo. “Finding that out before you state your dare is cheating.”

Gojo pouted, but said:

“Fine. Number one has to call everyone by our given names.”

Nanami sighed and revealed his ace, and Gojo crowed in delight. Nanami supposed that it could’ve been appreciably worse, but knocked back another mouthful of whiskey anyway.

“Lucky, lucky, lucky!” Gojo sang out. He rested his chin in his hand and beamed at Nanami, who just stuck his hand out for the cards. Gojo kissed the king before sprawling across the table, one foot in the air, to hand it back. Nanami checked to make sure he hadn’t left a residual on it, then handed them over to Ieiri. She shuffled, selected her card, and immediately sent them back his way.

Nanami selected his own card and slid another Gojo’s way.

“One,” Nanami said again. Gojo looked over at Haibara.

“Haibara-kun, did you hear something?” he asked, looking all around the room, behind himself, even under the table. Haibara cackled at Nanami’s misfortune, because he was an absolutely terrible friend.

Nanami just glowered and passed the deck to Iori. Haibara gave a little yip of joy, and ordered number one to drink a water-cooler-cone’s worth of whatever alcohol they were drinking.

“Sorry!” Haibara winced when Nanami again flipped the ace.

“Why?” Nanami asked as he strolled over to the cooler. “I would’ve gotten to it in a few minutes anyway.”

The giant water bottle at the top had been empty for who knew how long, but there was still half a sleeve of paper cones in the dispenser. Nanami retrieved his whiskey and poured as much of it into the cone as he could without spilling it.

“That’s not full!” Gojo shouted, standing and pointing at him like Phoenix Wright. Nanami had to expend conscious effort not to crush the cone in his hand before he could drink it.

“‘There will always be an infinity between the top of the whiskey and the edge of the cup,’” he said, scowling, “we know, Go—”

“Ah ah!” Gojo grinned. “Say it.”

Nanami’s eyes narrowed further. He’d need more than the next drink to put up with this bullshit.

“Senpai,” he bit out. Gojo shook his head. His cheeks and the tip of his nose were pink, despite the fact that he hadn’t even finished a single drink.

“Is still not my na-ame,” Gojo sang at him. He leaned across the table, sunglasses low, looking up at Nanami.

Nanami could almost pretend that Gojo was bowing, begging, if it weren’t for the glee on his face, and the fact that he demanded: “Say it, Nanami-kun.”

Nanami stared him down. The little round lenses of his glasses slid low on his nose, intersecting the bottom of Gojo’s eyes, the color that the sky aspired to be, like the beginning of tiny eclipses. Gojo blinked at him slowly, like a fond cat.

“Satoru,” Nanami growled, and knocked back the cone of whiskey in one gulp to wash away the taste. When he tipped his head back down, Gojo was smiling wider and brighter and different in a way that Nanami couldn't quite interpret. Geto interrupted the stand-off by tapping Gojo to get their cards.

Ieiri got the king next, and Gojo wound up having to massage her shoulders for five minutes. He smiled slyly, looming over Nanami out of proximity. The looming tables were turned when Nanami had to sing the last song he'd played while standing on the table, thanks to Iori.

“Is this what it's like being so short, Utahime?” Gojo asked, now looking up at Nanami instead of down. “No wonder you're so insecure.”

“Less talking, more rubbing,” Ieiri snapped. “Nanami. Be careful.”

Nanami turned the volume on his phone all the way up, then handed it down to Ieiri to put it on the table. He held his breath and hoped that maybe the others had somehow avoided hearing a song which had been out for thirteen years.

They had all scooted to one side of the table so that they’d be able to witness his humiliation from a decent angle. All hope that they might not be familiar with the song was dashed the moment the opening chords hit.

Ieiri’s mouth twisted in the knowledge that she couldn’t rescue him, one part pity, three parts better-you-than-me. Iori actually covered her mouth and squealed the word “Aww!’ Mei had her phone out, a sly little smile on her face, no doubt filming him for blackmail purposes.

Haibara groaned, having heard Nanami sing this song in the shower when he thought no one was around. Gojo, at least, just looked confused, and Nanami prayed that the wonder boy had never bothered to learn English.

The biggest surprise was Geto, who closed his eyes and smiled, fingers tapping along to the beat.

Nanami took one last pull off his whiskey bottle and steeled himself for the lyrics.

“When you were here before, couldn’t look you in the eye,” Nanami warbled. He tried to find a safe place to look. Ieiri was out because Gojo was right behind her, Nanami refused to provide Mei with a better angle to use against him later, and he was a little worried that, if he looked at Iori, she would shriek again.

So, Nanami looked at the ceiling, looked into the middle distance past all of them, and when he accidentally looked at someone, he made sure it was Haibara whose long-suffering face pitied no one but himself.

Haibara was right next to Geto, who mouthed along to the lyrics himself. Nanami was a little stunned. There was some meager relief in knowing that, of the people who knew the song, at least two of them seemed to like it.

“Can I stop?” he asked after the first chorus.

“Noooo!” Iori, who had passed tipsy a while ago, whined. “Do the whole thing, I love this song!”

So Nanami did the whole damn song. Iori, Ieiri, and Geto all joined in on the bridge, which was a nice reprieve, but abandoned him again for the outro. Nanami hoped that he didn’t sound too bitter.

When the last, “I don’t belong here,” died out, Iori was clapping with tears in her eyes. Ieiri whistled and clapped, and Geto applauded as well.

“Don’t encourage him!” Haibara wailed. “It’s like our bathroom is haunted by emo ghosts!”

“There are so many unoccupied floors, Hai— Yu!” Nanami argued. “We don’t have to share!”

Nanami was trying to figure out how to get down when Iori, now openly weeping, leaned in and wrapped her arms around his shins and bear hugged them. Taken out at the knees, he started to fall backwards, overcorrected, and pitched forward instead. Ieiri yanked Iori out of the way so she wouldn’t be crushed, but before Nanami could break his nose on the industrial carpeted floor or snap any more bones, he was sideways, and still in midair.

“Iori-senpai, you could’ve killed him!” Haibara laughed. A camera flash went off.

“Damn, Geto,” Ieiri murmured as she maneuvered Iori, who was slurring apologies at a mile a minute, into a chair. “Good catch.”

Nanami, who was currently awkwardly folded into most of an acute triangle which could not possibly be comfortable for Geto to maintain, cleared his throat.

“Thank you, Get—” Nanami sighed, and started over. “Thank you, Suguru.”

Geto’s cheeks were a little pink, which contrasted with his eyes, a surprisingly gentle violet. Nanami had always assumed that they were brown, like Haibara’s. He looked every bit as surprised to have caught Nanami as Nanami was to have been caught.

“Of course, Nanami-kun,” he said. “Though now I wonder if you also haven’t been eating enough.”

Nanami ducked his head, about to explain that really, he ate plenty, but he never managed to keep weight on when it was this hot out, but was interrupted.

“You two gonna cuddle all night, or are we still playing?” Gojo asked loudly. Geto looked away from Nanami to glare at Gojo, but set Nanami down gently. Iori immediately ran up to Nanami and hugged him tightly.

“Nanami-kun, that was so good!” she cried. “I love that song soooo much, and you’ve got a really good voice…”

Nanami stood there like a lamppost being hugged, trying not to bluescreen between that, Geto’s shockingly gentle treatment, and the absolutely murderous expression on Gojo’s face. He was still smiling widely, but had removed his sunglasses, and it did not reach his eyes when they locked with Nanami’s, as this was somehow all Nanami’s fault for being made to sing, getting tackled, getting caught, and getting squeezed half to death.

“Stop that,” Geto snapped sternly from behind Nanami’s right shoulder. Nanami felt compelled to obey even though he wasn’t doing anything. Iori must’ve thought the same, because she let Nanami go with apologies about propriety and boundaries. Gojo clearly thought it was meant for him as well, because he finally stopped staring down Nanami and looked at Geto instead.

“Stop what?” Gojo asked, raising his hands. “I’m just standing here.”

“You’re being ridiculous—”

Nanami tuned out the argument. Gojo jealously hoarded everyone’s attention, but he was particularly vicious about it when it was Geto’s. Thanks to that rescue, Nanami estimated any interactions with Gojo would be at least fifty percent more unpleasant than usual for him for a week or more.

