Archive of Our Own

The moon has climbed high enough overhead that it can no longer be seen through the open window, not by anyone in the tightly shut infirmary as Gojo slumps backwards over the hard wooden chair he’s relegated to. 

“Much as I hate to align with the higher-ups over anything, we suspended him for a reason.” He rolls his head, blindfolded eyes turning to Shoko. “Unless you forgot what we brought back to you after the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons.”

“I haven’t,” she replies, clipped. She pulls a cigarette from the box in her pocket and puts it between her lips without lighting it, cognizant as ever of preserving the air in the room. “But I also haven’t forgotten what was brought back to me after Nanami and the stitched-face guy fought that first time.”

Gojo doesn’t wince at that, but he does look sideways at the infirmary’s other inhabitant. Nanami is framed in the moonlight drifting through the window, eyes obscured behind glasses, arms folded but body turned toward the conversation. “Nanamin can handle himself,” Gojo replies, waving his hand dismissively.

“Don’t call me that,” Nanami interjects, briefly, his voice neutral as almost always. Neither irritated nor fond, exasperated nor affectionate. 

He pouts. “Itadori does,” Gojo whines, but before he can continue Shoko cuts him off. 

“Stop flirting, Gojo,” she snaps, not allowing rebuttal before continuing. “Anything that can do that kind of damage to a grade one sorcerer isn’t something I want to fuck around with. I have a feeling we’ll need all the help we can get, and we can’t afford to be proud about it.”

“Should we call Okkotsu back as well?” asks Nanami. “He’s quite powerful from what you’ve told me.”

“We should consider it,” Shoko says. 

“No way,” Gojo says, simultaneously. “Miguel gets pissy if you interrupt his schedule. I’m not risking that again.”

“Surely the strongest sorcerer on earth could handle him,” Nanami says, but before Gojo can even turn to catch his expression, to see if his noncommittal voice is hiding any teasing, Shoko laughs. 

“You’re right,” she says, “Okkotsu could probably handle it. But I think Miguel’s pissiness isn’t really what we’re worried about, right, Gojo?”

Gojo grins at her, letting his tongue loll from his mouth. “Ha ha.” There’s a pause for a moment, all of them likely thinking the same thing, waiting for someone else to say it. Waiting for Gojo to say it. “Fine,” he mutters, mirroring Nanami’s pose and thumping his head back to stare, moodily, again at the ceiling above him rather than either of the two co-conspirators he knows are looking his way. “Fine, we’ll see what we can do to get Hakari back. Who knows, the higher-ups may appreciate a little violence against non-sorcerers these days. If it had been Itadori he beat up they probably would have promoted him.”

“Don’t be so bitter,” Shoko huffs. She slips her still unlit cigarette back into the pack. “We get it, what he did was wrong.”

“Hmmph.” Gojo sulks down a bit in his seat, turning back to the window. “And what do you think, Nanamin? You’re the one who fought him.”

They’ve had this conversation, or a form of it, before, after the first time with Patch Face in this exact infirmary, while Ijichi and Shoko talked quietly in the hallway. Gojo’s sure he hasn’t changed his mind since then. A man like Nanami so rarely changes his mind.

As expected, Nanami speaks thoughtfully. He doesn’t acknowledge the nickname this time. “I believe you know what I think,” he explains directly to Gojo, before turning to Shoko and addressing her. “I think as the patch-face curse was when Itadori and I encountered him, we do not need additional resources. I think that now there is no telling how quickly his power has advanced. He was fairly new-born when we fought him. I have no opinion on Hakari specifically, as I have never met him, but I can’t argue with having additional strength on our side. If Hakari is the right choice then I believe we should try.”

Shoko nods. “I think that settles it. We need Hakari. Gojo, you can deny it but I know you said he’d rival you someday. Even Okkotsu said—”

“Yuuta is a kid,” Gojo interrupts her. “Though I guess I said what I said. Fine. I don’t know why you’re still trying to convince me, I already agreed we should do what we can.”

“Good,” Nanami says, evenly. 

“Right.” Shoko re-crosses her legs. “So what the hell is that kid up to these days?”

“Oh, you don’t know?” Gojo smirks, always the center of attention, always the one in the know. “He’s a bookie.”

“Bookie?” Shoko repeats the word, laces it with incredulity. “Like… gambling?”

“Yup.” Gojo pops the p, spitting it out. “You’ll never guess what over.”

“Fighting.” Nanami’s response is almost instant, bringing Gojo’s attention snapping back to him, not that it’s ever very far away these days since that awful night in the infirmary, watching Nanami in pain, his wounds healing. His eyes had looked faded, Gojo remembers suddenly, his glasses off on the windowsill. Now though, they’re clear behind his lenses. “No sorcerer would bother tangling in anything less dangerous.”

“Makes sense,” Shoko agrees before Gojo can even confirm it. Privately, it’s a bit irritating how easily Nanami has managed to earn the trust of everyone at the school Gojo has basically kept going single-handedly for years. Shoko would never come around to Gojo’s opinion on anything that quickly. He pouts a little.

“Am I right?” Nanami asks, and Gojo feels his eyes on him so he juts his lower lip out further. “I take it from your silence that I am.”

“What if I’m in awe of your brainlessness?”

“I said stop,” Shoko cuts in. Gojo’s eyes dart to Nanami’s still-impassive face for a moment, searching him for any response. He finds nothing that he can see, which is saying something. “I assume it’s not a situation where we can just go in and get him, right?”

“Nope!” Another popped consonant tumbles from Gojo’s mouth. “It’s a hotbed of sorcerers, low grade but pugnacious. Not even worth my time to go, really. Anyone could do it.”

“We could send one of the students,” Shoko murmurs, thoughtful. “Itadori? He seems quite adept at physical fighting.”

Gojo pictures Itadori brawling with another person, remembers the kid’s face when he’d come back from the mission with Nanami, and dismisses it. “They’re learning still, come on.” He draws out the last sound, the way he knows makes Nanami pinch the bridge of his nose and sigh, makes Shoko flatten her palm against her forehead, but neither happens. They’re taking this seriously. Gojo is the only one even trying for levity at this point.

“This could be good experience for them,” Shoko argues. “Plus it might be easier with someone he’s never met — unless there’s someone here he’s more bonded to.”

“They left with him,” Gojo explains. “I just don’t think this is the kind of thing the students should do. I’d rather they keep improving instead of getting steamrolled by an overgrown high schooler with a bad attitude and a lot of power.”

“What, his sensei couldn’t persuade him?” Shoko asks in a mock-sweet voice, wiggling her fingers at Gojo from across the infirmary. “Surely it’s worth your oh-so-valuable time.”

“Why don’t I do it?”

Nanami cuts across the conversation like a knife, and Gojo and Shoko snap from their banter to look up at him, still mostly a silhouette in the moonlight. Gojo replays the image in his head from earlier, with Nanami instead of Itadori. Nanami can fight, he’s physically fit even without his cursed technique, he’s a relative unknown outside the academic circle of their world thanks to his time away in an office. Nanami wouldn’t return from the ring with that pain in his eyes that Gojo sees in his dreams sometimes, that Itadori tries so hard to hide from his fellow students like they can’t see it if they look for any longer than a second.

“If we’re concerned that someone recognizable could jeopardize the situation further, I am a very suitable candidate,” Nanami continues. “The higher-ups can surely spare me if the students are all in reasonably good health. For once,” he adds, just a touch dry.

Shoko frowns. “I don’t know that I’ll be able to help you if something happens,” she says, “but that would be the case for anyone I suppose. And you’re so tough, Nanami-kun.”

Gojo watches, mouth dropping open, as Nanami bows, just a little. “That means so much coming from Shoko-senpai.”

“Okay, what the fuck is this?” Gojo asks. “I am your senpai, Nanamin, where’s my bow?”

“I respect Shoko,” Nanami replies, voice once again even and impassive.

“Exactly.” Shoko caps the heaping pile of injustice with a shake of her head. “Maybe if you’d ever been someone worth looking up to.”

“Hmmph,” is about all Gojo has to say to that. “Weren’t we discussing something important?”

“You’re the one who changed the subject,” Shoko points out. “Idiot. Regardless, I think it makes the most sense for Nanami to take it on. Gojo, you should start thinking about how to keep the higher-ups out of it.”

“How is that my job?” Gojo whines.

“You’re best suited for it,” acknowledges Nanami, and it isn’t really praise but something about it goes straight to Gojo’s head anyway.

“It’s settled,” Shoko says, firmly, like it’s her decision to make any more than the other two. She’s, in fact, the only one not actually doing anything, but she turns her chair around with the air of a conversation ending. “Now get out of my infirmary.”

//

Gojo measures his time in Tokyo in three epochs: childhood, after Geto left, and when Nanami returned. They had been under- and upperclassmen at school, first Nanami with Haibara, then Nanami on his own. And maybe Gojo had been too wrapped up in his own bullshit, overwhelming and significant as it had been, to realize that Nanami was pulling away, honing his skills and losing his passion.

It had been a day or two before Nanami’s graduation, depending on the position of the clock, when Gojo had left the party the third-years had insisted on throwing for their only remaining senpai with Nanami in tow. The kid needed it, he reasoned; sure, the party was ostensibly in his honor but he knew that faded, heavy look in his eye, had seen it in his own one too many times in the mirror since everything with the Star Plasma vessel.

“What’s on your mind?” Gojo had asked, in the space where the noise from the party still drifted to them, where the smell of smuggled alcohol had faded, where Nanami had still been by his side. “Sad that you’ll be graduating and leaving your precious senpai behind?” He bumped Nanami’s shoulder with his own to punctuate the words, grinning in that way he’d honed to obfuscate anything else on his mind. Nanami never responded to it but if at first you don’t succeed, he reasoned, try, try again.

“I’m leaving,” Nanami had said, like he was confirming what Gojo started, but on replay the words carried a little more weight. Gojo had stayed uncharacteristically quiet at the time, the way he’d wish later on he was more often around the younger boy. “I don’t think I have it in me to be a sorcerer.”

“What?” Gojo extended the word in exaggeration, but his eyebrows really were raised over the glasses he wore to keep the Six Eyes muted enough to stand. “You just got your first-grade promotion. You could do anything you wanted with that kind of certification.”

“I don’t want,” Nanami had murmured into the darkness of the hallway, and Gojo had waited for the rest of the sentence for a moment before realizing that had been the end of it.

“You don’t want anything?” Gojo had asked then. Color him surprised. Nanami didn’t seem like the ambitious type but he also didn’t seem like an AWOL, dereliction of duty type either. 

“Nothing sorcery can bring me.” This had been more personal than Nanami had ever gotten before, with Gojo or ostensibly with anyone else. Neither Shoko nor Suguru seemed especially close to him. In fact, as Gojo thought about it in that moment, no one at all had seemed especially close to Nanami Kento. “I want Hai— Yu to be alive. I want to read all the books on my shelf. I want a life with a relative amount of peace and quiet.”

“You’re right,” Gojo had said, unable to say anything else. “Sorcery won’t bring you those things.”

They’d ended up on the roof, Gojo proffering one of the two cigarettes he’d picked from Shoko’s pocket when she’d been otherwise engaged with that older girl who’d been chaperoning the students from Kyoto on site for the combined celebration. Gojo was sure if he tried he could remember her name. Nanami, to some level of surprise, took the tobacco willingly, settling it between his lips and waiting for a light.

“Shoko-senpai has bad taste,” Nanami had remarked, evenly, when Gojo had managed to spark a flame with a lighter that likely the woman herself had left on the roof during a previous smoke session. He exhaled, pungent vapor billowing from between his lips into the warm air around him. Nanami had his uniform sleeves rolled neatly up to his elbows. His exposed forearms were a rarity Gojo hadn’t fully appreciated at the time. “This is disgusting.”

“The taste isn’t the point,” Gojo had replied, trying to fully suppress his own distaste to sound wiser than he felt, slightly ruined by a cough that brought no hint of amusement to Nanami’s face. “The result is the point.”

“And what is the result, Gojo-san?” It had been amazing, really, how Nanami could use the honorific so seriously and still carry absolutely no respect in his tone when he said it. Gojo almost wanted to laugh, so he did because otherwise things were too leaden between them. 

“I don’t know,” he had replied, simply. “That we’re having this great conversation?”

Nanami had exhaled again, more smoke moving from that stern mouth to the soft air. Then he had said something surprising. For such a steady, predictable person, Nanami was so often surprising him. “I guess you’re right.”

More silence, lit by the distant city lights and the embers of their cigarettes. Gojo had gone through his first, taller and with larger lungs as he always had been. He flicked the butt off the edge of the roof, careless of anyone walking below. Nanami had taken another drag, at least. 

“So what will you do instead?” Gojo had asked. He remembers feeling unusually serious. Things had seemed so heavy lately, with things devolving with Geto, Nanami’s solitary existence an endless reminder of Geto’s immeasurable failure on the mission with Haibara. “What can fill your life the way sorcery can’t?”

“I don’t care, really,” Nanami had replied. Something in Gojo rejected this, knew that he had cared deeply, painfully much. A man like Nanami felt things, still water running deep. But he didn’t speak up to argue yet. “But I’ll do it long enough to go somewhere I can do whatever I want.” He had paused, one more long pull at the cigarette before stamping it out and then collecting the ash like the model citizen that he had always been. “Thailand, maybe.”

Gojo had laughed, again, a little cruelly this time. “You can try,” he had said, watching Nanami’s hand close around the detritus of his stolen bounty, “but walking away from this is a heavy weight to carry, Nanami.” Even back then he had never bothered with the suffixes. “Even someone as strong as you isn’t going to be able to lug it around forever.”

Nanami had looked at him then. He hadn’t worn glasses back then so his gaze was unfiltered, inescapable. “You think I’m strong?” It hadn’t been the flattered question of a praised child, nor a straightforward request for confirmation of intention. It had been disbelieving.

“Nanami Kento, in the whole of humanity you are one of the strongest.” He had said it magnanimously, had meant it a little. Having access to cursed energy made you, by default, like a god among men.

“And still not strong enough.” Nanami’s tone had been clipped, the same as his steps when a moment later he had turned around and climbed back off that roof for the last time.

//

Gojo follows Nanami, follows him right down to the train station and onto the train without words passing between them. He’s tall and unusual looking, handsome, some might say, so he attracts some stares but he doesn’t give them the pleasure of his attention, eyes only for Nanami. Nanami, too, is handsome, he thinks. People should stare at him. People might have a chance with him. 

“Dare I ask what this is about?” Nanami asks then in a low voice, polite to the strangers surrounding them. They’re standing close together in the late-night traffic. Gojo leans in a little nearer just to push things. 