“Enough bickering!” Ieiri said, returning to the head of the table. “Back to your seats! This meeting isn’t over.”

They all pushed their chairs back where they had been, some more sullenly than others. Gojo was quickly cheered up when, in quick succession, Mei had to go spend half the money she had on her at the vending machines (Haibara and Nanami were recruited to help her carry as they bought out one and a half machines), and he and Iori had to switch seats.

Geto looked at Gojo sidelong as he smugly planted himself between Geto and Nanami. Nanami, on the other hand, knew better than to react in any way. Iori got her comeuppance for having set the entire debacle in motion with her song-dare, as Ieiri flipped the King.

“Number four has to go around the table, and say Fuck-Marry-Kill for each of them,” she declared, “and say why.”

Geto had long since stopped passing Iori the rum, but she was in that unfortunate zone where she would still get a bit drunker from what she had already consumed before she could even hope to lurch back towards sobriety. Thus, instead of giving a maidenly meep of scandalized embarrassment, she stood up and planted both hands on the table to steady herself. Mei and Ieiri both raised their hands to catch her if they had to, but she only swayed gently. It was almost graceful, until she stuck her arm out and pointed at Nanami.

“Marry,” she barked. “You would be the perfect husband. And you could sing for me when I want it. I like women better though, so we would also need a girlfriend. Or I could just have a girlfriend, you could do whoever you want.”

Before Nanami, not that he would, or anyone else, which they absolutely would have, could comment on that, her arm clicked like a watch hand to point at Gojo, who peered back at her with narrowed eyes.

“Kill,” she growled. Her hand trembled slightly, like if her hatred were sufficiently intense, she could make him fall dead from across the table by pointing alone. “You are the bane of my existence.”

Gojo, rather than pouting, cackled.

“Please try,” he grinned. “It would be so, so funny.”

Geto, seeming to realize that Iori was so drunk that she just might, quickly said,

“Will you please spare me, Iori-senpai?”

She hummed loudly, rubbing her chin as she thought.

“Fuck,” she said. “If I married you, Gojo would be over at our place all the time, so fuck. But only if you wore your hair down. And maybe some rouge.”

Gojo laughed harder, and Geto just shrugged. Iori considered Haibara next.

“Mmmmmarry? I think I’d marry you and Nanami. One introvert husband to take care of things around the house, one extravert husband to talk to all the people I don’t want to.”

“This is turning into a reverse harem for everyone but Gojo-kun,” Mei giggled. Iori turned to her and pouted.

“Meiiiii,” she groaned. “You’re so, so pretty, but you’re so expensive. You’d never let me buy anything and we’d always be making deals for who would do the dishes, and you might not make me pay you to fuck but you’d definitely find some way to squeeze some money out of it, so… I think I’d have to fuck you and then kill you right away. I’m sorry.”

Mei smiled, and while she never lost that hawk-like attentiveness for weakness, her face was still somehow fond.

“I understand completely,” she nodded to Iori, who slumped with a sigh of relief.

Iori slowly turned to Ieiri, chewing her lower lip.

“Marry,” she said. “No, fuck. Aaagh, marry?”

Iori collapsed back to her chair like a puppet with cut strings, upper body completely flattened against the table.

“I can’t decide, Shoko-kun, don’t make me choose, please?”

Iori might have accidentally set up a great deal of strife for Nanami with her tackle, but it hadn’t been a lie that Ieiri was his favorite, and he couldn’t help but feel bad for Iori having just drunkenly come out to their friends, and frenemies, under circumstances she would never have chosen sober.

“That is too difficult a decision, Utahime-senpai,” Nanami said, trying his best to sound wise and sober and reasonable. “I think it would be best if you and Shoko-sensei spent some time alone together, just socializing, to make such an important decision.”

“OH!!” Iori popped back up. “Nanami-kun, that’s so smart!”

“If I could borrow your phone, I can find some free time in your schedule and recommend some cafes I think you would both enjoy,” he offered, and Iori had very nearly thrown it at him before he could hold his hand out for it.

“See, this is why Nanami-kun is marriage material and you're not,” she said, looking back and forth between Gojo and Geto. Nanami smiled placidly while he set up three calendar invitations on Iori’s phone and sent them to Ieiri as well, making reservations at the more exclusive places, including notes about the appropriate level of dress and his recommended dishes on each calendar entry.

“Why do you know so much about romantic cafes, Nanami?” Haibara asked suspiciously. Nanami looked up, dismayed to find that the whole table seemed unreasonably interested in the answer.

“I know a lot about a lot of cafes,” Nanami replied defensively, and slid Iori’s phone back over the table. Ieiri bumped his foot again with hers, and he nudged it back. “The ‘romantic’ ones tend to put in more effort to their desserts.”

It was Iori’s deal, but after the third time she dropped the cards while trying to shuffle, Ieiri took over. Nanami didn’t have to go far to give Gojo his card, so he just slid it to his left. Gojo’s fingers got tangled with his when he tried to take it.

“What’s my number?” Gojo asked as he finally managed to slide the card in front of himself.

“You’re such a lightweight,” Nanami sighed. “Six.”

“One for each eye,” Gojo laughed at his own joke. “Like little window shades.”

“Mm,” Nanami replied. He had to lean a bit to slide the deck to Geto while Gojo, of course, did nothing to get out of the way. Geto flipped the king this time, and, after a moment’s thought, said,

“We haven’t had any kissing so far.”

Gojo groaned.

“Are you really going to cheat to get a kiss?” he said with a glare. “I thought you were more moral than that.”

Geto frowned.

“I wasn’t planning on it. I was going to pick two numbers,” he said, thinking for a moment. “Five and two.”

Haibara flipped the two, and, with a grin like she planned to swallow him whole like a snake, Mei flipped the five.

“It was nice knowing you, Yu,” Nanami muttered quietly. Gojo snorted, then broke into maniacal laughter as Mei pushed her chair back from the table and patted her thigh.

Haibara audibly gulped, but got up and managed to get the wide pants under control and settle in her lap. Mei took no prisoners, clutching a fistful of his black hair and kissing him deeply, turning his head whichever way suited her.

“Mei-senpai. Mei, he’s turning blue,” Geto said eventually. Mei just looked at the rest of them out of the corner of her eye while suffocating Haibara with her mouth.

“Mei-senpai, please don’t kill my classmate,” Nanami added. “You know how I hate working extra hours.”

At that, she relented, sending Haibara back over to his side of the table with a slap on the ass. Haibara staggered, not unhappily, back to his seat, where Geto gave him a pat on the shoulder upon arrival.

At this point, Iori’s head was beginning to droop, then pop back up, then droop again as she tried to stay awake, Haibara looked like he’d spent the last six hours on a roller coaster, and Nanami had only a quarter of his whiskey left.

“All right,” Ieiri declared, holding her hand out for the deck. “Last round.”

Everyone but Gojo chose their card, who instead accepted his from Nanami.

“One,” he said, and Gojo gave him that slow, feline blink again. The oxygen-deprived Haibara flipped the king.

“…okay…” he said, as if trying to remember where he was, let alone what numbers were and why they mattered. “Uh… two has to answer five questions from one. Or… um… five secrets. Tell five secrets. Whichever.”

Nanami flipped the one and looked around the table to see who had gotten two. Gojo cleared his throat, tapping the two of diamonds on its side on the table. He let the card drop and stood.

“C’mon,” he said. “Haibara-kun didn’t say anything about anyone else hearing them, and someone would just try to sell them off later.”

Nanami sighed and got up, scooping up his bag and his whiskey. He picked up his own Coke, stuck it in the bag, then rummaged through the vending machine haul until he found a couple sports drinks. He put one in front of Iori.

“Utahime-senpai, please drink this.”

She frowned blearily at the bottle, and Nanami sighed, leaned down, and said so only she could hear:

“I bet it’ll make Shoko-senpai happy.”

He once again nearly got his nose broken when she bolted upright and scrambled at the bottle top.

“C’mon, Nanami, quit babysitting,” Gojo called from the doorway.

“‘Spect your elders,” Iori grumbled before returning to her electrolytes. Nanami slouched along grudgingly while Gojo took them up a flight of stairs to an interior room. He shut the door, and the room was entirely dark.

“Go—”

“Ah!”

Nanami glared and hoped that Gojo could still sense it.

“Satoru. Why are we in the dark?”

There was the sound of a switch being flipped up and down.

“Light bulbs must be burned out. I don’t want to be near a window. There’s no telling where Mei has her stupid birds.”

Nanami nodded, unsure if Gojo could see him. Nanami could sense him easily, his cursed energy unmistakable, though at the moment, it rippled slightly, as though there was a steady drop of rain falling in its center every so often.

“So,” Gojo said. “Ask away.”

“We don’t actually have to do this, G— Satoru,” Nanami sighed. He noticed that the ripples in Gojo’s energy reflected and crossed and vibrated at a higher frequency when Nanami said his name. If Gojo was irritated by it, he had no one but himself to blame. “We can just stay up here for a few minutes and then go back down. They won’t be surprised if I refuse to tell them what you said, and they won’t believe anything you say you said anyway.”

“We do, actually,” Gojo retorted, and Nanami could hear the stubborn jut of his jaw. “I’m not going to risk giving up half my clothes to Yaga’s stupid dolls, and do you really want to sacrifice half your sad band t-shirts?”

“What if I don’t have any questions for you?” Nanami asked, and he swore he could see Gojo’s grin glowing in the dark.

“Then I’ll tell you five secrets that you’ll never be able to unhear which’ll haunt you ‘til the day you die.”

Nanami didn’t doubt it. He was a little surprised that Gojo hadn’t pushed for that option, but then, being interviewed was a form of attention, apparently.

“Fine,” Nanami agreed, and then his mouth kept going in a moment of what he could only describe as madness, or perhaps possession. “But you have to ask five questions, too.”

The air went still, and Gojo’s cursed energy went stiller than that.

“And why do I have to do that?” Gojo asked, and his laughter sounded strained, his moods and their undercurrents somehow easier for Nanami to interpret in the dark.

“So it doesn’t feel… uneven,” Nanami said, which he thought was partly true. “I don’t want to feel like I owe you something, so, one for one.”

Gojo seemed to consider this. Nanami shifted, reaching out blindly until he felt a table, then a chair, and sat. As he waited for Gojo to pick whichever of the whims flitting around in his mind he intended to follow, Nanami thought back to sitting with Ieiri and Geto. It felt like years ago, instead of hours.

Nanami wanted Gojo to know more about him, about the person under the prop in his stories, behind the stony face he liked to tease and call weak. More than that, he wanted Gojo to want to know, for Gojo to have been the one to push for some equity in this stupid drinking game dare, rather than Nanami forcing him into it. He heard Gojo easily find a chair of his own and settle into it, heard it squeak backwards on wheels that hadn’t been lubricated in years to kick his feet up onto the table.

“Okay,” Gojo finally agreed. “Five for five. Hit me.”

Nanami thought for a second, trying to come up with a question that would satisfy Gojo without unearthing something that would, as Gojo said, haunt Nanami until he died. Something simple, un-dramatic, low stakes. Favorite color, hat size, did he have any cavities. Instead, Nanami asked,

“Why were you and Suguru arguing with each other after he caught me?”

“Because I think he has a crush on you and I’m jealous,” Gojo replied immediately, his cursed energy prickling when Nanami used Suguru’s given name.

“You’re supposed to tell the truth, you know,” Nanami sighed.

“That is the truth. My turn. You’re going back to Denmark for the next break.”

“That’s not a question. Who told you, Geto, Ieiri, or Haibara?”

Gojo snorted, not calling him out on his failure to use first names anymore.

“Is that one of your questions?” Gojo asked.

“No, I don’t care that much,” Nanami replied, despite that he should’ve said yes to get this over with more quickly, more painlessly.

“I’ll answer it anyway.” Gojo’s voice was broad with magnanimity, a king throwing a peasant some crumbs. “A little bird told me. Well, a big bird told Mei, who sold it to me. You need to invest in some curtains and a white noise machine.”

Nanami gritted his teeth. There was a great deal that had been said in that conversation that he didn’t want anyone else to know, including the people he’d told it to in spite of himself. That Mei had sold his stories to Gojo was another blow to Nanami’s sense of autonomy, of being anyone at all in this fucking place.

“Thank you for the advice, Go— Satoru,” Nanami said, watching the ripples speed up again. “That’s still not a question.”

Gojo was silent for a moment, and then asked,
“Are you going to come back to school after the break, or are you going to stay in Denmark?”

That had been covered by the conversation with Geto and Ieiri, so perhaps Mei hadn’t been able to listen for very long, or she was holding onto that information to try to get a higher price at a later date.

“I have no plans to,” Nanami said. “I’m needed here. My parents are here. I can’t protect them in Denmark.”

The ripples in Gojo’s energy smoothed out to something more tranquil, or at least less active. Nanami wasn’t sure how to interpret the changes. For all he knew, they could mean disappointment instead of calm.

“Your turn,” Gojo prompted.

“I’m thinking,” Nanami said, which was true, he just hadn’t been thinking about his next question. Gojo, for once in his life, was relatively patient.

“Do you actually want to be doing this?” Nanami asked at last, posing the question that he’d been asking himself to Gojo instead.

“What do you mean?” Gojo asked. “The game? Being a student?”

“Being a sorcerer at all. Being Gojo Satoru. Being the strongest. Do you actually want any of that, or like it?”

Gojo was quiet for too long, the ripples in his cursed energy too tiny and numerous to count.

“I don’t know, and I’ve never thought about it, and I don’t want to think about it, because I don’t have a choice.”

His voice was firm and a little frantic.

“I thought special grades could do whatever they wanted,” Nanami mused. “Isn’t there that woman who rides around on a motorcycle and does whatever she feels like?”

“Yuki? Don’t get me started on her. I answered your question; it’s my turn now.”

Gojo drummed his fingers on the table, considering whatever options he was considering. Nanami took another long pull of the whiskey in the dark.

“This shouldn’t be that difficult, given that you know literally nothing about me,” he said after he swallowed, putting some of the burn of the alcohol into his words. “Favorite color. Favorite food. Can I speak Danish, or just Japanese. Favorite sea—”

“Give me a second!” Gojo snapped. “You’re the one who decided you couldn’t stand the inequality of being the only one to ask anything, so don’t get pissy about me making up my mind!”

Nanami raised the bottle back to his mouth and sighed. His breath echoed and resonated in the opening, a soft groan as he sipped again.

“Fine,” Gojo said, and his voice sounded a little like Nanami’s accidental noise across the bottle, almost mournful. He could feel Gojo lean across the table and heard the click as he removed his sunglasses.

“If Geto asked you to go out on a date with him, on more than one date, would you say yes?”

Nanami pulled his phone out and turned on the flashlight, battery be damned, and set it off to the side between them, a cold LED campfire biting through the dark.

“I have no idea, because I’ve never considered the possibility, because you’re talking nonsense,” Nanami retorted. “Though I think I’d probably say no since it seems like you might murder me if I agreed to date him.”

The light of the phone rendered Gojo's every expression into something exaggerated, almost grotesque, his white eyebrows cast faintly blue in the cold light.

Surprised didn’t seem an appropriate word. He looked… stunned, the same disorientation as when he’d first returned to life, but focused instead of scattered.

“Are you actually that dense?” he asked, and Nanami gritted his teeth and looked away.

“You’re the one making up imaginary crushes,” he grumbled. “Besides, it’s not your turn to ask a question.”

Gojo groaned, kicking his chair back so far that it should’ve fallen, but of course, infinity was there to prevent him from suffering the consequences of his drama.

“Fiiiiine. Ask me something or whatever.”

It was that word. Whatever. No, it wasn’t just the word, it was the word and the tone and the angle of Gojo’s jaw and Nanami’s eyes falling on his throat, just below the laryngeal prominence, exactly where his technique had told him to strike when Gojo was coming back from the dead, and exactly where Nanami hadn’t done it.

He blamed all that, mixed with the whiskey as it finally made it from his blood to his brain in an amount that mattered, for what came next.

"Why are you like this?"

Gojo blinked at the outburst.

“Why am I like… what?” he asked.