“I don’t know, dare you?” He grins, letting his teeth show. Someone who had been staring at him over their magazine looks away. “Come on, Nanamin, indulge me a little here. Ask.”

Nanami sighs, leveling Gojo with a glare he has to look up a little to meet his eyeline, even with Gojo slouching. He says nothing. Why he has to pick a fight with a man with a will of iron, Gojo will never know — maybe because it’s the only variety of fight he knows he has a chance of losing.

He loses this time, too. “Call it our first strategy meeting,” he explains. 

“Any particular reason why you couldn’t have started this conversation at our actual workplace?” Nanami asks. It’s a little infuriating how calmly he says it. He’s even more composed than usual, which is saying something. 

“Ears everywhere.” The explanation is easy. Gojo doesn’t think the higher-ups will deem it suspicious to see him leaving with Nanami, unless it had been in observation of how little complaint he had put up against the intrusion, but not everyone is as privy to the nature of the friendly animosity in their relationship as people like Shoko and Itadori. “At least wherever you live is more private.”

“Oh?” Nanami’s tone shifts, subtly. “What makes you think that?”

“A guy like you definitely lives alone.” Gojo stamps the statement as fact.

“And what is ‘a guy like me’?” The change in timbre remains, undefined and elusive.

Gojo just grins again. “Am I wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Nanami replies, and Gojo thinks the corner of his mouth might twitch up just a bit, “are you?” Maybe it was the movement of the train after all.

“All right, all right. Maybe I should turn around then,” Gojo says, and he’s having a good time even if Nanami isn’t. “Get off at the next stop.”

There’s a moment of silence. The voice overhead announces where they’re pulling into next. The train slows, the doors open, and Gojo prepares to commit to the bit, hands in pockets, turning toward the platform. 

“I live alone.” It’s quiet, barely audible over the rush of people getting on and off, but Gojo grins anyway, righting his position to look again at Nanami. “And I hate to give you credit but your reasoning makes sense.”

“You don’t hate to give me credit,” he argues, but he only receives silence in response, swaying together with each turn of the track. 

Nanami’s place is private. Gojo had known it would be. It’s an apartment without neighbors on the same floor, decent but not exceptional for Tokyo, Kichijochi leaves waving just outside the building. Nanami’s window looks out over the neighborhood.

“Nice,” Gojo says, when Nanami follows him in from the complicated process of locking his front door, “but is it worth the commute?”

“Separation from work isn’t a bad thing,” he comments mildly. “You live on campus still, right?”

Gojo rolls his eyes. “You make it sound like I’m still living with my parents or something,” he whines. “I’m a teacher — the teacher, really. It’s the responsible thing to live near them. You have no idea how many times I’ve caught someone—”

“So.” Nanami cuts him off ruthlessly, no regard for the sentence left half-tripped out of his hanging mouth. “Tell me about this third-year and whatever he’s playing at bookie for.”

“Well,” Gojo says, when he’s recovered, taking the opportunity to sprawl very broadly out on Nanami’s couch, feeling his irritated gaze descending upon him like a ray of light and basking in it, “it’s like you said: a fighting ring. Sorcerers who haven’t found their spot in this world, lesser clan offshoots, one-offs, bastard children, have a place to get all that anger out and make a little money at the same time. Well, I say a little.” Gojo cracks his knuckles. Nanami is watching him from where he’s still standing near the entryway. “If it was a little I guess no one would do it. The spectators are non-sorcerers, from what I hear, so they don’t even use cursed techniques. What a dull fight that would be.”

“Indeed,” Nanami agrees, stepping forward and taking a very begrudged-looking seat at one of his two kitchen chairs. They match each other and the table perfectly, Gojo notes, a far cry from his own setup at the school. “Good thing I haven’t let my combat get rusty.”

“Nanamin, rusty? Perish the thought.”

“Enough with the nickname,” Nanami says again, voice still mild though the words themselves are more impatient. “How long has this ring been in operation?”

Gojo lifts two fingers to his chin, thoughtfully. “Well, I’m not the most in-the-know gossip in the jujutsu world, but I’d expect Hakari has been there since his suspension. Long enough to be fairly established, based on what the managers have been able to find out. He’s not the top dog or anything but he’s barking.”

“Interesting metaphor,” Nanami comments, dryly, and Gojo grins like squeezing blood from a stone. “And the location?”

“Not sure. At least not exactly. I think Nitta is taking point on the details since Shoko somehow has her wrapped around her little finger. She’s a good kid,” he adds, with some level of earnestness. “She’s not going to give us up.”

“If Shoko trusts her then so do I,” Nanami agrees. “Does this conclude our strategy session?”

“But I just got here,” Gojo whines, giving himself one long stretch on the couch just to watch the muscle in Nanami’s jaw twitch. “There is one more thing I wanted to say though.”

“By all means.”

Gojo sits back up then, takes his glasses off because he knows it makes him look more serious and watches Nanami unform into mass and energy and force but still somehow the core of him is there. “Remember in Hokkaido, what I asked you to do?”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Nanami says, smooth like silk, hard like iron.

“Then be careful with this.” It’s a warning in Gojo’s mouth, in his ice chip eyes. “Yuuji isn’t done learning from you yet.”

Something passes through Nanami’s gaze at that, their unfathomable depths surfacing something generally buried, but it resubmerges without him fully catching it. “I would never leave those children in your sole care,” he replies, and Gojo’s startled fully into a laugh at that. The mood lifts like a light being turned on. “Loathe as I am to prolong this, you did have a long ride here, so I suppose it would be all right for you to—”

“Nanamin!” Gojo practically yells, throwing his arms up in the air, and he can almost see the regret sweeping through the man across from him as he loosens his tie like it’s strangling him. “I knew you’d come around. Let’s find the most terrible movie we can.”

//

They spend a week preparing, which considering how quickly things seem to be changing around them feels like an terribly long time, but Nanami insists on a separate place to stay while he’s undercover, in a manner of speaking, and as much as Gojo superficially complains about it, calls him high-maintenance, he knows it’s the right call. That takes a while to arrange. Shoko talks to Nitta, gathering what information she can, flexing their network in whatever way feels highest reward, lowest risk. Hakari is with Kirara, another third year Nanami knows nothing about but Shoko and Gojo assure him is just as dangerous in their own way. Nanami swears to keep a low profile, Gojo argues that getting Hakari’s attention requires the opposite, Shoko throws her hands in the air and kicks them out of her moonlit infirmary, their unspoken but chosen headquarters.

But then suddenly one day, Gojo steps out into the sunshine with his vending machine bento and finds the bench where Nanami eats (packed lunch, homemade, huge variety of components week to week that he never offers to share) empty. 

It startles him, which is strange enough, but then even stranger is that on reflection he realizes he’s startled less by the unexpectedness of his absence and more by the disruption of his routine. Nanami was never patient with him, never went beyond tolerance and often came up short even to that, but he sat next to Gojo and ate his lunch, let him whine in his ear about the slimy unagi and the overcooked rice, didn’t adjust his schedule when Gojo started making it a fixed point in his day. Lunch with Nanami, lunch alongside Nanami. 

“Hi, sensei!” Itadori’s voice is like a shot in the arm, and Gojo turns toward it to flash a smile he’s sure glints in the sunlight. “Are you looking for Nanamin?”

Is it that obvious? “Maybe,” Gojo teases him. The kid is practically jogging the couple meters between them, never slows down. Kugisaki and Fushiguro trail him, embroiled in an argument he’s instantly curious to know about. “Who’s asking?”

Itadori blinks, coming to a stop on the balls of his feet in front of him. “I am!” he says, chipper and blinding. Bless his little heart. “Anyway, he left this morning.”

“Maybe if you weren’t nine minutes late to everything you could have seen him off,” Fushiguro mutters as he and Kugisaki reach them, deeming it important enough to interrupt their fight to make this pronouncement. 

“You’re so rude to your favorite teacher!” Gojo moans, clutching the hand not holding his lunch over his chest. 

“You’re our only teacher.” It’s Kugisaki’s turn to mutter something rude to him. How touching that they can put aside their differences to roast him as a united front. “Anyway, do you know when he’ll be back? He’s the best to spar with using tools, Maki-san is too scary.”

“Knowing him, probably soon,” Gojo replies, and his voice is easy and reassuring as the kids make their way along, picking up their argument and, in Itadori’s case, mediation right where they left off, but his eyes behind the blindfold turn toward the front gate.

It’s remarkably, almost astonishingly stupid that not a moment later someone bumps into his back, letting out an oof.

“Can’t a man eat lunch in peace?” he asks, turning to see Shoko just finishing a fumble of her phone between hands made more complex by the pack of cigarettes in one palm.

“Where’s your stupid Limitless when you need it?” she grumbles, when she has a secure handle on her cell. “Stop moping.”

“Who’s moping, Ieiri-san?” he asks, finally strolling toward the bench now that he knows he’ll have someone else to annoy on it. “I’m as merry as a schoolboy.”

“I don’t remember any of us being especially merry in school.” Shoko sits next to him, disgruntled, hunting in her pockets for a lighter. “Although these new kids seem pretty cheery, all things considered. Maybe I’m just too used to Okkotsu-kun but Itadori-kun seems downright gleeful half the time I talk to him.” She shakes her head, flame to the end of the cigarette between her lips. “I’ll never forget him sitting up on my table like that.”

“Me neither.” He gulps down a very salty sheet of nori without actually wrapping anything in it. Nanami would scold him for it, he thinks. Nanami has ideas about what ways are proper to eat food. Gojo has ideas about how much labor he’s willing to expend for a lunch he bought from a machine. “Better this way than another class of miserable assholes.”

“Don’t forget childish,” Shoko chuckles, smoke escaping with the exhales. “Miserable, childish assholes.”

“Some things never change,” Gojo sighs, like he’s feeling nostalgic, gesturing to indicate Shoko and earning himself a cuff on the head. “What, you’re not a miserable asshole anymore?”

“No less than you,” she says. “You were looking like a miserable asshole watching Nanami’s spot on this bench, hmm?”

“Maybe I just miss having sensible company,” Gojo argues, forcing down another indistinct bite of the bento. “No withering look can match Nanamin’s.”

“He’s right,” she says, absently, another pull, “you should knock it off with that nickname. It’s such an Itadori thing.”

“Whatever.” Gojo rolls his eyes behind the blindfold, eyelashes catching. “You think he’s been in a fight yet?”

“Itadori-kun?” Shoko asks, and something in Gojo’s mind stirs at the fact that he’d been the only one in the conversation still thinking about Nanami. “You mean, today?”

Gojo flicks her forehead. “Nanamin,” he clarifies, drawing the word out sing-song just to hear her huff out her next lungful of smoke. “Yuuji would call him ‘Tyler Durden’. That was one of the movies he had to watch when he was training with me, you know — Fight Club. I wish I could tell him where Nanamin is, he’d think it was so cool.”

“Itadori-kun doesn’t need any help thinking Nanami is cool,” Shoko laughs. “He looks at that guy like the sun shines out from behind his head.”

“That’s just his default expression,” Gojo replies, and Shoko concedes the point but the thought doesn’t quite leave Gojo’s head. 

//

Teaching keeps him busy and firmly planted at the school for another week after Nanami leaves. They hadn’t specifically planned how he would communicate if he had new information or needed anything; perhaps Shoko and Gojo had been too trusting in Nanami’s ability. 

He’s not anxious, he thinks as he closes the door behind him on the second-years’ rare late night FaceTime with Okkotsu, the first-years off on a mission he doesn’t need to oversee, for once. Not anxious at all; the thought is only somewhat reassuring as without really thinking he prepares his teleportation and pops into the dingy room that represents almost the entirety of Nanami’s current digs. 

He brings up Limitless, just in time to catch the spotted edge of Nanami’s tool, just in time to admire his control and reflexes as he realizes who has materialized. “What an unexpected surprise,” Nanami murmurs, as though it’s not so unexpected, and then he moves in some way to catch the light and Gojo has to suppress a gasp.

Nanami isn’t wearing his glasses, which makes sense since one of his eyes is swollen too large for the lens to cover. The bruising spreads like an oil slick down onto his cheekbone, where there’s also a line of stitches too orderly to be done by anyone but the man himself. He’s dressed in his usual clothes, minus the jacket, and with the way his forearms look where the bone almost touches the skin Gojo is a little glad of it. His shirt is blood spattered like a crime drama. 

“I’d hate to see the other guy,” Gojo offers, raising a hand on instinct like it could help. He wishes for Shoko, for Okkotsu all the way in Mozambique on FaceTime with the second-years. The most powerful sorcerer in the world rendered useless. 

“You would,” Nanami agrees, and maybe he’s on pain medication or maybe he’s loopy from the lack of it but Gojo swears he smiles for a second, just a second, and he pictures the sun behind his head like he’s Itadori. “I think I caught some attention.”

“You have all mine,” Gojo replies, flippantly and without thinking. Nanami cocks his head slightly, like the constellation of bruising on his face is weighing him down. “I mean, you look like shit.”

“Ah.” His head and the axis of the earth right themselves. “Well, I haven’t really had a chance to clean up. I just got back and was planning on getting my report written before… anything else.”

“You’re joking.” Gojo’s voice is flat. “Nanami, do you have a bathroom in this hole? Because I’m locking you in it and not letting you out until you bathe.”

“I don’t trust you to stay out of that process whatsoever,” Nanami says. His voice is so fucking even, unruffled, the contrast between his appearance and the sound of him almost making Gojo angry. What would it take, to have him nervous? “That said, I do plan on bathing tonight. So if you have anything you’d like to discuss let’s do it.”

“It could take a while,” Gojo sing-songs, waggling his eyebrows hopefully clearly enough to be seen behind the blindfold. “Nanamin is so talkative. You should clean up first, eat if you haven’t. I can help!”

“No.” Gojo is almost tempted to read an exclamation mark into the end of the word with how forcefully it spills from his mouth. He can almost see the memory reflected in Nanami’s one open eye, the reunion lunch he’d decided to make for them all when Nanami had returned to Jujutsu High, to Gojo’s life. It’s a kitchen filled with smoke, it’s a fire alarm destroyed with a cleaver, it’s burns reversed and cigarettes smoked in rubble. “I would actually rather you annoy me in the bath than destroy this building in the kitchen.”

“Well then,” Gojo says, grinning, head lolling onto his own shoulder to put him at eyeline with Nanami. “Lead the way, your highness.”

Nanami levels him with a look then, strange and somehow more intense from his single visible eye, and Gojo crosses his arms. “You know,” he says, thoughtfully, “you really used to irritate me. Now it feels like a play we’re putting on.” As if that doesn’t send Gojo reeling, he’s not done yet. “Don’t you think, Gojo-san?”

“This is getting creepy,” Gojo mutters. “Just get in the bath.”