“You fuck with people like you’re playing with a wounded animal you haven’t decided whether you’re going to eat or not,” Nanami snarled, “which would be fine. That would make sense at least, with the way you were at the vending machines this morning, but then you go and threaten Haibara and say that it’s for my sake? And then you throw me around to humiliate me because you’re angry that Geto is paying attention to anyone who isn’t you? And the story on the stairs outside, just… why? Why do you do this? Is being the strongest so boring that the only thing you can do to entertain yourself is pick me apart? Did I do anything to deserve that, or am I just convenient? I know I’m not pleasant like Geto or Ieiri, but do you really hate me that much?”

Nanami was breathing hard by the time he was done, his insides stinging like a thousand cuts made with shards of salt.

It felt like forever before Gojo broke the silence.

“That’s a lot more than one question.”

Right. Because they were just playing a game.

They had always just been playing a game.

No. Nanami wasn’t playing. Nanami was just one of the pieces.

“Forget it.”

Nanami snatched his phone and the bottle of whiskey, looking around for his bag, which he’d dropped shortly after Gojo had led them into the dark room. He finally found it under the table, dragged there by the strap caught on the wheel of the chair.

Gojo’s hand on his wrist wasn’t a surprise, catching Nanami before he could reach the bag and retreat; neither was being unable to pull away.

“I’ll answer all of those, but only if you tell me something first,” Gojo said quietly. Nanami swayed slightly, anchored at his wrist, and suddenly found he didn’t have any fight left in him.

“We don’t have to play anymore,” he sighed. “Let’s just—”

“What’s under your bed, Nanami?”

Nanami froze.

“My backup—”

Gojo squeezed his wrist a little more firmly, not hard enough to hurt, not even threatening, really.

“Nanami,” Gojo said again.

“Fine,” Nanami muttered, finally yanking his hand away, which meant that Gojo had chosen to let him go. “Come on.”

He fumbled with his phone, trying to turn off the flashlight, and didn’t resist when Gojo took it out of his hand and did it for him before putting it into his own pocket and retrieving Nanami’s bag as well. Which was fine, Nanami supposed, it wasn’t like there was anyone he could call for help if he needed it.

“Come on where?” Gojo asked, frowning as Nanami knocked back the remaining whiskey and set the bottle into the center of the table with a thunk.

“I might as well give it back to you, I suppose,” he said. His voice and legs were steady now, even if his mind was anything but as he made his way down a different staircase than the one they’d come up. The two of them had been removed from the same loop they’d been in since they’d met, like a satellite whose orbit had decayed to the point that it was going to crash back to earth. If the crash was inevitable, then Nanami would at least choose where he hit the ground.

Chapter Text

Gojo trailed along behind him, silent for once as Nanami led them through the dark, back to his dormitory, up the stairs, and back to his room. Nanami only forced himself to look at Gojo once they arrived because he needed his bag which held his keys. Gojo just blinked at him, sunglasses either forgotten or tucked away someplace. Nanami cleared his throat and reached for the bag, but Gojo just caught his hand in mid-air, and they were on the other side of the door.

It was such a frivolous use of power, one Nanami would usually have made a comment about, but at the moment he felt too brittle and tired to do so. Gojo’s face was tight with nerves in an expression Nanami had never seen on him, pressed close to the door so they’d both fit in the narrow genkan. It made him look younger than when he was prancing and crowing about his gifts without a care in the world.

He was hyper aware of how long it took him to untie his shoelaces, his fingers incredibly uncoordinated between the alcohol and the anxiety. He would’ve sliced through them, but in his current state, he was liable to cut off his own foot. Finally, cursing himself silently the entire damn time for his extra-tight double knots, he managed to pluck himself free of them and stop crouching at Gojo’s shins.

Of course, they were nearly nose to nose again when Nanami stood, which wasn’t much better, but at least he was able to step away. Nanami turned away and crouched, pulling the small trunk from under his bed. He looked at the combination lock and thought, “fuck it,” and this time did use his technique to slash the hasp. It had only ever been there in principle anyway, and there would be no need to re-lock it after. He tossed the broken parts of the lock into his wastebasket and sat heavily on the floor.

“Please don’t damage anything I take out of here,” Nanami said, releasing the latch and lifting the lid. “Not that I can stop you.”

“Why would I?” Gojo asked, toeing off his own shoes by the door. He set Nanami’s bag down on the floor and got his phone out, then plugged it into Nanami's charger on the bedside table. While this went on, Nanami opened the chest and slowly started taking things out, one by one, not giving Gojo an answer to that question, since he was in the process of answering his previous one.

Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. The similarities between the world of the first half of the book and existence as a sorcerer was a little uncanny, one side utilizing processors of information on the side of order and government, and then a fallen splinter of that same group, stealing information and disseminating it or selling it for profit. He’d read it before he’d ever heard of Jujutsu Technical College, or sorcerers and curse-users in the context that he knew them now, yet here he was.

Next came the backup weapon, the wicked little hatchet, the arc of its blade hidden safely under the thick slabs of leather, riveted together and then buckled shut behind the head. For all that it wasn’t Nanami’s preferred weapon, and for all that it was a tool, with energy but without consciousness, he felt a discomfort close to pity for it. The leather enclosure reminded him too much of a muzzle.

He set aside the small photo album, close to his hip and out of view. He half-hoped that it would escape Gojo’s notice or interest, that he would remain focused on the perverse secret he knew existed, but didn’t yet know the shape of. If Gojo did decide to kill him, at least he could probably swat it under the bed to try to protect it. Maybe Haibara would find it later.

All that was left now was the sweater and all it contained. Nanami lifted it out and held it in his lap for a moment before raising his head. Gojo was staring down not at the bundle, but at him, looming above with as much menace and power as when he levitated over a battlefield. He didn't look angry, or malicious, but he was Gojo Satoru, and that was menacing enough.

There was no point in stalling. Nanami twisted so that he could put the sweater on his bed and unfold it there, rather than letting it drag on the ground, and removed the lynx and the matchbox. He didn’t want to put the lynx away just yet, so he set it on his bedside table to keep watch.

He turned back and held the matchbox up to Gojo. He thought about warning Gojo that he wouldn’t like what he found inside, or offer him an opportunity to back out, but Gojo’s eyes were now fixed on the box in his hand, baffled in a paradox between some sort of recognition and not being able to explain it.

“This is what you wanted to see,” Nanami said. Gojo still didn’t reach for it. It was possible that he already knew what was in it, that he’d known all along, and this was just a trial, a judgment, and the punishment for whatever sin he thought Nanami had committed was his silence of all things.

“Take it,” he ordered, sharp like when he really needed to prevent Haibara from doing something truly foolish. Gojo startled at the change in volume and his eyes snapped back to Nanami's.

“Just…” Nanami cut himself off. Just what? Damned if he knew. “Get it over with.”

Gojo looked back to the little box, held between Nanami's thumb and the knuckle of his index finger. Nanami hadn’t even registered the art on the matchbox when he’d emptied it. The irony that there was a stylized white fox on the top wasn’t lost on him, but he wasn’t in any mood to appreciate it. It wasn't like Gojo would get the joke anyway.

Gojo sat down, right in front of the chest, and took the box from him as gingerly as if he was taking a knife offered blade first. Nanami wanted to shut his eyes and spare them both, but he forced himself to keep them open and take in Gojo’s reaction, judgment, whatever was to come.

The box slid open easily, and if Gojo had any thoughts about the illustration, he didn’t express it. He lifted the little fold of cloth and looked.

“What…” Gojo’s brow furrowed as he stared at the little bone shard. “Why does this feel like mine?”

So he didn’t know, hadn’t just known, and from the bewilderment on his face, still didn’t. He looked up at Nanami, who, utterly unable to come up with the words to say what he needed to to answer Gojo, tapped his own forehead. Gojo still had a little scar there. Nanami wondered if he even knew. Gojo just blinked at him, touching his own forehead in the same spot. Waiting for him to get it was far more painful than just ripping off the bandage, so Nanami finally gave in.

“After I found you and you left, I came back here to clean up and tell people you were alive. That was stuck to my face. When I found you, you had this… hole in your forehead.”

Gojo’s laugh had a jagged, brittle edge to it, not unlike a shard of broken bone.

“So this… you’re telling me that this is a chunk of my skull.”

“Yes.”

“From when an assassin perfectly heavenly restricted to murder sorcerers stabbed me through the forehead and into my brain.”

The claws were back in Nanami’s chest as he saw Gojo swallow, swallow again.

“Yes,” he said, because there wasn’t any other answer.

“And you kept it,” Gojo said, voice pitched higher and thinner, and looked back up at Nanami. His face was so ashen that it almost matched his hair, a black and white sketch of himself, made even more stark by the awful blue of his eyes. “Why did you keep it?”

The same question Nanami had been asking himself ever since, now posed by Gojo, and Nanami still didn't have any answer.

“I don’t know,” Nanami confessed, because he didn't, and because he couldn't think of one plausible, rational reason, and he had tried. “It wasn’t anything like the concrete, and I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t throw it out or let it wash down the drain.”

“Why not? Why not the incinerator?” Gojo pressed. “Medical waste in the infirmary.”

“Gojo—”

“You’re supposed to call me Satoru,” Gojo ordered furiously, and the whole room trembled as Gojo's emotions got the better of his control. Nanami couldn’t really say that the frenzy Gojo was working himself into was inappropriate, because nothing about their lives was appropriate. Despite that, he couldn’t accept that his own hestiance to treat this bit of Gojo like trash, or worse, somehow, like a corpse, was the wrong reaction.

“Satoru, you weren’t dead,” he blurted. Nanami reached out to try to shake him, because he was fairly sure that one or both of them was about to have a panic attack. His fingers hovered just a fraction away from actually touching Gojo thanks to Infinity; a tremor surrounded him in the air.

Of course Infinity was up, and Gojo didn’t want Nanami of all people to touch him, of course he felt threatened, and it was Nanami’s fault for being disgusting and keeping such a terrifying, personal, morbid object without saying a word about it.

“You weren’t,” Nanami swallowed.

“Oh, I was,” Gojo disagreed, and how was Nanami just now noticing the shadows under his eyes, the way the skin looked thinner than usual, that underneath the expensive balm, he could see indents from where Gojo had been chewing his lips?

Gojo’s eyes cut hard to Nanami’s and the inquisition continued:

“You said it yourself. I was.”

“Even if you were, you’re not, not now,” Nanami argued back. He didn’t try to push past Infinity, not that he could, but he ran his hands up and down slightly, as if he could soothe it instead of Gojo. “You’re here. You're alive.”

Gojo drew a deep, shaking breath, and then slowly let it out.

“I think that’s why I couldn’t just get rid of it,” Nanami admitted, both to Gojo and himself. Gojo gave that little puppyish tilt of his head again. Nanami also admitted to himself that the gesture was kind of cute.

“I probably should’ve just given it back,” he went on, the embarrassment of the situation kicking in. “I swear I’m not some body-part collecting lunatic. I just… I couldn’t burn it, and I couldn’t throw it away. But it’s yours, so whatever you want done with it….”

“I got lost,” Gojo interrupted. Nanami’s hands stilled, not that Gojo could feel it. Or maybe he could? Who knew how Infinity worked, really, other than the strangest of strange boys sitting in front of him?

“You… I don’t understand,” Nanami said. “Lost?”

“I wasn’t lying about retreating inside myself,” Gojo mumbled. “Just… my soul’s not the only thing in there.”

Oh.

“Infinity?” Nanami asked. Gojo nodded.

“I was trying to put my body back together,” he said quietly, eyes straying around the room as though he was tracking some kind of insect only he could see before returning to the little box containing his memento mori. He folded the cloth back into place and managed to slide the cover shut despite how much his hands were shaking. He stared at the fox on the matchbox for a moment, then set it back in the chest, like he didn't care if Nanami kept it or not.

Gojo looked back at Nanami and giggled like a sob.

“Infinity is really big, you know?” He held his arms as far apart as he could, which caused Nanami’s hands to slide along the barrier between them like there was no friction at all until they rested by the nape of Gojo’s neck. “Like, the biggest. I’d never been able to use reversed curse energy on myself, so I was kind of already off my game. I wasn’t exactly being careful, you know?"

Gojo's eyes flicked back and forth between Nanami's like he couldn't decide which to focus on, like even Six Eyes couldn't keep up with how overwhelming the situation was. Gojo swallowed hard and looked down at his own lap.

"I was just trying to get someplace safe,” he said, sounding so quiet and so young.

Nanami started to pull back his hands, since having someone's hands at one's throat, Infinity or not, probably didn't feel the slightest bit safe. Gojo was still faintly trembling; clearly Nanami's awkward patting wasn’t helping, and wasn’t wanted given the barrier between them. Gojo’s eyes snapped back to his face, widening.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I…” Nanami swallowed, staying exactly where he was. “It seemed like you needed space?”

“Space is the last thing I need,” Gojo shuddered, and suddenly, there was the unexpectedly silky texture of Gojo’s ludicrously expensive plain black t-shirt under Nanami’s fingers, overlapping the edge to Gojo’s bare skin.

“Okay,” Nanami said, slowly moving his hands again. He turned his palms slightly and gently let the sides of his thumbs graze the taut tendons between Gojo’s neck and shoulders. Gojo’s eyes fell half shut, and his breath trembled, but the muscles loosened.

“I got lost,” Gojo said again. This time, Nanami kept moving.

“In your own Infinity,” Nanami confirmed, and Gojo nodded, his head pitching forward so that his face was hidden under all that white hair.

“Yeah. And I couldn’t warp back because it wasn’t my body that was lost, it was the rest of me. And everything around me was the same, in every direction. It should probably have been enlightenment, doesn’t get much more ego death than that, right?”

Nanami laughed before he could catch himself, but before he could apologize, Gojo looked up and smiled, tentative and fragile, but real.

“How did you get out?” he asked. He tried to think of how to backtrack immediately as Gojo’s smile vanished.

“You,” he answered, all while blinking like it was the most obvious thing in the world and Nanami was a complete moron for not getting it.

Nanami would’ve been offended, but it seemed like a positive sign that Gojo was capable of feeling superior again.

“Me,” Nanami repeated, responding, as he so often did when it came to Gojo, with skepticism. Gojo nodded. “G– Satoru, I didn’t do anything. You came back on your own.”

Unlike all the times Gojo had teased and attempted to convince Nanami of some random nonsense he put forth, Gojo shook his head ferociously, complete with a small, frustrated growl. He tried to push forward, more into Nanami’s space, only to smack his knees into the chest. He shoved it aside and clapped both his hands to Nanami’s cheeks, quickly enough to sting a little, though it didn’t seem deliberate. He held Nanami’s face still and stared at him like he might evaporate if Gojo looked away.

“I was lost, and there was nothing around me to grab onto, to sense, just flickers of cursed energy here and there, but then I felt yours, and it was steady and close and you were there, and I knew the way home.”

Nanami’s hand settled over Gojo’s against his own face without his input in the decision, but it felt like the right thing to do.

“I could’ve been anyone,” Nanami said softly.

Gojo’s mouth pressed flat and he shook his head, kept shaking it as Nanami continued.

“Gojo, you have to know that. It didn’t matter that it was me. If it had been Ieiri, or—”

Gojo shook his head more adamantly.

“No! No, Nanami, don’t tell me it doesn’t matter!” he snarled, the frantic, aggressive fear of a guard dog protecting its owner. “It was you. I came back because I sensed you.”

Nanami sighed, and Gojo flinched like he’d struck him.

“You don’t get to tell me what’s important to me.” Gojo wasn’t snarling anymore, but his voice was heavy with resentment. “Even if it’s you. It matters to me, even if you don’t fucking care.”

It was Nanami’s turn to flinch. Gojo dropped his hands, pulling the one from under Nanami’s hand like he’d been snapped in a mousetrap.

“Right. I’m supposed to answer your question. Why I’m ‘like this.’”

Gojo sat back and gestured between them.

“This is why I’m like this,” he said. “Because I have so many fucking feelings about this whole situation that I don’t know what to do with. Because I’m angry at you, and I want you to pay attention to me, and because I feel safer around you than anyone else.”

Nanami swallowed hard, still digesting all of that when Gojo continued:

“My turn. Why didn’t you come see me?”

Nanami was so thrown by Gojo’s rapid fire response that he forgot that it was still his turn, since Gojo had delayed his answer.

“When?” Nanami asked. “Where?”

Gojo laughed, incredulous and wounded.

“Any time after the dust settled? Anywhere? You found me dead and… nothing. No ‘how are you?’, no ‘are you okay?’, nothing. Do you just… not care at all?”