Nanami might chuckle, or it might be that Gojo wants Nanami to chuckle, and then he’s past him and behind a closing door. Gojo doesn’t hear it lock.

For a moment he surveys the room, lights still out, relying on the Six Eyes and the street lamps. The table, rickety and so unlike the one in Nanami’s own apartment, is strewn with string, gauze, plastic bags filled with melting ice. The floor, cheaply carpeted in what looks to be serving as living and bed room, has blood spattered on it. Gojo can already envision the financial paperwork he’ll file with the school when they fail to get their security deposit back, but then he tries to picture Nanami leaving a bloodstain on someone’s floor and somehow that feels less believable. He turns, slowly, taking in the pitiful and somehow barren-looking kitchen as he does, and makes his way to the bathroom door.

The water in Nanami’s bath is tinged pink. This is the first impression Gojo has, turning the lock on the doorknob behind him to keep anyone else out, or keep the heat in, or whatever his motivation is. The water is pink, and Nanami has his head dropped back against the wall behind him, and Gojo feels something inside him turn over like an elderly engine at the sight of Nanami’s clothes folded neatly on the tank of the toilet, a direct contrast to the inherent squalor surrounding him.

Nanami’s eyes don’t open as he speaks. “I wasn’t sure you’d actually follow me in here.”

“Man of my word.” Gojo plants himself, less than certainly, on the lone stool. “How goes it getting Hakari to notice you?”

“Fairly well, I think.” Nanami adjusts himself, displacing nothing but Gojo’s attention. “Today’s fight was rather challenging. The audience was engaged. I believe it made a significant amount of money.”

“Are those what you fought in?” Gojo asks, gesturing toward that pile of fabric, the clothes of a businessman. “That might actually get you too much attention.”

“Only the undershirt,” Nanami explains patiently. “My nose was still bleeding when I got redressed, however. And my—” He gestures toward that line of Frankenstein thread across his cheek. Gojo wonders if his opponent had worn brass knuckles, or something worse. The parts of Nanami he can see over the surface of the water are nebulous with contusions, ribs, arms, one pectoral where he swears he can see the imprints of individual fingers. 

“You really do look fucking awful,” Gojo repeats, a little brusque.

“I’ve been fighting at least once a night for a week.” Nanami is no longer patient but he drops no further into another emotion. The water in the bath is no pinker than when Gojo arrived, at least. “I am competent but not perfect.”

“You’re more than competent, though,” argues Gojo. “I mean, sure, I’m the only perfect fighter out there, obviously, but—”

Nanami snorts. For a moment Gojo thinks he imagines it, but he watches the transformation his face undergoes against the wall of the bathroom, can’t deny the movement of his jaw and nose around the sound. He thinks his mouth might fall open. “Gojo, I mean it when I say I would like very badly to see you in that ring,” he says. “No sorcery, no powers, just your own physical prowess.”

“Okay, yeah, maybe I have a bit of a sweet tooth so my nutrition isn’t the greatest,” the most powerful man on earth admits, “but come on, Nanamin, I can still dish out a beating.”

“It’s the taking of it that worries me more.” Nanami shifts once again, finally opening that one eye, his blond hair heavy with the steam around his face. “It’s not enough to be powerful. You have to be strong. Resilient.”

“I totally am those things.” Gojo stretches one leg out, straightening it at the knee, lining his heel up with a crack in the linoleum on the floor. “But you’re better suited to it, I suppose. You probably never miss a morning in the gym.”

“I do occasionally,” Nanami admits. His eye is back to shut, and he seems no closer to actually moving to wash himself than he has been at any point thus far.

“Now, what in heaven or hell could make Nanamin Kento disrupt a routine?” Gojo asks, putting a little spin on the nickname. He pictures Itadori again. It’s amazing how he can miss the kid when he saw him that very morning, not twelve hours in the past, waving at him from the door of Ijichi’s car. 

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Nanami asks, and oh, fuck, would Gojo absolutely like to know, but he senses a closed door, or rather a door that has to be opened with time and patience and the appropriate key, so he backs down. 

“Have you seen Hakari yet? Hoshi?”

“Hoshi-kun doesn’t seem to be seen very often,” Nanami says. “Hakari-kun, on the other hand, is around. He’s seen me fight once or twice. He hasn’t asked me to come to see him as of yet, though, which is from what I understand the main, or rather the only, way to gain meaningful access to him.”

“Hmm.” Gojo steeples his fingers, long lenses to peer at Nanami between. “Have you thought about what you’ll say?”

“Yes,” Nanami says, simply. Gojo waits, but it appears no further information is coming without prompting.

“And?” he prompts.

“And I have an idea.” 

“Which is?”

“You’re awfully nosy.” Once more Nanami shifts in the water. Gojo watches the droplets move against his skin, dim light flickering overhead reflecting. Nanami is handsome, he thinks. He thought it before, on the train to his apartment, and he thinks it again now with all the bruising, with that wound on his cheek, with that bathwater risen around his waist. He doesn’t really know that it means anything that he thinks it but he’s almost sure that thinking it repeatedly carries something. “Don’t you trust me?”

“Yes, but you’re right,” he explains, “I am nosy.”

The corner of his mouth twitches, and Gojo feels very painfully like a puppy who has successfully done a trick. “I suppose I knew that,” he says, and if Gojo isn’t deluded he thinks he hears fondness in his tone, but it turns clinical quickly. “I imagine I’ll tell him the truth. That the Night Parade could be a shadow of what we’re facing with these new curses. That helping us doesn’t have to mean returning to Jujutsu High, or even to sorcerer society proper.” He definitely smiles now. “Maybe I’ll tell him about Itadori-kun. That might intrigue him.”

Gojo stares in abject disbelief, pushing his blindfold up onto his forehead and back into his hair. “You love that kid,” he says. It’s a statement of fact. “Yuuji.”

He half expects Nanami to be frightened, denying, recalcitrant, but instead he nods, returning Gojo’s gaze without fear. “He is very easy to love,” he replies, by way of an answer, and Gojo has to admit that he’s right. “I have certainly loved worse.”

And this is interesting. Gojo gets that same feeling he had on the rooftop all those terrible years ago, even before everything had gone to shit; the feeling that Nanami had just said something far more personal than he usually allowed for. Perhaps, in this anonymizing apartment, where neither of them have any connotation or personal significance except to each other, it’s easier to come clean. A pang of the strange, sickening curiosity that leads him to stick his finger into an open wound when he sees one thrums through Gojo. So he does. “Haibara?” he asks, dredging up the memory of the name, a name he mostly recalls as one of the thousand inciting acts to everything that had happened with Geto, what it felt like was somehow still happening with Geto even after…

Nanami is leveling him a look, that focused single eye trained on him, but as Gojo observes it he can already see it softening slightly into something else. “I doubt what I felt for Haibara was love,” Nanami says, which is a touch surprising. “I don’t know if I was even capable of that at the time. I do wonder sometimes, though, if it ever would have been. I certainly felt vulnerable around him.”

Gojo almost makes a joke, has to bite it back with his teeth in the tip of his tongue. Geez, Nanami, did someone knock you loose in that ring? But the idea of breaking this spell is repulsive. He barely knows what they’re doing in this bathroom.

“Plus,” Nanami continues, voice edged with a fondness so faint it’s tender, “isn’t Itadori-kun rather like Haibara?” He pauses, then lets his head loll to the side so his swollen eye presses against the tile on the wall. “I suppose you wouldn’t remember him, though.”

“I do,” Gojo argues, lies somewhat. He certainly hadn’t been focused on the underclassman, tied up with everything else, and by the time he’d thought to take interest Haibara had been gone. But he remembers how Nanami had been before, how he’d been after. He thinks he can retrace his steps back and form the person from their absence. “He… I suppose he was a bit like Yuuji. Does that make you Megumi?” He leans forward on the stool, elbows on his knees, eyes glinting. The steam in the bathroom is dissipating a little, letting the air clear.

Another snort from Nanami at that, and Gojo wonders how long he’ll be turning over these expressions in his mind after this night ends, the inevitable snapping of the thread holding them like this. “Maybe so,” he agrees, dryly. “He has a similar false composure about him.”

“False?” Gojo echoes, and Nanami nods, skin against the linoleum. “It never seemed false.”

“Then those eyes don’t catch everything.” Nanami’s reply is quick and cutting, solely through its perceptiveness, tone and diction giving away nothing. “Conduct lies outside the realm of the rational, I suppose.”

“Well, I can’t have my sights on everything,” Gojo says.

“Have them on Fushiguro-kun more frequently then, hmm?” Nanami asks. “If he’s anything like me, and if Itadori-kun is anything like Haibara, there are difficult times ahead for him.” Gojo nods. Nanami’s functional eye is closed still so he’s not sure how he expects him to know he does it, but the movement seems to make its way to him regardless. “I cannot believe how long I’ve let you stay in this bathroom with me.”

“Hey,” Gojo says, shifting again on the stool, “I can only take so much of Yuuta and Inumaki-kun mooning at each other before I need a break. Don’t make me go back, Nanamin, I beg of you.”

Nanami moves then, hands scooping water over his skin where it’s drying in the air, the action of taking a bath following the idea of the same. “I suppose you can stay,” he acquiesces, eventually, his attempt to leave Gojo in suspense not unappreciated. “Maybe we’ll even come up with something worthwhile to discuss.”

//

Maybe Nanami had been knocked just a little bit looser than usual, because in the end they do find things to talk about, enough that when Gojo leaves he finds himself loathe to do so. Enough even that several days and no news later, Gojo’s mind is wandering back to that apartment, to the blood on the carpet, to the stitches in Nanami’s cheek.

“Everything okay, sensei?” Itadori’s voice is a cheerful chirp as usual, jogging over to where Gojo is eating another solitary vending machine meal from the training field where it looks like Panda is about to toss Kugisaki right over Inumaki’s head.

“It is now that my beloved student is here,” Gojo sing-songs, and Itadori smiles like it’s the greatest compliment he’s ever been given and sits next to him, looking like it’s his honor and pleasure to be allowed to. Gojo can feel his mood lifting. “What are you all working on today?”

Itadori’s shine fades, just a little, into confusion. “…what you told us to this morning,” he explains, as if that should mean anything to Gojo. He shakes his head. “If you’re testing me, it won’t work!”

“Ah, you’re too wise for me.” He swallows another oily clump of roe, woefully, thoughts still half on Nanami and remembering their conversation. “Yuuji,” Gojo begins, then stops and resettles himself, “Yuuji, what would you say the most important thing you learned from Nanami is?”

Itadori’s face falls so completely it’s as though Gojo had asked him to cut off all of Kugisaki’s perfectly kept fingernails in front of him. “Only one thing?” he asks, bewildered, and Gojo nods. “But he’s teaching me so much!”

“Not right now he’s not!” Gojo sing-songs, wondering how it had ever gotten so fucking easy for this kid to get his guard down. “So come on, pick one.”

“Why do you even want to know?” Itadori asks, frowning. “Do you… don’t you trust me? I’m learning, I promise!”

“Then prove it!” The rice is dry today, but Gojo forces it down. If Nanami was here he’d be begging him for just one bite of his delicious-smelling lunch, a bite Gojo would never get but would salivate over which would be nearly as satisfying. 

“You miss him?” Itadori asks the question innocently, but it almost chokes Gojo on that starchy swallow. “Is that why you’re asking?”

Gojo waves his chopsticks dismissively. “Ridiculous,” he says. “It’s so much more fun without him. I just want to make sure he’s actually helping you! Can’t expect much from someone who doesn’t respect me.”

Itadori doesn’t look especially convinced of the candy floss tale Gojo is spinning, but he does think for a minute, kicking one leg where it dangles a little off the bench. “I don’t know,” he says after not enough time to consider the question, really, but Gojo isn’t entirely sure he wants an answer anyway. “Maybe… maybe about all the different ways you can care about people.”

This isn’t even remotely what Gojo had expected, which is enough to stop the progression of his lunch altogether. In his mind he’d envisioned flowery descriptions of Nanami’s technique, the exuberance of youth reverencing the material reality of simply being older, maybe even something as considered as Nanami’s eternal, unshakeable poise. “Oh?” he asks, and Itadori nods. 

“Yeah. Like, when I first met Nanamin, I kind of felt like there was one type of way to show someone you wanted to help them — big and loud, you know? Like me.” He grins, a little sheepishly. “It made me think at first that Fushiguro didn’t like me when we met. I didn’t know why he saved me since he never was like that. Kugisaki I got right away.” He doesn’t need to explain this to Gojo, since those two had been thick as thieves in their own incomprehensible way since the day they’d met in the crowd of downtown, but some soft little corner of him likes hearing it anyway. “But then, Nanamin would never praise me, never lecture me, but he was always helping me, right from the start. Teaching me things, saving me in that fight near the cinema. It made me understand that it wasn’t that Fushiguro didn’t like me, or was… resenting me or anything. We’re just different.” He ducks his head suddenly, cognizant of how much he’s said. “That probably sounds dumb.”

“Only a little,” Gojo teases him, but Itadori doesn’t even realize as he flushes up to his ears and bolts the hell off the bench that he’s given him access to something he didn’t even know he was missing. 

“His precision,” Maki answers the same question later when she happens into him outside the classroom later in the day. 

“Mustard leaf. Bonito flakes.” Little shit, right as usual. 

Panda crosses his arms. “He’s strong. I guess.”

Kugisaki puts a hand thoughtfully to her chin. “Probably his style,” she says after a surprisingly long time considering it. “If he can do what he does looking like that then I can do the same.”

“Definitely what an actual adult should be like.” Fushiguro gets a cuff on the ear for that one, along with no hint whatsoever about how often, how deeply and consistently Itadori’s thoughts turn to him. What’s life without a little fun, Gojo reasons.

On that train of thought, he decides he has to see a fight.

//

Gojo is not an easy man to make inconspicuous. Even with his eyes covered, his slightly less attention-grabbing sunglasses taking the place of the blindfold for once, even with his starlight hair pushed back off his forehead and covered with a hood, he’s still the tallest man in most crowds. This is no exception, and it’s not that he’s so used to hiding himself or so unrecognizable to the jujutsu crowd, more accustomed to giving into his ego, but the bouncer doesn’t seem especially interested in him when he makes himself known as an audience member, focusing his skills for a change on hiding his cursed energy signature rather than warning anyone around him who is on the scene. 

He doesn’t mill in the crowd, per se, but doesn’t set himself apart to draw attention either. He knows Hakari would recognize him, tries to keep an eye out for him without looking like he is. The room, if it could be called that, is large — the hollowed out corpse of a parking garage, the lower level where the brawl happens, the upper level around a hole created from someone’s technique the spectator space, like bleachers in some perverse gym. It smells like liquor and cigarettes. Gojo wonders about Nanami’s lungs, hoping smoke rises instead of sinking. A voice blares in the background of everything he observes, amplified by some type of sound system, announcing the ticket for the night once again. Gojo appears to have shown up, along with several other people, mid-bill. He hears enough to know Nanami is last, which is indeed a sign that he was not amiss in his assessment of garnering attention, and settles in to attempting to look engaged with what separates them. 

There are one or two highlights. He thinks one of the fighters might be an Inumaki offshoot, when her tongue flashes out in concentration as a blurred black and pink. There’s someone who reminds him of Kugisaki, brown hair and brash and no obvious family connection. But overall it’s a strange sort of anticipation that feels edged equally with appeal and disquiet. Gojo doesn’t really care to examine it further, but without conscious effort it occurs to him that he may not actually want to see Nanami acquiring the wounds he’d seen the aftermath of previously. On the other hand, though, his previous declaration of disinterest in witnessing his opponent is becoming more and more patently false. Nanami is strong, Gojo thinks. It never crosses his mind that he could lose. 

And he doesn’t. 

Nanami is announced, under his real name which just reminds Gojo once again of how long he had been away from sorcery, away from Gojo’s life, and he appears to have interested parties in the crowd because the cheering increases. Gojo watches him emerge from beneath the outcropping of the second level where he stands, finally indulging in a stretch to his full height to be among the first to see his blond hair, his bruised face, his shoulders flexing under a sleeveless top that has Gojo feeling something uncomfortably not-new burning through him. Nanami doesn’t bother looking up at the crowd for a moment, and something about how practiced it feels is routine, like he never does, but then something changes just for a moment in his face, either visible from this high up or — and Gojo thinks this is more likely — that he is just in tune enough with Nanami’s expression to recognize it without really seeing it. 

He glances up, right into Gojo’s shaded eyes. It’s just for a moment, probably just the skill of a grade one sorcerer picking up easily on what these other weaklings can’t sense right under their noses, but Gojo doesn’t even have time to grin at him, to wave, before Nanami has his eyes back on his opponent. 

It’s a hulking figure across from Nanami in the ring, not as tall but wider by enough that it’s noticeable. He’s wearing something that shines in the lights around them across his fingers, brass knuckles or some other tool of pain. Gojo grits his teeth just thinking about it, the way Nanami is the type to take half a beating while he prepares, then lay out his opponent in one long-calculated strike. He hopes he’s adapted, imagines he’s had to since a fight like that is no fun for the audience. Nanami’s opponent, whose name Gojo hasn’t deigned to listen for in the blare of the speakers, removes his hoodie, revealing a torso hairy and dotted with scars and finger-bruises. He looks less beat up than Nanami had been in the light of his LDK, but that could mean he’s less in-demand, less practiced. Nanami’s legs from the hem of his shorts look strong.  Gojo wonders if he’d had to buy or borrow them specifically for this; something about his mental picture of Nanami precludes him going to the gym in anything but his usual business wear. 

It’s a funny image. Gojo almost laughs, instead letting his mouth open soundlessly as he watches Nanami wrap his own hands, nothing but the tape between him and his opponent. His muscles flex. Gojo doesn’t know how much he’s actually seeing and how much he’s projecting.

A bell dings. There is no clear referee, just a few people standing around the ring that look competent and as though they belong there. Nanami looks as though he relaxes into his stance, the sure sign of a more than competent fighter. Gojo listens to the noise of the crowd, listens to the noise of the first blow landing — a left cross from the opponent that glances off Nanami’s forearm. It looks like a hard hit missed, sounds like the chance of cracking bone. Nanami looks beyond unfazed. Gojo might be letting a little too much of his cursed energy out to see him but he can’t stop, can’t look away. His movements are unbelievably well calculated, uninterested in a dance around his opponent in favor of a trade of blows that inevitably demonstrates his dominance. It isn’t that his opponent, sheening in sweat and cording with tense muscle, is in any way weak or incapable; it’s simply that Nanami is substantially better. 

Gojo watches with interest as Nanami lands hit after hit, a combination that looks simply unbearable. His thigh is stained dark where the brass knuckles had connected too well with the meat of him on a downward swipe, but he doesn’t limp, doesn’t favor it at all. It’s almost impressive, if Gojo didn’t know how much intensity and hard work went into keeping it that way. His neck is bruising, like a lover had been tending to it. 

The other guy does, indeed, look worse.

//

Gojo starts moving as Nanami lands his second of who knows how many blows to his opponent’s skull. He knows Nanami had seen him, knows he knows to find him after, avoids undue notice by leaving alongside several despondent patrons who had clearly, stupidly, bet against Nanami, against those clear eyes and those clean lines of muscle. Gojo touches his own arm, over his sweater, feels where he has not been so disciplined. He's sure he hasn’t been seen, disappears to Nanami’s apartment when he feels far enough from everything.

He expects to be waiting half the night, for whatever Nanami’s routine after a fight is to complete, but it’s probably an hour before he hears keys rattling, before he senses Nanami’s moments before he sees him.

Up close, he looks worse. His thigh is bloody, what looks like potentially the torn arm of a shirt bound around where the brass knuckles had sunk too deeply. His skin is purpling, sweat still gleaming in a few crevices Gojo’s eyes catch where his sunglasses are pushed up on his forehead, shoving his hair out of his face.

“Nanami,” he says, and the blond sorcerer doesn’t look even remotely surprised to find him sprawled out at his kitchen table, legs stretched out from underneath it like he’s too big to fit in there. “When they say right man for the job…”

“What the fuck were you thinking?” The words fall from his loose mouth, still red with blood and the pressure of force, and Gojo can’t help but look at it. “Showing up there… you’re only the most recognizable person in the jujutsu world. Hakari-kun asked me if I had seen you since coming back.”

Gojo sits up, straightening his back. “You saw him?”

“Yes,” Nanami replies, crossing the tiny distance to his freezer and pulling out what looks like an ice pack. He drops into the other decrepit chair at the kitchen table, window letting in electric light from outside to dip his bruises in high contrast. “I saw him. He merely said he was interested in me, wanted to know why I hadn’t gravitated toward the school.” He sighs, face half-obscured by the ice. Gojo thinks his stitched up wound could have reopened and at this point he wouldn’t even know it.

“You were—” He bites down the sing-song tone, the kind he would use to praise Itadori after a successful training session. Nothing could be farther from where he is right now. Nanami winces, shifts the pack, and Gojo’s spine snaps straight. “Eh, doesn’t matter how you were. Matters how you are! And how you are is shit!” Nanami manages a glare even with half his face obscured, but it’s more expression than usual so Gojo counts it as a win. “You have anything else around here to take care of all that? Please say yes so I don’t have to teleport Shoko here, she hates it when I do that.”

Gojo is watching him, carefully, so he sees the hesitation cross his face. He watches as Nanami runs through possibilities in his mind, the finessed calculation that makes up his technique apparent in the eye Gojo can see, in the changes in the line of his mouth, swollen and split as it is. He can see, too, when he relents, maybe the pain enough to sway him, maybe the knowledge that Gojo isn’t the type to let something go. “Fine,” Nanami says at last, and Gojo is already out of the chair, eyes sweeping the room. “I have a kit in the cabinet to the left of the sink.”

“That’s like the only cabinet you have in here, Nanamin,” Gojo protests, snagging the black bag which represents the great majority of the cupboard’s contents. “When you’re done with this I’m sending you somewhere nice.”

“Yaga might not approve of that,” Nanami offers, mildly, and it’s almost enough to cover the way he grits his teeth at the drag of the chair Gojo had just emptied across the kitchen floor so he can plant himself in front of Nanami, nudging his knee to the side to settle between his parted legs. 

“Yaga could stand something he doesn’t approve of happening,” Gojo replies, easily, unzipping the kit to reveal an unsurprisingly well-stocked first aid supply. “Nanamin,” he whines, but he doesn’t really have anything to follow it up with, just the hollow feeling at the thought of him doing this all on his own every night before now. No Shoko, even, not that she’s much solace beyond her ability. Bad personality, that one. 

“It’s fine,” Nanami assures him, and isn’t that a strange thought — the most powerful man on earth being comforted. Gojo looks up at Nanami for a moment, wondering if this is maybe the first time this has ever happened. Surely not. “I’m fine. I appreciate you wanting to help.”

“I’m gonna be the best nurse you’ve ever had, Nanamin!” Gojo chirps, rummaging for what looks like salve. It’s a sizable jar; Nanami is a sizable man. “Shirt off!”

“Shouldn’t you buy me dinner first?” Gojo’s mouth drops open, but Nanami’s shirt is in the way of his face, tugged off slowly by arms lacking the full range of motion. 

“Was that a joke?” he asks, stupidly, but by the time he can see Nanami again, folding up his bloodstained tank top with inordinate neatness he is stoic again. Gojo shakes his head, twisting off the lid of the jar. “Whatever, Nanamin, I’ll pull it out of you eventually.”

“You have a knack for that.” It’s that same unruffled tone, but when Gojo’s gaze flicks up to catch what his expression might be betraying he thinks he sees something broach the surface.

Gojo, for once, bites his tongue, instead taking a generous scoop of the gel in one hand. “This is gonna be chilly,” he warns, before smearing his palm over Nanami’s right pectoral where bruises bloom like a hothouse, again over his shoulder, up the side of his neck. Once the initial pass is complete he returns to his chest, rubbing the salve in more thoroughly. He doesn’t bother not to press on the contusions; in their profession pain is nothing new and just as often stems from an ally as an opponent. Nanami hisses all the same. 

“You’re awful,” he says, through gritted teeth, and Gojo nods. Nanami’s muscle flexes under his fingers, and he wiggles them against his skin, drumming the pads over his pectoral like it might make him laugh. It doesn’t. He moves to his shoulder next. 

“You know,” Gojo says, keeping his voice even, “maybe you should think about changing up your cursed technique. I’m not surprised you had the Black Flash record for so long after seeing you actually in a fight. Maybe you could incorporate it!” The bruising on his upper arm is larger, allows him to linger longer in the conversation. 

“Well,” replies Nanami, with the cadence of admitting something, “maybe I’ve learned a little from watching Itadori-kun. He’s a very capable fighter.”

“Ahh, of course he is! He’s my student!” Gojo grins. 

“Awful.” Nanami repeats the word firmly. “I think my arm is numb enough by now that I’ll never be able to use it properly again, by the way.”

“Fine,” Gojo whines. “Maybe I’m just liking all this contact with the unreachable Nanamin! Is that so wrong?”

Something shifts in the air as he says it, something Gojo doesn’t like whatsoever as he leans in to finish attending the marks on Nanami’s neck. There’s blood smeared there he hadn’t seen before. “Unreachable?” Nanami repeats. “Is that what you think of me?”

“Well.” Gojo hates that he can feel his exhale on the word, mildly exaggerated for effect, hit the skin of Nanami’s neck as he begins, like a bad precedent or an evil omen. He soldiers on. “I just mean you’re… reserved. It’s hard to get to you.”

“Aren’t you with me now?” asks Nanami. Their faces are awfully close together, Gojo thinks. 

“Yeah,” he agrees. “But like… I’m not with you.” At this point he’s not even sure he knows what he means. “You know when you’re sitting with Shoko, she’s talking to you, you’re telling her things, you’re connecting with her? With you it’s like…” He waves his unsalved hand airily. Some of his fingers are still pressed to Nanami’s neck. 

“Maybe so.” Nanami saves him scrambling by acquiescing the point. “It’s difficult to want to volunteer anything about myself when you’re so—”

Gojo lets his eyes flick up again, and this time he catches Nanami red-handed, biting his own lip to halt the sentence leaving his mouth, and he can’t help but grin up at him. “What?” he presses, the way his hand presses over the bruises on Nanami’s neck, pulling another hiss of air from between his teeth. “Special? Amazing?”

“Overwhelming,” he grits out, and it might be half-acerbic but it also feels meaningful, filling Gojo with the pleasure of a compliment of sorts from someone who seldom shares them. “You’re so much.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Gojo says, winking, looking fully up to meet Nanami’s eye now where he’s leaning into his space, mouth still stretched around a grin. “I’m sure you have too, Nanamin.”

“Please don’t call me that,” Nanami requests for about the fifth time, but the additional pleasantry doesn’t make Gojo feel any more likely to stop doing it.

“Maybe I’m jealous that Yuuji gets to call you a nickname and I don’t.” He tries for playful, finally moves his hand away from Nanami’s neck to wipe it on his tank top, which might actually make it dirtier but at least it’s not gummy with salve. “I’ve known you so much longer.”

“Didn’t you just say I’m unreachable?” Nanami asks, then tilts his head, considering Gojo thoughtfully. Condensation drips from the ice pack still pressed to his injured face, running down the line of his neck to the divot of his collarbone. “I’ve always felt the same about you.”

“Oh?” Gojo asks, a little faintly, unwrapping the shirtsleeve from Nanami’s leg. It’s matted with blood, so before Nanami can protest Gojo takes the bloodied shirt, still in hand, and runs it under the sink for a moment before settling back down in his seat, curving his left hand under the meat of Nanami’s thigh to hold it steady, before he can think too much about it.

“Yes,” he answers, simply, like he had been waiting for him to return to the physical space of their conversation before voicing his thoughts. “You’re the strongest — I know you won’t deny it, but it’s true too. It makes me wonder.”

Gojo hums a little, in the back of his throat. Under the blood the slice in Nanami’s thigh is less than it looks. It’s not even likely to need stitches, just a cleaning and a covering. His muscle is hot under Gojo’s palm, thick and vital and strong. His fingers twitch against it. He can feel the weight of Nanami’s gaze. “What does the great Nanamin wonder about?”

“It’s like you said,” he replies, taking the conversation far more seriously than Gojo has earned. He swipes over the cut one more time, reaching blindly — and isn't that strange? — for an antiseptic. “I wonder who is with you.”

Gojo’s fingers stutter when he smears the balm over Nanami’s broken skin. Something about him makes Gojo feels like he’s been caught, doing things he shouldn’t have been. “Well, then it’s like you said,” he says, wildly, capping the tube and peeling open a butterfly stitch, “you’re with me.”

There’s a moment of silence that’s more obscene than anything Gojo thinks he’s ever experienced before, heavy and laden like the gasp before orgasm. He has the time to apply two more stitches, pressing them into Nanami’s skin, before looking up at his face. He’s lowered the ice pack at some point and Gojo is pleasantly surprised to see his face hasn’t re-opened, the slice below his eye already starting to seal into a scar. “I wonder if I could be,” Nanami says then, and Gojo feels the words settle at the root of him, deeper than his gut, darker than his lungs. “Don’t come to any more fights, Gojo-san. It’s too risky.”