A tendril of offended outrage twisted in with the rest of Nanami’s bewilderment. Gojo, after all of his bizarre behavior, thought Nanami didn’t care about what happened?

“Of course I care!” he spat, unprepared for how much that question offended him.

It was Nanami’s turn now to pivot into ferocity, reaching out to grab Gojo’s t-shirt and stopping himself just short.

“You told me not to get in your way. When you came back to life, you seemed ecstatic, Gojo, like you were high on something. You didn’t stick around to tell me what had been going on in your head, in your near-death experience or whatever the hell you want to call it!”

Gojo scoffed.

“I’m sorry I didn’t have what you’d call a normal reaction to coming back to life after getting stabbed a few dozen times!”

“Gojo—” This time, Nanami corrected himself not due to the game, but because Gojo seemed to listen when he used his first name, his cursed energy fluttering and engaged.

“Satoru, I don’t even know where your room is, if you even have one on campus or if you live in some mystic compound out in the mountains when you’re not here,” Nanami said helplessly. “I didn’t know you wanted to see me. Geto wasn’t around either for me to ask about you, and I had no idea what was happening. I thought you might be being debriefed, or treated, or…”

Nanami sighed yet again, a hiss of air through his teeth like a kettle starting to boil.

“All I heard were the rumors, second hand, and a lot of them full of a lot of nonsense about what I supposedly did. It didn't seem like– I thought that if you wanted to see me, that you would’ve found me like you always do, so… I just thought that you didn’t want to see me either.”

Gojo’s face fell, his posture slumped. Nanami had no idea why, until he heard the word he hadn’t meant to say:

‘Either.’

No amount of backpedaling would put it back in his mouth, so he asked his fourth question.

“Why didn’t you come see me, if you wanted to?”

Gojo looked away and miserably mumbled something Nanami couldn’t make out.

“I can’t—” Nanami started, leaning in to hear better, but Gojo looked him full in the face again and interrupted before he could ask.

“I wanted you to want to see me,” he said, louder this time, but no less sadly.

Oh.

Nanami sat back, and tried to put words to what he wanted to say next.

“I don’t know what I’m allowed to want in this world,” he started. “So I just try not to want anything. And I almost never know what anyone really wants from me. Curses and sorcery may not be completely new to me, but I’ve only been in this version of it, 'jujutsu society,' for… god, it’s only been five months. It feels like so much longer.”

He picked up his little lynx from his bedside table, and felt Gojo’s eyes follow his every movement like a wild animal, one whose body language Nanami didn’t know enough to interpret. It might’ve signaled awaiting an opening for attack, or it might’ve signaled waiting to be the one struck. Neither happened as he sat back down, holding this other little thing of bone between his index finger and thumb. The tips of its large ears had been charred black, as had the spots on its body and other features. However long it had existed, those fragile details had survived.

“I'm not even very good at reading regular people to begin with. I more or less know how to behave in Japanese society; I’ve lived in it long enough, but here?"

Nanami glanced at Gojo to find him listening intently, like it was even possible for someone whose presence was so enormous that he was as much an event as a person, to understand what being insignificant was like.

"Suddenly, I'm surrounded by people who can basically read my thoughts through cursed energy, while they've had their whole lives to learn how to hide theirs. Yaga is clear about what he expects, Haibara is an open book, and Ieiri doesn't want anything from me, but everyone else?"

Nanami had mostly been addressing the little lynx, but looked up to check Gojo's face, to see if there was anything to be learned there.

"I have no idea how to behave when someone dies in front of me and then comes back," Nanami finished helplessly. "Nearly everyone else seemed to want to pretend everything was back to normal, that everything was fine. I didn't know that you didn't. I'm sorry."

Gojo flinched and swallowed hard, throat bobbing like he was choking down tears.

"They really did, didn't they?" he tried to smile. "A middle school girl died, the woman who raised her died, I died, Geto nearly died… and other than telling me how badly I'd fucked up, no one cared."

Nanami’s stomach dropped.

Everyone knew that Gojo’s relationship with the upper tiers of jujutsu governance was strained at best, but every parameter of that mission that Gojo and Geto hadn’t decided themselves had contributed to the tragic results. Hearing that he had had to go before the people who had put him in that position and let them blame him for their decisions, Gojo seemed less like a rebellious brat and more like an invincible scapegoat to bleed for everyone else's mistakes on top of his own.

It should’ve been impossible to believe. Sadly, it wasn’t even difficult. That didn’t make Nanami any less furious about it.

"They blamed you?" he snapped, too drunk and too raw to keep anything in.

Gojo’s eyebrows jumped high on his forehead, but he didn’t pull away, despite Nanami’s sudden intensity. Then again, Gojo’s moods were so changeable, maybe he was used to it no matter who it came from. Either way, it was Nanami’s turn to shake his head.

"Fuck them, how could it have been your fault?"

Gojo's smile quivered.

"I'm the strongest," he shrugged, holding his hands out slightly and wobbling them like a chorus girl.

"So the fuck what?!"

Nanami reached out and grabbed one of Gojo's hands out of the air with his free one, hanging on like he could drag him away from the idea of ‘the strongest.’

"Satoru, you're sixteen years old," Nanami reminded him, slow and sharp on each syllable. "You are seven months older than me. I don't give a fuck who your clan is, or which vengeful spirit is your ancestor, you are sixteen years old and it is not fucking fair for them to say it was your fault. It wasn't. It wasn't."

"I…" Gojo blinked his ridiculous eyes several times. "I don't think I've ever heard you swear that much."

"Sorry," Nanami winced

“Ieiri is such a bad influence.”

“Sorry,” Nanami repeated. He tried to rein himself in, sit up straight and appear composed again, but he didn’t get far. Gojo squeezed his hand, and his smile was steadier that time.

“No, it’s amazing; I love it,” he said. “It’s nice to have you pissed off for me instead of at me.”

Nanami ducked his head and squeezed Gojo’s hand back. It was a little embarrassing, really. Nanami had spent all those months firm in the knowledge that every word out of Gojo Satoru’s mouth was bullshit, but he’d never once bothered to consider the truth underneath it, whatever that might be. He looked back up to find Gojo still fully focused on his face, like he was considering what truth might be under Nanami’s prickly defensiveness. Nanami had buried his feelings and vulnerabilities so deeply that he wasn’t all that sure himself what that truth was.

“I lost count. Whose question is it now?” he asked to stop himself from spiraling into introspective paranoia.

“We don’t have to keep going,” Gojo shrugged, though it seemed like that option would disappoint him, like suggesting a restaurant he disliked as a show of courtesy, not that Gojo bothered with those. “Or we can, but we don’t have to keep counting.”

Nanami nodded. There was one question that had been gnawing at him all evening.

“Okay. You don’t have to answer this one, then, but…”

Nanami typically didn’t pry into other peoples’ personal lives, but this particular topic seemed like it would impact him long-term, so he felt somewhat justified.

“Wouldn’t it just be easier to tell Suguru—”

Gojo wrinkled his nose and broke in,

“You don’t have to call him by his first name anymore.”

Nanami snorted, since this territorial behavior was exactly what he was talking about. He took a breath and let it out slowly, trying to will his impatience away with it.

“Wouldn’t it be easier if you just told Geto how you feel about him?” Nanami finished.

Gojo froze in place, his hand going limp in Nanami’s, the other covering his mouth as he started to shake. Nanami looked up, any irritation absolutely quashed, about to beg Gojo to please not cry, to assure him that Nanami wouldn’t do anything with Geto, not knowing how Gojo felt about him, not that he wanted to, until Gojo dropped the hand on his face revealing the smile underneath.

“Oh my god,” Gojo laughed.

His irritation rose from its grave, glaring at the timid specter of relief he had felt that he hadn’t driven Gojo to tears.

“Oh my god, Nanami.”

No, Gojo was tearing up, but it was from laughing at him so hard. Nanami tried not to bristle, because Gojo hadn’t let go of his hand, and Nanami did prefer this to tears of heartbreak or panic.

“I don’t see what’s so ridiculous about it!” he grumbled. He tried to tug his hand free, but Gojo wasn’t having it. He held on, shaking Nanami’s whole arm for over a minute before he finally calmed his cackles enough to speak.

“You,” Gojo giggled. “You’re ridiculous.”

Nanami tried to pull away again, but Gojo just responded by holding on even tighter.