“Uh,” Gojo says, stupidly, before recovering himself and tossing Nanami a salute that’s too exaggerated to carry any actual deference, “your wish is my command.”

“I’ll see you here after, though,” he continues, and when Gojo meets his eyes clearly, no barriers between them, he feels more exposed and flayed than he has in a long time. “This was much easier than trying to do it all on my own.”

“Right.” Gojo stands from his chair, watching Nanami’s gaze follow him as the tilt of Gojo’s stomach rises to the line of his mouth, and remembers what Nanami had said before — feels like a play we’re putting on. “Later, Nanamin.”

“Oh, for the love of—” Gojo doesn’t catch who Nanami loves, he’s already out the door.

//

Gojo might have known, even without the kind of intuition that a lifetime of dodging curses gives you, that Nanami’s order would never come true. He’d flitted back to the school, immersing himself for once in instruction, attending to his students on their missions whether they need him or not. He buries himself so deeply in his work that he avoids having time for anything else.

“Don’t you have anything better to do?” Maki asks, bluntly, one day while they’re listening to another of his finer pointers on sparring. The field is growing dark under the dimming sky. Kugisaki is flat on her back, panting, right next to Panda who Gojo suspects had the less exhausting part of things despite being the one expending the most physical effort. Itadori is fanning her.

“Ikura,” Inumaki offers.

“You know, it hurts more coming from you,” Gojo says, pouting. “Don’t you want to hear your sensei’s words of wisdom?”

“Maybe,” Fushiguro offers, begrudgingly, from his spot across from Maki, “but not for this long.”

“Don’t you usually have someplace to be by now?” Kugisaki asks. She’s breathing probably harder than necessary.

“I am the greatest teacher of all time!” Gojo assures them. “I would give all my time to my beloved students if I could.”

Panda and Inumaki snort simultaneously. 

“Fine!” Gojo throws his hands into the air. “You leave me no choice but retaliation. I’m going to the infirmary, if I don’t see another adult right now I’m going to lose it on all of you.”

From behind his back, the question comes quietly: “W-what’s the retaliation?” Gojo can practically hear Fushiguro’s eyes roll. “What?” Itadori snaps. “I just want to know!”

“Nobara is in charge of dinner tonight.” Chaos erupts behind him, groans from Itadori and Fushiguro, what sounds like the start of a lecture from Kugisaki about how her cooking isn’t that bad, the audible expression of Maki’s resignation. It’s music to his ears.

By the time Gojo is nearing the infirmary, the tension he’s been avoiding all day — all week, if he’s honest — is creeping back into his frame, spine held rigid, hands in his pockets to keep them from twitching with that strange energy. Bothering Shoko helps to take the edge off, a little, so his opening salvo is already halfway out of his mouth when he pushes open the door.

Strange, that. It’s rarely closed. But he’s already there before it occurs to him that it’s unusual.

“Shoko-san, you’d better have something interesting to—”

Two heads turn his way, and he’ll be ashamed of it later but Gojo barely even registers that Shoko is there. Nanami looks haggard, body spotted with the remnants of Shoko’s work over what looks like the beating of a lifetime.

“Nanami,” he says, almost whispers, not bothering with the nickname. “Hakari?”

“He’ll help us.” Nanami’s voice is reassuring. Gojo isn’t sure if it’s an emotion he’s actually trying to project with his words or whether it’s just the sheer relief of seeing him, hearing him. He hadn’t been worried, Gojo reminds himself. “He won’t come back to the school, which is understandable given the circumstances, but he will be our ally when things rise to the surface with the special-grades again.”

For a moment Gojo can’t look away from him, his blindfold less than a barrier between the realities of them. Shoko makes some sound he doesn’t bother to decipher and returns to applying her reverse technique to Nanami’s body, fixing where it’s broken.

“I’m fine, Gojo-san,” Nanami says then, and Gojo knows he doesn’t imagine the gentleness, the compassion in his tone. “Maybe you’d like to come see for yourself?”

“Not in my infirmary.” Shoko’s voice is clear. Nanami laughs, he actually laughs, and Gojo might trip over his feet stepping forward toward them, stopping just short of Nanami, letting him be the one to reach out his hand and wrap his strong fingers around Gojo’s wrist. Nanami’s pulse thrums in the pad of his thumb, right against Gojo’s radius. “You know,” Shoko continues, “this is substantially worse than what I was picturing. When I said not to flirt, Gojo, I didn’t think I actually needed to mean it.”

“Shut up,” Gojo snaps, and Shoko huffs, but not as much as she huffs when he adds, “All these years I’ve had to watch you and Utahime dancing around each other? Let it go. Imagine if my old student had killed Nanamin and the only other adult left at this godforsaken school had been you.” He glosses over the idea of Nanami dying like swallowing tar, licking the residue off his teeth.

“You are the rudest person on earth,” Shoko proclaims like it’s fact. It might as well be. “Also, you ignore Yaga and Kusakabe every time you talk about who works here. It’s disrespectful.”

“Gojo-san hasn’t been flirting,” Nanami adds, and Gojo looks up at him, a little aghast. Has he been? Hasn’t he been? But Nanami’s face is placid as Mt. Fuji in the distance, looking at Shoko now since he’s addressing her. He still has Gojo’s wrist in his hand, warm maybe with the cells in his body fighting off potential infection.

“How did you do it?” Gojo asks, to change the topic, to grab a lifeline. “What made Hakari come around?”

“Well, it wasn’t my charming personality,” Nanami replies, and Gojo chokes out a laugh. “The last time we saw each other, I believe I told you I had already gotten some attention from him. I am, as you put it, a competent fighter.”

Gojo senses rather than sees the look Shoko gives Nanami, because he can’t bring himself to tear his eyes away from the man himself, his face, his hair, the body that is his and is alive and, largely, whole. “You’re underselling it,” she says reproachfully. “To come out looking like this after a brawl with Hakari is impressive. To come out alive at all—”

“You fought him?” Gojo is not breathless with the question.

“Rude,” Shoko repeats, cuffing the back of his snow white head.

“I was lucky to survive, I think,” Nanami continues, politely addressing Shoko’s incomplete point first. “But yes, we did fight eventually. I suppose it is the logical conclusion of my time spent in a fighting circuit to get a bookie’s attention.” He makes it sound like the most tedious job in the world. Gojo hangs on his every word. “He let it circulate that he wanted to meet me, so I started spending more time around the ring. Eventually we did meet. He gave me a run for my money, so to speak.”

“But you won,” Gojo interjects, and Nanami and Shoko both shake their heads at him. Why was he glad to have Nanami back, again? All it meant was one less ally, one more team of people to shut him down and counter him on all his great ideas. Then Nanami’s fingers flex against his skin and all that fades again.

“I merely didn’t lose,” Nanami explains. “He is quite powerful. I suspect it was fairly lucky I presented my request in a way that wasn’t immediately unappealing.”

“Who knew you were so persuasive?” asks Gojo, chuckling.

“I wasn’t asking for much.” Nanami squeezes around Gojo’s wrist, just one time, unfathomably gently, and then lets go to turn whichever way Shoko is directing him. “My impression from speaking to him is that Hakari-kun feels bitter toward the higher ups more than toward you.”

“But he is bitter toward me, just a little.”

“Who wouldn’t be?” Shoko asks.

“A little,” confirms Nanami, then winces as Shoko tugs an arm behind his back to stretch it out, or right it in its socket. “But you weren’t the one to go see him. So all is well.”

“I mean, you still look like garbage,” Gojo counters. The corners of Nanami’s mouth twitch and he feels so empty being separated from him, it’s almost frightening. But Nanami is strong, one of the strongest, the most resilient, and feeling this connected to him isn’t as bad as it’s been before, with Suguru, with a dozen people since who could never come anywhere near understanding Gojo and his life and his obligations.

“I hate to agree with this guy, but he’s right.” Shoko acknowledges the condition of Nanami’s body with her usual optimistic practicality, dropping the arm she’d been pushing on. “Go home. Get some rest.” She rounds on Gojo then, accusing finger in his face. “Don’t bother him.”

“I would never,” he assures her, to a look of such utter disbelief that it makes him laugh, inherently. “I’m the most motivated to keep Nanamin strong and healthy — he’s the only other adult at this school who wants to spend time with me!”
“I certainly can’t claim to be in that category,” Shoko agrees, and Gojo’s sure he catches the flash of a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her coat before she’s disappearing through the doors of the infirmary, clearly done for the night, bags under her eyes highlighted in the developing moonlight.

“Do you?” Gojo asks, shooting for casual, turning to Nanami, shockingly close still.

“Do I?”

“Want to spend time with me.” Gojo’s done this, too easily, a hundred times, his height and his looks and his charm effortlessly performing the work for him, but with Nanami it’s like there are switches being flipped to the off position more often than not. Still, he tries, can’t imagine letting Nanami go home on his own on this particular evening, not so soon after the brush with death he’d had against Patch Face.

Nanami watches him, thoughtfully, and just once Gojo wishes he’d give in to him, but it doesn’t seem likely for a moment. But as usual, or as usual with Nanami, Gojo is surprised. “Don’t get your hopes up,” he says. “I’m tired, and I still have to make up my report for Yaga. Shoko let me know that he’s already looking for me.”

“Fine, fine.” Gojo waves his hand, almost close enough to brush Nanami’s shoulder, still tantalizingly distant, the infinity between them. “I’ll even come to your place. You should thank me.”

“We’ll see,” Nanami says, evenly.

//

Gojo realizes he’s making something of a habit of waiting alone in Nanami’s apartment when he’s sitting at his kitchen table with a bag full of udon slowly cooling. He’s not opposed to it, he thinks, the anticipation, the thought of him stepping through the door and seeing the strongest sorcerer in the world making himself at home waiting for a person that knows him about as well as anyone else left alive.

He doesn’t really know when that started, really. He doesn’t know how it survived the aftermath of Suguru leaving, the lashing out and shutting down that Gojo put everyone around him through. But Nanami was realistic with him, never let it get to him, never took it personally because he knew. The kind of man who understands people’s pain, Gojo had said in Hokkaido, and he meant it. When Nanami had left then, after his own graduation, it had stung in an entirely different way, like something had happened that simply could not be possible. It had been a clean break, no thanks to Gojo’s wheedling texts that had gone ignored for years before an impossible phone call had come his way, to the number he’d kept all that time, from a man he’d started to think of as another ghost in the rear view mirror. 

“You look like you have something on your mind.” 

It isn’t that Gojo hadn’t noticed Nanami coming in, hadn’t felt his specific frequency of cursed energy before he’d even been able to see him, but he had been surprisingly deep in thought. He grins to cover it. “Always,” he says, gesturing toward the bag. “I brought you dinner.”

Nanami eyes the bag. His shoulders are slumping under his jacket, rumpled with the events of the day. “You consider me a fairly cheap date,” he says then, raising an eyebrow at Gojo.

“This is definitely not a date,” Gojo insists, tongue a little thick in his mouth. “I would have put in so much more effort.”

Nanami chuckles, which feels like a win, lets the moment slide, makes to sit across from Gojo but he puts up a finger. 

“You are not eating in that suit,” Gojo says, gesturing down toward where the man is standing in his own kitchen wearing a fucking belt. “I’m uncomfortable just looking at you. Change into whatever the Oh So Uptight Nanamin wears when he wants to relax.”

Nanami gives him a look, that might be irritation over the demand or the nickname, but he disappears for a moment and reappears in a t-shirt tight enough to have Gojo’s mouth watering and a pair of joggers he has a hard time picturing him buying. “May I sit now, at my own table, your majesty?” Nanami asks, deadpan as anything, and Gojo nods, gesturing him dramatically into the seat. The udon is still warm as he passes it out to both of them. “You know, for all your attire requirements you don’t look any different than usual.”

“Well, I didn’t want to be rude and show up looking sloppy.” Gojo slurps a mouthful of noodles maybe a bit louder than he needs to, but Nanami doesn’t give him the satisfaction of looking up at him. “Plus, when I really want to relax I’m not wearing anything socially acceptable.”

“Disgusting,” Nanami offers, but it’s without heat. “I take it back then.”

“Rude.” Nanami doesn’t reply. Gojo chances a glance up at him from over his bowl, peering through his blindfold. He looks tired, face tense with leftover pain, and suddenly Gojo doesn’t really feel like bothering him anymore — which, he realizes, doesn’t translate into leaving. “Nanamin,” he blurts, and that does get him to look up, “you realize you’ve done me a colossal favor. Probably the entire jujutsu world, depending on what’s going on with these special grades.”

Nanami holds his gaze then, for a moment. “This is what I came back for,” he says then, seriously. “To do what only I can do. Not even the great Gojo Satoru could have gotten Hakari-kun back.”

Gojo grins at him, shocked to see he’s getting the tiniest hint of a grin in return. Maybe the exhaustion is to his advantage if he can see more prismatically the sides of Nanami hidden from most of the world. “You’re right about that,” he says. “Don’t get cocky.”

“I’ll leave that to you.” Nanami sets his chopsticks neatly along the edge of the empty container in front of him, leans back in his chair and tips his head backward over it, stretching his throat out under the light in his kitchen. “You are the best man for the job.”

No argument there. “Tired, Nanamin?” Gojo asks instead.

“I told you I was.”

“Would you like me to let you be?” There are a few things Gojo doesn’t like whatsoever about this sentence leaving his mouth: the fact that it’s a question, open to Nanami letting him in, the way his voice doesn’t sound as cocksure as he’d like. But it’s out, and it sits between them.

“I should say yes,” he says, slowly, and Gojo feels his spine straightening in the chair. “But I don’t think I will.” It’s only now that Nanami raises his head, leaning forward over the table and using two fingers to hook into Gojo’s blindfold at his temple, tugging it up into his hair to force eye contact between them. “Stay the night.”

//

It turns out Nanami had asked him to stay the night because even beaten to the point of exhaustion he had enough energy to fuck the absolute life out of Gojo, folding him in on himself, collapsing him into his bed and unconsciousness until he came to in the light of dawn. Thankfully the second round before he returned to the school had been marginally calmer, leaving him limping just a little into the classroom.

“Did you hurt yourself, sensei?” Itadori asks almost as soon as he makes his way through the door, bright with concern. Kugisaki elbows him. Fushiguro is staring out the window. 

Part of him doesn’t mind the ache, the burn between his thighs. What had happened between him and Nanami hadn’t been intimate, hadn’t been some deep moment of connection or realization, but it had felt a little like cresting a wave, like everything in Gojo’s head for these past months, the past years, really, since Nanami had come back, finally rearranged itself into something he could make sense of. He desires Nanami, simple as that, and it’s logical; since Suguru, it had been nothing but short-term partners who by nature couldn’t remain in his orbit. Gojo’s life is one inherently lacking intimacy of any kind beyond the superficial connections he allows to form with his students, so it makes sense that a grade one sorcerer returning to his life and returning his attraction would shut the voice inside him up wondering when things would change.

Still, it’s hard to teach with the memory of it stirring in his mind with every grating brush of fabric on skin. He remembers Nanami, rough and bruised and scarred in the light of the moon through his bedroom window, sinking into Gojo like an exorcism to drive everything else out, the lines of his muscle and the sound of his voice as he came. Gojo had come essentially untouched the first time. It’s a little embarrassing, a lot hot. 

His lunch today is looking to be lonely, a protein shake he’d found that morning in the back of the fridge in the dorm kitchen that probably belonged at one forgotten point to Itadori, but only a couple of minutes after he’s settled on his usual bench he hears steps behind him. 

“Aren’t you disgusting?” Shoko asks through lips clenched around a cigarette. She settles herself next to him, not bothering to look up as he grins at her. “Make it more obvious that you’re fucking, why don’t you.”

“Hey!” Gojo says, a little indignant, but his eyes behind the blindfold still roam the grounds as though Nanami might rise up out of them. “We’re not fucking. Or at least we weren’t. I guess now we are. Fucking, I mean.”

He doesn’t have to look at her to see the disbelieving look on her face, smoke puffing from her mouth in surprise. “You’re stupider than you look if you think I believe that,” she says. “And you look pretty fucking stupid.”

“Mean,” he pouts, but he knows there’s nothing too bad behind it. He and Shoko are like this, always have been, worse since Geto offset the balance of their trio. “I’m serious, though. All-knowing Shoko can be wrong sometimes!”

“But,” she protests, unusually committed to it, “all that flirting… the way you looked when you saw him in the infirmary…” Gojo doesn’t like the way the tone of her voice is changing, wandering from fog to something unsettlingly like realization. “Gojo,” she says then, and he does turn to look at her now, her expression caught between stricken and amused. “Are you—”

“Thinking fondly on how big Nanamin’s dick was?” Gojo cuts her off with the introduction of a topic he knows she’ll be uninterested in. “Yes, ma’am!”

She considers him for a second, taking a long drag, but in the end she generously allows the subject to change. “Like I said,” she reaffirms, “disgusting.”

“A little,” Gojo agrees, “but I kinda like it that way. You?”

“I’m not having this conversation,” she snaps, firmly. “You have no shame, you know? What if your students hear you? What if Itadori-kun finds out you’re stupidly having sex with his beloved Nanamin?”

Gojo laughs at the nickname in her no-nonsense mouth. “I’m his beloved sensei!” It’s an easy counter argument; not even Shoko can deny the way the kid’s face lights up any time he sees him in the halls or on the training field, even after that unfortunate scheme keeping him artificially dead. “He’d probably start imagining us as one big family.”

Shoko gives him another look, piercing the way no technique can be. “He might,” she agrees, slowly. “Be careful, Gojo. Don’t let your innate stupidity ruin this for you, or for Nanami-kun.”

“Don’t call him that,” Gojo mutters, brushing away the rest of her point. “You make me feel bad dropping the honorifics.”

“You have never once in your terrible life felt bad for anything,” Shoko replies, and he laughs, and the conversation moves on but sticks behind his sternum in a way he can’t let go of, even as Kugisaki and Fushiguro, reluctantly, interrupt them to settle an argument they’re having, but Shoko and Gojo just take opposite sides and make everything a thousand times worse. 

He doesn’t see Nanami at all that day. When Gojo wheedles it out of Yaga, the way he’s practiced to make it seem like he’s not really letting anything out at all, he learns Nanami is away on a mission in Sendai. So soon after the unofficial work of getting Hakari back on their side it stings a little. Gojo can imagine Nanami let nothing on when Yaga sent him back out. 

“Sendai?” he asks instead, chuckling. “What a country bumpkin you’ll turn him into.”

Yaga is impersonal and impatient as usual, making what Gojo is sure is an excuse that he has dinner tonight with Panda before leaving Gojo alone in the principal’s office. He resists the somehow ever-present childish urge to take advantage of his being unattended by rifling through Yaga’s things, and instead avails himself of his own dinner with his own students. Maki and Inumaki join them, enthusiastically as it’s Itadori’s turn to cook this time, and Gojo wonders, idly over the constant hum of his mind’s current occupation, why Kusakabe never seems to be around at times like these, then why he’s never seemed to care as much about the whereabouts of his fellow teacher as of the sorcerer turned salaryman turned back like the frog from the story to a prince that he can’t stop thinking about. 

Itadori puts far too much chili in the curry. It all works out in the end.

He manages four days before he texts Nanami.

//

Texts turn into a phone call throughout the day as their schedules clear, Nanami chasing down and exorcising the first grade that felt more like a semi-special, Gojo finally convincing Itadori into his first Black Flash since the goodwill event. It feels like a feather in his cap, and he’s already preening when Nanami’s contact photo (a candid of him smiling at something Shoko was saying at the bar on one of their somewhat forced post-work outings, which at the time had simply felt like a rarity worth capturing and now feels like the kindling of a flame in Gojo’s lungs) flashes across the screen. 

“Miss me already, Nanamin?” he crows, flopping back into the chair which represents the other major piece of furniture in his room at the school. His wardrobe barely counts. “So needy.”

“I don’t really like having a conversation over text,” he explains, and Gojo might be imagining the patience in his voice where exasperation is missing. “And you seemed insistent on continuing.”

There’s the barely-suppressed irritation. Gojo wonders, adjusting himself a little, if this is the strangest thing he’s ever been attracted to, then remembers how things used to be and figures this is actually moving more toward understandable. Plenty of people have voice kinks, he thinks. Not so many want to fuck a guy who’s more curse than man. But Gojo had. Gojo had licked into that man’s mouth until the taste of sickness was gone, until Gojo was all that was left. Gojo doesn’t know, now, what the inside of Nanami’s mouth tastes like — maybe nothing. Maybe bitter disappointment.

“Maybe I was wrong,” Nanami says then, and Gojo’s spine twitches.

“Nah. What else am I going to do this late but talk to my friend Nanami?”

Are they even friends at this point? Gojo supposes by necessity, or by the process of elimination of other things they could be. It’s dark outside his window, clouds obscuring even the moon.

“Fine.” He doesn’t even sound put-upon. Gojo wonders how quickly he’s losing his touch. “What would you like to talk about?”

“Your day had to be more interesting than mine,” Gojo says, and he actually believes it, Black Flash and all. “Tell me about that.”

There’s a pause. “You… want to talk about my day,” Nanami echoes, like he doesn’t believe it. “Not what I expected.” Before Gojo can ask, he starts explaining, the qualities of the curse he’d fought at a burned-out hospital where kids had been sneaking around after school and getting hurt. How it hadn’t been intelligent like the ones they’ve been working against in the group of special grades, but had been profoundly durable. Gojo palms himself, idly, through his pants, listening.

“It may have been a good thing, in the end, that you sent me to deal with Hakari-kun,” Nanami is saying, and Gojo is at least fifty percent focused on squeezing his dick at the sound of Nanami just saying the word good before he zones fully back in on what he’s talking about. “It ended up being quite a brawl.”

“Yeah?” Fuck he sounds like he’s jerking off. Gojo hopes Nanami doesn’t mind — or maybe he hopes he does. Jury is still out on which reaction would be better. “Are you sitting in Sendai all beat up, Nanamin?”

“Don’t use that nickname while your cock is in your hand,” Nanami snaps, and apparently that was the right response because the cock mostly in Gojo’s hand jumps like a dog on a leash. “If you cannot call me by my last name like a normal person… you could call me Kento.”

This feels like a brick of gold slipped into Gojo’s fingers, one he’s not sure he’s responsible enough or deserving enough to accept, but something in him can’t help it. “You caught me, Kento,” he says, drawing the name out into that same stupid sing-song as Itadori’s diminutive. “Can’t help it!”

“I’m certain you could,” Nanami replies. “There’s no one else in Tokyo who could handle Gojo Satoru?”

“You know that’s true,” Gojo says. He’s pretty close to done with playing around, fingers moving to unbutton his uniform for better access to his own skin. “I’m still pretty impressed by how well you did it.”

Nanami makes a strange, muffled noise over the line that’s quiet enough to be mistaken for static, or a bad connection. Gojo hopes it isn’t, hopes there’s something about him that draws Nanami in the same way he finds himself gravitating towards Nanami. “I’ve known you a long time,” is all he says, but Gojo thinks he can hear a strain in his voice. 

“Long day fighting curses?” Gojo asks, layering his voice sweet and thick like honey. “Where are you hurt?”

“Not hurt,” Nanami replies, breathing a little easier, which won’t do at all. “Just bruised.”

“Anywhere interesting?” Gojo strokes himself idly, lazy, languorous. It’s unprecedented luxury, even with Nanami who had not been especially concerned with taking his time during their previous encounter. “Anywhere you want to push down on?”

A moment of nothing but half-heard background noises, then Nanami gasps into the phone. It’s incredibly hot; Gojo can hear him biting his own lip, an ineffective means of controlling the sound. “My… thigh,” he explains then, and Gojo tightens his grip on himself. “The curse head butted me there. It was painful.”

“Mmm, poor baby.”

“Don’t baby me.”

“I’ll do whatever I like to you.” 

Nanami curses at that, low and hot through those same gritted teeth. “You talk a big game,” he mutters, “for someone who was begging me to fuck you.”

“If I like to beg, then I’ll beg,” Gojo answers, not bothering to hide the arousal wrapped around his voice, flicking the tip of his own dick to catch the precome beading there to lubricate the downstroke.

“I’d tell you not to get cocky but I know that’s impossible for you.”

“Ooh, don’t say cock in that voice, Nanami, I’ll come too soon.”

“You’re irritating. Put your mouth to better use or keep it shut.”

A spark of arousal sizzles down Gojo’s spine at that. Nanami is beyond bossy, beyond demanding; those are words to describe mere mortals, and Nanami is a sorcerer. Something about him makes Gojo want to serve. “There’s definitely something better I wish I was doing with my mouth right now, Nanami,” he sighs, and there’s another controlled inhale over the line. Gojo is getting better at picking them out from the background noise as the cadence of Nanami’s voice. “I’m sure you can’t guess what it is.”

“How is it,” Nanami says through teeth that sound gritted, “that even like this you are so profoundly—”

Gojo moans, too loudly probably, but Nanami shuts right the fuck up on whatever rude thing he was about to say. “I’ll give you a hint, thick-headed one,” he continues, just to really get on Nanami’s nerves, to really wind his emotions into a twist he can’t untangle the way he feels himself, but he doesn’t get there.

“You think I need a fucking hint that you want to be sucking my cock?” Gojo’s hand stutters over his dick, hard, like the earth is moving under him and he has to move with it. “When I get back to Tokyo I’ll make you ask for it.”

“I’m sure you will,” Gojo agrees, quickening his pace, heat building in the pit of his stomach. “You’re so mean to me, Nanami, you never just give me what I want.”

“You’ve had enough of that already,” says Nanami, voice gruff, less controlled. “Besides, I don’t think that’s actually what you want at all. Always getting exactly what you want… it’s exhausting.”

Gojo exhales, long and loud enough he knows he’ll be heard. “What I want, Nanami, is to come. Your turn to put your mouth to better use than giving me a lecture.”

“I could hang up.” Nanami’s tone is closer to that infuriating impassivity again, like he was fearfully and wonderfully made for Gojo, the man who could count on nothing more than a reaction. He stammers over a curse but Nanami continues. “It would be easy, you know, to leave you to finish in silence, the sound of your own head. You wouldn’t like that at all, would you?”

“Fuck — Nanami, no.”

“Suffer,” Nanami commands, and there’s the distinct triplicate beep of disconnection but it’s too late, Gojo is biting down on his own lip and shooting onto his own stomach, where his jacket and shirt are hastily lifted in the hand shuffled from holding the phone.

It’s not the hardest he’s come, because that might have been days ago in Nanami’s bed, but it’s enough to overwhelm even the Six Eyes for a moment, whiting him out, wringing him dry. When he returns to himself fully, it’s with the realization that he is completely and totally fucked. He picks up his phone again.

come on that bruise. right on your thigh.

He doesn’t get a response before he’s cleaned up and called away by the noise of what sounds like a developing Smash Brothers tournament in the common room down the hall, Kugisaki kicking ass as usual, but when he returns in the early hours of the morning after a striking number of losses it’s to a reply from Nanami, just an image, glazed contusions in the soft glow of hotel room lighting.

//

It’s not exactly that it turns into routine between them, these harsh, inevitable moments of connection, always in the dark, never face to face. It couldn’t be routine with the way Gojo’s skin heats up everywhere Nanami touches him, with the way Nanami muffles the sounds he makes into the skin of Gojo’s shoulder instead of his own hand, with the way Gojo feels himself molding around Nanami like clay in the sun. It happens quickly, he thinks, too quickly before he realizes maybe the seeds were planted five years ago when Nanami had returned to sorcery and now they were just watering them at last, letting them grow. 

But it’s never intimate, only the thoughts in his head Gojo catches himself with sometimes: dinner together outside the necessity of happy hours with Shoko; nights not split down the middle on either side of the bed, tethered to be pulled down from his pedestal; a kiss, just one, the thought alone enough to make his knees shamefully weak in a way no enemy, no fight ever could. 

It doesn’t quite materialize, but it also doesn’t become routine. Sometimes he catches Nanami looking at him, idly, thoughtfully, during group mission recaps or dinners with the first years that Nanami is charmingly powerless to resist when Itadori invites him. Sometimes Gojo finds himself letting his hand linger on Nanami’s shoulder, unrebuffed, while they explain some tool technique to Maki in that way they’ve always had since Nanami returned, two sides of an entire coin. Sometimes Nanami tangles his fingers in Gojo’s hair from behind him, tugging him up to press Gojo’s back against his chest and reach between his legs to touch him with something almost like kindness. But Gojo has always known Nanami is kind, compassionate, so he tries not to let it get to his head. The only thing he can picture stinging worse than the amber-preserved distance between them is the snapping of the thread maintaining that distance, so far be it from him to push Nanami away, or pull him too close. Let him come in his own time, if that time ever comes. 

It’s Kugisaki, which is not entirely surprising, who comes the closest to mentioning it to him, one warm day before the leaves start falling in earnest, while she takes a breather next to him in the grass on the side lines of the training field. She’s in a surprisingly good mood considering how hard he’s been pushing them this morning, probably still basking in the glow of watching Fushiguro kick the shit out of Itadori when he doesn’t bother to turn his brain on during a spar.