“I don’t have any feelings to tell Geto about. He’s my annoying, sanctimonious best friend. He knows he’s my best friend.”

Nanami could not, for the life of him, fathom what the hell all that had been about during the game, then, unless Gojo really just needed everyone’s attention that badly.

“Then why do you care if he—”

Wait.

Nanami watched as Gojo’s smile widened at his expression as the puzzle pieces clicked together in his head. Nanami wondered if he looked as dumbfounded as he felt, and how ridiculous it made his face if he did.

“Can it be?” Gojo gasped, wiggling Nanami’s arm on purpose this time. “Does he get it? At last?!”

“Me?” Nanami asked, baffled. Gojo just cracked up again.

“How is this a surprise to you?” he asked. “It’s not even just me and Geto, there’s also Mei. Oh! Remember that huge fight between Kiko and Aya last month?”

“No,” Nanami replied. Did he know a Kiko or an Aya? “Are they fourth years?”

“Yeah. They spent three days in the infirmary after a practice spar went bad after Aya said that you were checking her out, and Kiko took exception.”

Nanami shook his head. He was completely confident that he hadn’t checked any girls out, for a variety of reasons, and he couldn’t fathom what fourth year girls would see in a first year anyway.

“I don’t think… is Aya the tall girl, and Kiko wears the slouchy socks?”

Gojo fell over sideways laughing so hard, and because he refused to let go of Nanami’s hand, Nanami went down with him, clutching the lynx to his chest to protect it.

“Those are third years,” he finally gasped out. “You are so oblivious, it’s just the best.”

Nanami didn’t care about third and fourth year girls or their socks or their fights. He checked to make sure the lynx was unharmed as he tried to process the information that Gojo Satoru had some sort of crush on him.

“Why me?” was apparently the best question he could come up with. Gojo managed an awkward sideways shrug.

“I just do,” he answered. “But I guess if I had to get all scientific about it, you’re fair to me. You don’t suck up to me and you’re not scared of me. No matter how much you might wanna punch me, I don’t think you’d ever hurt me.”

“Like I could,” Nanami pointed out, because surely that didn’t count.

“Even if you could,” Gojo insisted. “Like I said, I feel safe around you.”

Nanami still couldn’t wrap his brain around the idea, at least, not without taking into account recent events. He’d never been one to allow his feelings to be divorced from reality, but for some reason, feeling safe around him was more important to Gojo than actually being safe.

“For how long?” he asked, and jumped as Gojo answered him with a flick to the center of his forehead. “Hey!”

It didn’t hurt, but it was a little too classic Gojo for the topic of their conversation.

“I can hear you thinking that I only like you like that because of the whole dying and getting lost thing,” Gojo scolded him, “and that’s not it.”

“You could’ve just told me that since I literally asked you ‘for how long,’” Nanami complained. He wanted to glare, but it was difficult when Gojo’s expression got even softer, gentle in a way that Nanami wasn’t sure he’d ever seen. He didn’t try to stop Gojo as he gently ran his thumb over the spot he’d flicked, then brushed Nanami’s hair out of his face.

“It was a lot of little things,” Gojo murmured, “but remember when Yaga introduced you and Haibara to us?”

“You mean when you slapped party hats on us both and interviewed us like a gameshow host?” Nanami asked.

“I’d make an amazing game show host,” Gojo declared. He was probably right; seeing as he’d brought his own microphone.

“If being the strongest sorcerer in centuries doesn’t pan out, it’s good to have a backup plan,” Nanami said, aiming for dry but unable to hold back a smile at the image of Gojo harassing contestants in a silver sequined blazer. “But what about it?”

“When I put your party hat on you, you looked me in the eyes,” Gojo said quietly, “even with the sunglasses, most people don’t. It’s like an instinct, usually sorcerers get over it, but you just looked me right in the eyes, and you sighed and you let me put on that stupid hat.”

Gojo idly petted his fingers through Nanami’s hair again, studying his face in the inebriated intimacy between them.

“I liked that. Let’s see… what else… you smelled nice. You always smell nice, even when it’s so disgusting out, and even when you’re sweaty and covered in dirt and beaten all to hell. I like your eyes, and all the different colors in them. I like your face, and just how unimpressed it can look, and how tall you are. I like how no matter how mean or cold you’re trying to seem, you’re probably trying to help, or wishing you could if you can’t. I like how you’re not ashamed to keep tampons in your bag just in case someone needs them, because you just don’t give a fuck if someone thinks it’s weird.”

Gojo slid his hand down Nanami’s cheek and ran his thumb under his lower lip, settling at the corner.

“When I can make you smile, it’s like I won the rarest gacha toy ever made,” Gojo smiled at him. “I like how you’ll be sitting silently in a group for what seems like hours and then say something brutal and so damn funny out of nowhere, even if it flies over most people’s heads.”

Nanami smiled then, and Gojo’s widened into a joyous crescent moon.

“See? I won again, and it feels amazing every time,” he said as he leaned in closer to peer at the corners of Nanami’s mouth like it was worth remembering this specific smile.

“I keep a pair of sunglasses in my bag,” Nanami confessed out of nowhere, “in case something happens to yours. They’re nothing fancy, just as close as I could find to what you usually wear without taking out a loan, but there’s stuff in my bag for you, too.”

Gojo’s smile softened.

“I never knew that,” he murmured. Nanami shrugged.

“I felt silly about it,” he admitted. “It seemed stupid to think that you could ever need anything from me, or from anyone. But I keep them in there, just in case. I keep a tin of strawberry rock candy, too, in case you run out of sugar, since you seem to need it to live.”

Gojo laughed, bright and delighted, then stuck his lower lip out in a betrayed pout.

“You’ve never given me any of it, though!” he complained. “Cruel!”

“You didn’t even know it was in there ‘til just now, and you never seemed like you needed it. It’s for emergencies,” Nanami answered. He was trying to be stern, but Gojo’s pout was very close to his own face, and Gojo’s hand was still on his cheek, moving along with every syllable out of Nanami’s jaw.

“Fiiiine, I’ll swoon into your arms if it’ll get you to give me some sugar,” Gojo relented. “You’re lucky I don’t ask for mouth to mouth resuscitation.”

“Am I?”

Nanami felt his cheeks heat in the silence that came after his terrible, cheesy, pick-up-line-from-a-trashy magazine question, and he really wanted Gojo to move his hand so that Nanami could cover his face.

“You really do think of me,” Gojo breathed.

“Everyone does,” Nanami sighed, because Gojo knew that, had to know that; he made sure his presence was big enough that everyone thought about him all the time. But Gojo shook his head, sliding his hand further back so that he was cradling Nanami’s head, fingers tangled in his hair, thumb stroking gently at the soft patch of skin just behind his earlobe.

Nanami had not, up until then, realized that being touched in that vicinity made his insides melt, but every time Gojo’s thumb ghosted along his earlobe, he relaxed a little more and forgot to be embarrassed about it.

“No,” Gojo said, “not like you do.”

Gojo’s gaze wandered down to Nanami’s neck, and he added,

“The first time I met you, I wondered if the reason you had your uniform customized with such a high collar was because you had a girlfriend or boyfriend who liked to leave a bunch of bite marks. Even after I found out that you didn't and there weren’t any, I couldn't stop thinking about it.”

God, once he got started, the truth came out of Gojo like a tsunami, and Nanami wasn’t sure he could survive it.

“You’re drunk,” he said, which was about as effective as saying ‘I’m drowning.’

“I always wondered,” Gojo continued, voice closer, breath warm against Nanami’s cheek, “if you’d let me.”

“Let you…?” Nanami asked, eyes slipping shut as the tip of Gojo’s nose nudged his earlobe at the same time as his breath moved from Nanami’s cheek to his neck.

“If you’d let me kiss you.”

Gojo’s mouth wasn’t actually touching him, so it shouldn’t have been possible for Nanami to feel his smile against his skin, but he would’ve sworn in that moment that he did.

“You’re drunk,” Nanami repeated, and Gojo let out a soft whine.

“You’re drunk,” Gojo accused him, and Nanami let out his own small noise of complaint as Gojo drew back to pout at him.

“Not as drunk as you,” Nanami argued, though they were probably closer to even than either would like to admit.