“So,” she says, after a few blissful moments of nothing but Itadori’s frustrated noises, “you seem stretched lately, sensei.”

To emphasize her point, or tease her, Gojo lifts his arms over his head, lacing his own fingers and leaning first to one side, then the other. “Gotta stay limber in this line of work, Nobara-kun,” he agrees, and she frowns. 

“You know that’s not what I meant,” she mutters. “You’re just being irritating on purpose.”

“Well, it’s a busy job teaching such rambunctious students.” He grins at her as, punctuating his statement, Fushiguro thwacks Itadori’s head with his bo staff. 

Kugisaki lets him think her attention turns their way, toward Itadori wincing and rubbing a hand over what will surely be a goose egg later, Fushiguro’s expression torn between concern and exasperation, lecturing Itadori about paying more attention during a fight. 

“I do pay attention!” snaps Itadori, loud enough for them to hear.

“To something,” Gojo mutters, winking at Kugisaki, and he knows she sees him in her peripheral vision, or hears him at least, because the corner of her mouth quirks for a moment.

When she turns back to him, though, it’s with a more thoughtful expression. “Fushiguro seems stretched too, since Itadori came back,” she says. “He worries too much.”

“He does,” Gojo agrees, and that’s easy enough. Good thing he only has himself to worry about, he thinks. 

Unrelatedly, a few minutes later when it’s Itadori’s turn to rotate out, Gojo pulls the kid in for a sweaty selfie that he sends to Nanami, hyperaware of the phone in his pocket until he feels the buzz of his reaction. Life goes on. 

//

The morning of October 31st feels essentially like any other one. Gojo doesn’t limp into the classroom this time, he’s getting better at taking what Nanami gives him and this time he hadn’t stayed the night to let the ache renew into the morning anyway. Itadori and Kugisaki are each their own levels of cheerful, Fushiguro looks disinterested but pays more attention than the two of them put together, Kusakabe’s voice floats up through the lone open window from the training field with the second years. It’s business as usual, until it isn’t.

Ijichi interrupts the evening staff meeting, Shoko and Yaga turning to look at him, Gojo and Kusakabe not bothering to pause their argument on teaching methodology until Ijichi speaks and his voice is all wrong. 

“Something is happening in Shibuya,” he says, stammering over the words. “There are curtains over the station, we don’t know exactly what kind. They’re…” He pauses, glances at Gojo quickly enough that he knows Ijichi is hoping he doesn’t notice, and because he’s not feeling especially generous he grins in response just to see Ijichi’s face flush. “They’re asking for Gojo Satoru.”

“Who is?” asks Yaga. He’s already out of his seat, ever professional. “Gojo, gather the students.”

“After I find out who’s looking for me,” Gojo agrees. Shoko is watching him now, thoughtfully. Kusakabe is biting the inside of his cheek, wishing for a cigarette or whatever else his oral fixation is targeting these days. He folds his arms. “So Ijichi?”

He hesitates, but not like he’s reticent. It’s like he doesn’t know how to answer the question. “It’s… hundreds of people are,” he says finally. “They’re all trapped down there, everyone who was in the station, under the curtain and asking for Gojo Satoru.”

“Interesting,” Kusakabe offers. 

“Interesting.” Shoko echoes him, seriously. 

Yaga already looks ahead of the situation, moving forward as always. “Gojo, the students. We’ll make a plan en route while we try to get more information.”

“Sir, yes sir,” Gojo offers, lazily and with a bow, mind racing around what Ijichi had just said. People, just average people, flocks of the weak asking for him by name. This cannot be good — not that he lets it on when he wrangles the first and second years out onto the lawn, not when he sends Nanami a covert text asking him to get in touch with Hakari, not when he helps divide them into teams and ostensibly stays on his own. 

Separately but simultaneously they leave for the station. 

Gojo passes easily through the first curtain, down into the station where packed strangers like sardines in a jar are chanting his name. If his life hadn’t followed the path it had, it would almost be surreal. Surveying the situation from above, it’s a little easier to see — Volcano Head and the curse with the branches for eyes are there, along with someone he doesn’t recognize, threatening the crowd implicitly by their presence.

The initial struggle lasts a few moments that feel as though they last much longer. He weighs it in his mind, the way he always does with sick guilt and forced practicality, the worth of the lives around him versus his own ability. A simple domain expansion could take care of them quicker than they could think, but the people around them… no, he couldn’t.

Even so, it’s funny how they think the three of them are any kind of threat, telling him he won’t be running away as if that had ever crossed his mind. The unfamiliar one seems barely interested.

“You’ll die first,” he tells the one with the Domain Amplification, deactivating his technique for a moment to lure them, and it works like a charm because at the heart of it curses are stupid in the truest sense of the word, blind to everything but their own goals, and he grabs those branches and tears them out at the roots, the backwards garbled screech of pain filling the station, reverberating off the walls.

Volcano Head yells something, and the unfamiliar one jumps in alongside him to attack, but they’re simple. Unfamiliar is batted off, a problem for later, and he lacks the fire that Volcano Head has for the confrontation, that the third one he’s seen so many times still has even with their eyes torn out.

He turns to them, then. “You first,” he says, pouring energy back into the reactivated Infinity, the crumbling of stone underneath its wooden and failing body almost loud enough to cover the screams of those dying in the background where Volcano Head is trying, fruitlessly, to distract him. It’s the cost of being the strongest. Gojo, satisfied that the first curse is dead, returns his attention to the other.

Now who’s running? he chuckles to himself as Volcano Head sprints deeper into the station, trying and failing to get the unfamiliar one involved beyond a cursory attempt. Three had been a piece of cake, one would surely be easier, trappings of the people swarming the station and curtains and levels and the splitting of their sorcerer team and all.

The train rolls in. Mutated humans pour out, almost distracting enough for Gojo not to notice Volcano Head talking with another cursed spirit up ahead, but not quite — the second spirit attacks, easily dodged, patchwork skin pinning him as the one who attacked Nanami and Itadori.

Big mistake showing that fucking stupid face in front of Gojo. He still remembers how Itadori’s voice had trembled, telling him about Nanami being trapped in his Domain, how close he’d come to death with that grey palm against his chest.

Bigger mistake filling the station with people the way he does, like that might push Gojo over the edge, make him snap alongside dodging the attacks from Volcano Head — easily disarmed — or Patchwork Face and the unfamiliar one, returned from upstairs. It only makes him more certain, more sure as he activates his Domain for that precise sliver of time that might give the humans in the station a chance at recovery. The mutated corpses are short work at that point, stunned, and when Gojo finishes the last one off from the train full of death he surveys his work, deciding who might be next.

There’s something on the ground, near where the cursed spirits had been speaking, something he didn’t notice which means it hadn’t been there before.

“Prison Realm. Open.”

//

The voice alone had been enough to send Gojo to his knees, weak in a way that is both new and intimately familiar, the voice he couldn’t forget, the voice that he’d snuffed out a year ago, the voice that had condemned the entirety of human society with a callousness Gojo had both envied and been unable to access.

The sound of that voice almost extinguishes the wide and staring eye of the Prison Realm, a mirror of his own reflecting his gaze back onto himself, the Six Eyes pushed down into two to keep him alert and attuned and at a distance. Almost. Like most things, the situation dawns on Gojo immediately and all at once, how completely fucked he is in the face of a plot where every piece had been thought of, how he had been separated from everyone but especially from Itadori for sinister reasons that prick at the edges of his mind, threatening to overwhelm him before the far more enormous material reality before him rushes back and blinds him.

It’s, literally, unbelievable to see him, smiling and waving and totally unrecognizable anyway, and as he might have expected if he’d ever imagined himself in this situation he flashes back to everything between them, a bloody path leading to an empty grave. But it’s mixed, he thinks, even as the object before him pins him between crossing seals — images of Shoko, the first years, the second years that had once been his first years, Utahime and Mei, Yaga. Nanami. His thoughts end on Nanami, where he is, what he’s up against, what his mouth might feel like open against Gojo’s, something he has a feeling he might never get to know now. Not that he doesn’t have faith in everyone, but nothing puts the brakes on a developing… whatever is happening between them than being sealed in a special grade cursed object. And who knows how long it will take his beloved students to figure this out?

“You’re not him,” he says, wearily, to the body of Geto in front of him, and it grins at him and unlaces the line across its forehead to reveal its gruesome pilot.

“You got me!” He shrugs, like this is all a cheeky joke he’s playing instead of the unburying of a trauma that Gojo hasn’t managed yet to will away. It stings to know they pinned their plan on this being his reaction, that it worked so predictably, so completely. The mystery of the consciousness inside Geto’s preserved body is one that is not for Gojo to solve, not when it reminds him that this is his fault for stopping Shoko from destroying his corpse when he brought it back to her that day in December. “We’ll undo the seal when everything is complete… maybe a hundred, no, a thousand years.”

Itadori, Fushiguro, Kugisaki — they’ll all be dead. Nanami… Gojo grins. “Don’t you remember who helped me take out that body, that cursed technique?” Fuck, he wishes they’d called Okkotsu, all those days ago when he and Shoko and Nanami had tried to plan ahead for something none of them could have imagined. He’d warned him anyway, a month or so ago on a business trip, that he needed to come back and take care of the students if anything happened. Okkotsu had teased him, he remembers, unusual for the kid he mainly recalled as painfully shy and sad, asking if he was planning on getting a girlfriend. How wrong he had been. “He isn’t even here for you to try to kill. Good luck dealing with him when he’s back.” And the other students, he thinks but doesn’t say. It’s not just curses that are stronger; this crop of Jujutsu High trainees is more powerful than he can remember in a long time, the continuing evolution of a gene that started with him and Geto.

The puppeteer in Geto’s body snorts. “Relying on a kid whose power comes from cursing someone else. Typical, Satoru.” That stings, badly, the first name in a mouth that has lost all deserving of it. Again, Gojo grins over it. “In any case, I think this is good night.”

He scoffs, all disbelief and disrespect and fear, fear, fear deep under everything, why had he come by himself, why had he left the others to whatever the hell is going on above them, where the fuck are they. “For me, maybe,” he agrees. “For you it’s more like good morning. Time to wake the fuck up.”

It should be more amazing than it is, really, but in the lake of despondence where Gojo is treading water it barely makes a ripple, the hand that suddenly jumps from Geto’s body’s side to clutch for an instant at his throat, and the puppeteer reacts more strongly, laughing in surprise at the novelty of it all. It’s then that Gojo notices, faintly, that Patch Face is back, the two of them engaging in a stultifyingly meaningless conversation about something philosophical that Gojo can’t or doesn’t want to hear over the flickering of faces through his mind, the students, Shoko, the higher-ups, Yaga, the unconscious masses spread through the station by his own hands.

“Get it over with,” he interrupts, and Patch Face and the demon wearing Geto’s body turn his way simultaneously, as if they’ve forgotten he was there. Impossible, forgetting Gojo Satoru. Nanami had tried and now look where they were.

“You’re right,” Geto’s body says.

Nanami.

“Seal com—”

//

If he dares to be so bold, he would say some of the first intervals of time inside the Prison Realm approach peaceful. The Six Eyes are stymied inside the barrier, nothing but the grasping of ghoulish, intangible hands to disturb him and he’s been surrounded by worse before. First it’s shocking, the silence suddenly in his mind without overwhelming stimulation from all points. Gojo is the type of man who talks to himself to hear his own voice, even when he’s alone, but here the sound drowns out as though muffled by mud when he tries to fill that silence.

So, he thinks. It’s strange to think of it as a novel activity, and it isn’t as though he hasn’t before — obviously. But here it’s a different experience altogether. In reality, the Six Eyes fill his mind with computations, with the essence of reality to stifle and swamp any imagination he might want to apply to his surroundings. In the Prison Realm, in some ugly irony, he’s freer than he’s ever been.

He shifts his weightless, formless body around as though he’s settling into bed, or into a chair somewhere, crossing his legs in an approximation of regularity. First he pictures Itadori, the one who’d started it all in some strange way. He remembers his smile without breaking him down into mass and force, the way he always waves at you no matter how recently he’s seen you, the way he and Kugisaki took turns dyeing each others’ hair when their roots grew out, forcing Gojo to film it — the memory, instead of the calculation of how much time had passed based on the length of the color change, the weight of each hair, how quickly they fell from their heads.

Kugisaki. Gojo flicks to her next, another beacon through the darkness, like the rungs of a set of monkey bars passing over an endless abyss. She’s somehow the easiest of the first years to picture despite being the one Gojo has known for the least amount of time by a day or two, the way her eyes spark during a fight when she sees a weakness, the way her laugh is louder than she thinks it is, all the less charming and all the more delightful, her blend of maturity and naïveté that somehow works so well for her. He can envision her, now, without the background noise of how much damage she’s taken while in his care, how many new micro-creases in the lines under her eyes she’d deny were there.

His mind goes to Maki next, the only sparring partner Kugisaki would tolerate for reasons he’s sure he can guess, even in his own lonely floundering. There are those he worries for without him there, not that he considers himself so critical to jujutsu society, but Maki is not, could never be, one of them. She reminds him of the man who’d almost killed him, strong and unafraid and spiteful, facing the sun the way he never had. Maki can take care of herself, and much as she claims uncaring of how her actions affect others she can take care of those around her as well.

So can her cousin, the last of his beloved first years, the one who had asked Gojo personally to save Itadori Yuji from execution after exactly one interaction. From childhood, ever since Gojo had met him at the tender age of six when he’d barely been out of his own childhood, Fushiguro had felt everything and shown nothing, impenetrable face and tender heart. Gojo hadn’t liked to dwell on it, knowing the kind of weakness that could be for a sorcerer, but Fushiguro and his friends had shown him wrong, always at each other’s backs, always pushing themselves further to help each other more, to protect and save and serve what was increasingly most precious to them. Even with Geto, with Shoko, it had never been that way for him, and remembering them now fills him for just a moment in the bloated void of the Prison Realm with a warmth like hope.

Hope, materially, looked more like Okkotsu, the one he’d sent away from everyone else with a man he’d almost killed in the Night Parade, the one who’d trusted Gojo enough to agree without thinking, with only the slightest pull downwards on the corners of his mouth and a nod and a glance he surely thought Gojo hadn’t noticed toward the common room where the other second years were taking turns losing to Shoko at Mario Kart — the only game she was good at, and therefore the only one she would ever offer to play. In September, a month ago that feels like forever, Gojo had asked Okkotsu to look after the others if something happened to him, which right now feels like about the only correct move he’d made.