“Are you saying I’m drunk because you think I don’t really want to kiss you, or because you don’t want to kiss me?” Gojo complained. The way his lower lip stuck out this time seemed like genuine distress instead of the usual dramatic pose. “Because I definitely want to, I always want to, so if you don’t want to, you should tell me that instead of telling me I’m drunk.”

Nanami searched Gojo’s face for any doubt, but there was just miffed outrage. He really didn’t take well to his feelings being doubted. Nanami was learning all kinds of things today.

“Ieiri said kissing was allowed…” Nanami muttered, and Gojo lit up like festival fireworks. He sprang backwards and upright, then offered Nanami both his hands.

“C’mon. I don’t want to kiss you on the floor. Well, I want to kiss you on the floor but there’s a bed and I’d rather kiss you there.”

Nanami sat up and leaned to the side to set the lynx back onto the bedside table before taking Gojo’s hands.

“What’s that?” Gojo asked, curious, as he pulled Nanami upright. He immediately shook his head and glared at Nanami. “Wait, no, I don’t care. Don’t distract me.”

“Who’s distr–” Nanami started to argue, but Gojo, having regained his focus on the task at hand, just gently shoved Nanami to sit on the bed, then bounced down next to him.

“I haven't done much kissing,” Gojo said, eyes flicking from one feature to the next on Nanami's face like he couldn't decide where to start. Nanami sighed and put his hand on Gojo's jaw, and Gojo settled instantly.

“Satoru,” Nanami said, exasperation and excitement tangling together, “please take this seriously.”

He moved in slowly, a small part of him still sure that Gojo was about to start laughing at him, leap up and say that he’d been joking, silly Nanami-kun, but Gojo was almost perfectly still. The only movement was the bob of his throat as he swallowed and a faint tremor, but that might’ve been Nanami’s own hand this time.

Nanami tilted his head to get the correct angle, while Gojo’s eyes followed his every movement in his periphery.

“Close your eyes,” Nanami murmured.

“No,” Gojo refused, his breath so sweet, the very tips of his eyelashes grazing Nanami’s cheekbone, and, well, fine. Nanami kissed him anyway, just a simple, soft press of slightly parted lips. Gojo tasted like the strawberry of his chu hi, and his lip balm was peach flavored. Nanami felt Gojo blink several times, though why he was surprised Nanami had no idea. He ran his thumb along Gojo’s cheek, and that elicited a small moan, and then Gojo’s overwhelmed attention seemed to realign and focus, and then, finally, he was kissing back.

Nanami hadn’t actually done that much kissing either, and none at all since he’d gotten to the school. Middle school fumbling had always been more about the act rather than the participants. It was almost entirely awkward and forgettable, but at least he’d learned what he adamantly didn’t like and what he sort of did, as well as how to pay attention to the other person’s reactions.

The melting sensation was back, a warmth flowing from the hinge of his jaw like liquid sunlight down his spine, riding every nerve until he was full of it. Gojo put his hand on Nanami’s neck, then slipped it up into his hair. Nanami sighed against his mouth, then drew back just to look at him.

Gojo had closed his eyes after all, and there was a dazed smile on his face. He let out a content breath and opened them again.

“Hi,” Gojo said quietly.

“Hello,” Nanami smiled back.

“Is there a reason you stopped kissing me?” Gojo asked him, playing with his hair.

“It’s polite to check in to see if someone’s enjoying it,” Nanami shrugged, “or so I’ve heard.”

“You heard wrong,” Gojo pouted, then pulled Nanami back in for a quick peck on the mouth. “It’s super rude for you to stop kissing me. Very offensive.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Nanami broke off into a hiss as Gojo bypassed his mouth and kissed the hinge of his jaw, brushed his lips along Nanami’s earlobe, and then made his way to Nanami’s neck.

“Mm hmm,” Gojo agreed. His voice buzzed along Nanami’s artery, and Nanami groaned. “Oh, is this a good spot?”

Nanami tugged at Gojo’s hair in retaliation, and Gojo doubled down by throwing some nips and bites into rotation with his kisses.

“I still don’t know what you want,” Nanami said. He felt a little lost himself, all turned around between the sensations, the emotions, and the alcohol.

“I’m kissing you,” Gojo answered, “and you’re kissing me. What more could I want?”

Any question with which Nanami could’ve followed up evaporated from his mind when Gojo gently took his earlobe between his teeth.

“But what does Nanami Kento want?” Gojo asked once he’d let it go. He was the one to sit back that time, looking over Nanami with a different flavor of curiosity. “You said you’re not sure what you’re allowed to want, so… you’re allowed to want anything.”

“I’m not,” Nanami shook his head. Gojo huffed and took the hand Nanami still had against his face, tugged it to his mouth, and kissed the center of Nanami’s palm.

“You’re allowed with me,” Gojo said, like he wanted to put the words where Nanami could hold onto them. “You’re allowed to want whatever you can think of.”

Nanami let out a slow breath, and Gojo’s eyes fluttered shut. His hair was so white that it seemed like anything should dirty it, like Nanami touching him should leave some sort of mark. He reached out with the hand that Gojo hadn’t taken possession of, and touched his face, running the pad of his thumb over Gojo’s eyebrow, as silky and soft as a feather.

“I want this to mean more than drunk kissing,” Nanami admitted. “But I suppose we’ll have to wait ‘til we’re sober before we can know if that’s a possibility.”

“I don’t,” Gojo murmured into his hand, “because I remember feeling like this before I ever started drinking. So what else do you want?”

Nanami shivered. Gojo’s mouth on his hand was a different kind of warmth than on his neck, a settling warmth rather than a stirring one.

“I want you to still be interested when the novelty of kissing me wears off.”

Gojo just nodded, like that was a given.

“I want you to tell me when you want something or need something from me, instead of hiding it and making a joke about it, or teasing until I figure it out, because I’m not good at that.”

“I’ll try,” Gojo said, opening his eyes and looking at Nanami over his own fingers. “I’ll start right now. I want to stay. We don’t have to do anything else, we don’t even have to keep kissing if you don’t want to, but I don’t want to be by myself tonight and I don’t want to be around anyone but you.”

Nanami let his eyes close, and let all of those wishes run through his mind.

“Okay,” he said. “Yeah.”

“I can sleep on the floor,” Gojo offered, and Nanami snorted softly.

“Don’t be stupid. I think we’re a little past that. Besides, it’ll be pretty obvious if this was all just the alcohol when we wake up nose to nose.”

Gojo grinned vividly at that, smile widening against Nanami’s palm.

“I do want to know what that is, though,” Gojo added, tipping his chin over towards the little lynx. Nanami reached out to get it with the hand he was still allowed to use, since Gojo didn’t seem inclined to stop nuzzling the other one.

“Family heirloom,” Nanami answered, rolling the statue between his fingers, “from the Danish side. No one knows for sure how old it is, but a hundred and fifty years at the least.”

“A cat?” Gojo asked, and Nanami nodded.

“A lynx,” he clarified. “In some old Nordic faiths and myths, there’s a thought that the soul has different parts, or that a person has more than one soul. One of them is a spirit that turns up when someone is born and accompanies them their whole life. My mother said that mine is the lynx, because one came up to her with its kitten at the zoo just before she found out she was pregnant.”

Gojo ran the gentlest of touches over the tip of its ear.

“Do you believe that?” he asked.

Nanami shrugged.

“You’re supposed to dream of your fylgja, but I don’t usually remember my dreams,” he said.

“But it’s supposed to protect you?” Gojo asked. Nanami nodded. “Put it down.”

Nanami glanced suspiciously at him, but set it back on the nightstand.

“Are you planning to attack me?” Nanami joked, the last word coming out in a yelp as Gojo tackled him to the bed, then propped himself up over Nanami on his hands. He was beaming, and his eyes bright as the sky at noon,

“It’s a protector,” Gojo grinned down at him, and Nanami tilted his head.

“Yes.”

“And when you didn’t know what to do with that little bit of me, you wrapped it up with your lynx.”

Nanami felt his cheeks redden.

“You really do like me,” Gojo wondered. “You do. You did before you knew I liked you.”

Nanami glanced away, blushing.

“Is that so bad?” he asked. This was so close to the mocking Gojo Nanami remembered, but then, Gojo leaned down, and tilted Nanami’s face back up so they looked one another in the eyes.

“No,” Gojo said. He touched his forehead to Nanami’s, and then kissed him again.

“It’s amazing.”