He wasn’t quite as close to the other second years, without the inherent bond of the only two special-grade sorcerers left alive and findable in Japan and without the sick ties of the major three clans, but Inumaki and Panda were growing too. Inumaki with the quiet confidence Gojo had thought he might never find with his cursed speech holding him back from so many people who’d been unwilling to understand, Panda with his natural limitations becoming the glue of their group, the one they were all willing to talk to first somehow. It was vaguely awe-inspiring alongside its strangeness, but that was par for the course in their world.

Shoko, too, springs to mind, one of the people that had known him the longest, that had stuck around although it was mainly through necessity. Her image is almost the easiest to summon, somehow, the purple crescent moons under her eyes no matter how long she slept, the endless nicotine between her fingers and in her pockets and huffing from her lips, the way her hands sat so competently at her waist while she explained something to him or to Yaga about an injury she had healed for an ally or the damage she hadn’t on the experimental body of an enemy. Gojo almost laughs at the sound of her voice in his mind, twirling her hair on her finger while she tells him about the last time she’d gone out with Mei and Utahime, the endless dance around each other that he never stopped teasing her for. They were in a better position to act on it, he thinks now, a little bitterly. Shoko is an asset kept close to Jujutsu High’s chest, Utahime a second-grade sorcerer at the quieter Kyoto establishment where there were fewer people and weaker curses. If he gets out of here, he thinks — no, when — he’s forcing her to make a move.

And Nanami. Of course he’d save him for last, the delayed gratification Gojo had never appreciated before Nanami had shown him what it could be like, like the yellow moon over the horizon on an autumn night promising the sun in the morning. His face is burnt into the cells of his mind, framed on every inch of the Limitless crawling all over him, filling the Infinity between Gojo and the rest of the world. If Shoko had been by his side, more or less, out of simple forced proximity, Nanami had been the one in a million, the return that hadn’t meant death, the choice to call Gojo’s number on that day five years ago. Maybe his was the only number Nanami still had, though he doubts it based on how oddly close he and Shoko are, maybe, maybe, but still Gojo had felt so profoundly decided upon in that moment, picking up the phone to the number he’d never lost after four years because Nanami would be the type to never change it through new model after cracked screen after Sumida happy hour incident. Gojo wishes he’d thought to tell him, though he’s not sure exactly what he’d say. He imagines Nanami in front of him, right now, in the blackness that is emptier than black, what he’d tell him, and comes up vacant and short. He doesn’t want it to be too late, a time he’s known too many times already in the less than thirty years he’s spent halfway between too much and not enough.

From the moment he’d woken up from certain death in front of Jujutsu High, coughing up the last of his own spilled blood with the sickening strange feeling of his neck knitting itself back together, with the memory of Fushiguro Toji’s spear all over him like a fog, Satoru Gojo had known that his power meant he would outlive everyone around him. Every single person, with the possible exception of Master Tengen even reduced to a frightening potentiality by the incident with Riko and the uncertainty of instability. At the time it had been a terrifying footnote to his closest brush with death since childhood, but with age he had made peace with it. The truth would mean a number of partings, yes, but more meetings and the time to see and nurture the achievement of others. Gojo was by no means selfless, and this was not the unselfish desire of a teacher — it was the only thing he could find it in himself to want for at the time, stronger allies, a path to a new structure of jujutsu society. But here, in this timeless void so opposed to his own Limitless that at this point felt half like home, he wouldn’t even have that chance, wouldn’t be able to see Itadori grow even stronger, to see Fushiguro develop his technique into the mastery that had threatened his own six-eyed ancestor, to see Kugisaki come into her own and become the force they both knew she could be. To see Nanami, from whatever distance he would allow, in his old age, hopefully some fulfillment found in the choice he’d made and stuck with to return all those years ago.

Just for this one time, clutched by the ephemeral hands of the dead and at the end of the names and faces of those he’s let in, Gojo hopes he’s wrong.

//

When the spear pierces the nothingness around him, Gojo instinctively shrinks back from it, a weapon he recognizes deep in his spine, in his femur, where the scars are reversed everywhere they can be seen but set more profoundly in him for it. But after compulsion passes he realizes this is the first thing he’s seen, seen with his eyes, since his sealing, that he should be chasing it, grabbing at it, and at that he scrambles for it but it withdraws before his seeking fingers can grasp it.

For a moment there’s despair through him, a moment he can feel unlike the impenetrable stretch of not-time he’s spent in the Prison Realm, and that’s enough for his heart to start pounding even before the lance of light penetrates what looks, directionally, like up and he’s swimming through emptiness, blindly holding his breath, reaching for the only thing that’s ever been out of his grasp. But then he’s suddenly on something solid, and hands he knows as living are hitting his Infinity, and Gojo is gasping air for the first time in who knows how long, a moment, a year, it hardly matters as he tears his blindfold off to better recognize who is present, who is missing.

Okkotsu is first, without Rika visibly by his side which is promising, sets him just slightly more at ease. “What happened?” Gojo asks, and the kid winces.

“Please, take it easy, sensei,” he says, pressing one tentative hand against his shoulder, only not quite because Gojo’s fight-or-flight is still desperately out of wack and bouncing him off like a threat. “Um. You’re… you’re not in any danger. Not right now.” He offers a weak smile. Infinity relents, just slightly, his fingers moving an inch closer to Gojo but with no pressure to give further.

“Gojo-sensei!” Itadori’s voice bursts into him like sunlight, and Gojo’s eyes flick to him next, drinking him in like oxygen after a long stretch underwater. He looks… well, he doesn’t look substantially older, which Gojo takes as a positive sign in terms of how long he’s been sealed, but he looks tired under the excitement, the lines of Sukuna’s second set of eyes etched more deeply. “It worked!”

Okkotsu laughs, which isn’t unheard of but is still a bit amazing in its own right. “Yes, Itadori,” he agrees, “it worked.” One hand, surprisingly gentle considering how heavy it is with the burden of cursed energy, pats Itadori’s shoulder. Gojo shouldn’t be surprised, he thinks, under all the bursting noise of the reactivated Six Eyes, that Okkotsu and Itadori would get along so well but he somehow is.

“As wonderful as it is to see my two favorite students,” Gojo says, and he hopes his voice doesn’t sound as shaky to them as it does in his own head, “where is everyone else? My other beloved first and second years?” He doesn’t allow himself the indulgence, doesn’t punish himself with the suffering, of mentioning Nanami’s name, the thought of him alone enough to make his heart pound. He’s been so fucking stupid.

Itadori and Okkotsu share a careful glance, one that sets Gojo’s teeth on edge and the muscles in his limbs trembling under the dimming sheen of Infinity. Itadori speaks first. “Well, Fushiguro and Maki-san are still trying to persuade the Zen’in clan to help with — well, we can talk about that later, I guess.” He cuts himself off at another look from Okkotsu, and his face falls. “Kugisaki is in the infirmary still. Shoko-san has her and—”

“Panda went with Hakari and Kirara back to the fight club.” Okkotsu flat-out interrupts Itadori this time, and Gojo is delighted enough to see them to put up with this obfuscation of the truth for a little longer. “They’re trying to recruit some more sorcerers to help with… everything.” He gestures weakly with one hand. “It’s been busy without you, sensei.”

Itadori is fidgeting a little, sat back on his heels just out of Gojo’s reach. “Sensei,” he blurts out, “can I… can I give you a hug?”

Okkotsu blinks in surprise, attention bouncing back to Itadori, but Gojo is with himself enough at this point to control his Infinity, to turn it the hell off so he can nod and push himself into a sitting position, hold his arms out for the kid he thought he’d never see again, never be able to save from execution, to fly into his chest at near-bruising speed. Gojo rests his chin against the pink head he’d been able to picture so perfectly in the never-ending void. He grins at Okkotsu, jerks his head up without losing contact with Itadori, and emboldened, the kid smiles a little and rests that same gentle hand on Gojo’s shoulder, meeting it fully this time.

“I missed you,” Itadori mutters into the fabric of his uniform, and Gojo pats his back once or twice before releasing him.

“Must have been a lot of messes without me around to clean them up,” Gojo replies, almost back to his usual sing-song, almost without the edge of panic at the still-missing pieces of information floating around like empty spaces in a puzzle making a terrifying picture.

Itadori frowns. “I missed you because you’re my fr—” He flushes then, bites off the word. “My teacher.”

If Gojo has ever been this tender in his life, he can’t remember it. “Well,” he says then, looking around suddenly at the realization that he had made no effort to identify where he is, “isn’t that nice.”

“We’re at the school,” Okkotsu explains. “It’s still pretty safe here, so we figured this would be the best place to do it. They brought the Prison Realm back here as soon as they managed to get it away from the group of spirits.” He gestures toward the Inverted Spear of Heaven, discarded to the ground on his left. “You hid this thing pretty well, huh, sensei?”

Itadori nods. “We called Okkotsu-senpai as soon as we got the curtain lifted to look for it, since we knew we’d have to unseal you.”

“So,” Gojo tries for casual, “how long has it been since all that went down?”

“About a month,” Itadori explains. It feels at once like forever and like not too long. Gojo made it back in time to help make things right from however they’re wrong. “We’ve been chasing curses out of Tokyo most of the time since. I… I’ve eaten a lot of fingers.” He brightens up a little. “We took a bunch from those girls in Shibuya! Okkotsu-senpai knew them, I think.”

“Mimiko and Nanako,” Okkotsu explains, quietly, and Gojo thinks back to young faces in the December air, dedicated to Geto like no one he’d ever seen, which was saying something considering how close he’d been to him once. “They’re dead now.”

Good news, Gojo supposes, although he remembers Geto being fond of them, the first ones he’d saved. It hurts a little.

“We got some of the others too!” Itadori exclaims, surprisingly excited with all the talk of killing. Must have been curses, then, which means as far as Itadori knows the thing puppeteering Geto’s body had gotten away to regroup. “Mahito, the Mt. Fuji-head one… oh! And that guy with the ponytail that was at the school when Kyoto visited. Nanamin took care of him.”

The smile pulling at the corners of Itadori’s mouth at the mention of Nanami’s name sets Gojo’s pulse thrumming again, the way he looks proud and fond, and suddenly he can’t hold himself back anymore. “And where is that old man at?”

Okkotsu bites the inside of his cheek, glancing toward the main building. “I haven’t seen him,” he says, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck, letting his ring glint in the thready autumn afternoon sunshine. “I actually just got back. I haven’t even seen In— er, everyone else yet.”

His students are saps, Gojo thinks, rather hypocritically considering how his own eyes move toward the school as though Nanami might materialize at a window, away from the small smile spreading over Okkotsu’s face. “Maybe we should all go,” he offers, and Itadori at least nods, bouncing to his feet and stretching out a hand to help the man who is once again the strongest on earth. “I’ll see Kugisaki first, see how things are.”

Okkotsu shakes his head at that. “Shoko-san wants things pretty quiet for her, I think,” he says. “She calls it ‘mending’, keeping her in a coma for a while until her body is ready to come back. I wish I had…”

He trails off, but Gojo understands. He understands, too, that Kugisaki is tough, that she probably has visitors on visitors to keep her company who haven’t just returned to reality after a month desperately far from it. He’ll see her in time, he supposes, when he’s ready to take her in without flaring into anger and unpredictable action.

The three of them make their way to the school, Gojo enjoying the fact that his muscles all seem to work just the same as before despite his time in the Prison Realm, at least for the basics. Itadori is breaking down the finer points of his fight against Mahito, with the help of that giant from Kyoto from the sounds of it. Hakari was there too, which makes perfect sense to Gojo, Itadori talking about the hulking third-year with stars in his eyes. Nanami had kicked things off, taking care of other, lower-level curses helping the one with the patchwork face so the students could handle him together. It’s so Nanami it pangs somewhere deep in Gojo’s chest.

Okkotsu waves them off at the door, claiming he has to drop the spear off with the other cursed tools stored on campus before the higher-ups catch wind of it being back in Japan, duty-bound first as all sorcerers are. 

Itadori lingers a little longer, like he can’t let Gojo out of his sight, but eventually at the door of the infirmary he pauses, hands in his pockets. “I think I’ll sit with Kugisaki for a while, tell her what happened.” He smiles, small this time. “Maki-san is usually in there with her, but she’s with Fushiguro today. He sent me a picture of where the Zen’ins live — you never told me Fushiguro was rich!”

“Since when is Fushiguro sending pictures?” Gojo asks, to deflect the question, and Itadori’s ears turn pink. “Anyway, his Zen’in half has some problems. He didn’t grow up there. I’ll let him tell you about it sometime.”

“Okay.” Itadori scuffs his foot against the floor, like he’s pondering something, but then looks back up again with a tentative determination in his face. “I hope you don’t mind me saying, sensei, but… usually around now Nanamin is with Shoko-sensei in her office. If you want to see him.” He gulps, muttering an apology before bolting into the infirmary and closing the door behind him.

//

Gojo does not run to Shoko’s office, almost stupidly far away from the infirmary where she spends most of her time anyway, but he supposes it is about halfway to the morgue by the time he skids to a stop in front of her mostly-shut door. And then he takes a moment to think about everything, everything, everything.

A month, endless and a blink to him within the Prison Realm. A month had gone by since the last time he’d seen Nanami, maybe the most chaotic month in their lives based on the incomplete and brief summary from Okkotsu and Itadori. That month had done a lot for Gojo, set his mind straight on what exactly he’d been playing with before, like fire but more dangerous, more damaging if extinguished. Now, in front of the door where he can hear the muffled sounds of human interaction, he isn’t sure if he loves Nanami but he’s sure as shit he’s never leaving him, never giving him reason to leave, again. If that same month had damaged Nanami irreparably, changed things between them for good, so be it as long as they could stay in the same orbit, as long as he could keep him safe.

Gojo puts his hands in his pockets because he doesn’t know what he’ll do with them otherwise, and with his foot he pushes open the door.

A couple of things happen at once. The first thing is that something bounces against his Infinity, something small and round and distinctly free of cursed energy. He looks down for a moment, distracted, and identifies it as a tennis ball. The second thing is that Shoko groans, and he’s so fucking happy to hear her voice that he can almost forgive her for what she says, which is, “Why the hell do I always have to be around for this shit?”

The third thing, overwhelming as Gojo lifts his gaze again, foot still extended into the doorway a little foolishly, is that Nanami whirls around with less composure than Gojo thinks he’s ever seen on him to look at him.

He has one eye. He has one eye and it is wide alongside the patch covering the left. Gojo is pinned in place by that gaze, that searching eye wandering up and down his body like he’s looking for damage.

And Nanami seems to have enough of it on his own. Gojo can see his forearms, neck and head without his suit jacket and with his sleeves rolled up for the exertion of whatever he and Shoko had been doing before Gojo so rudely interrupted them, and his left forearm has twisting scars winding around it, muddled skin even with the obvious application of Shoko’s considerable talent. Gojo can afford to be fair to her for once in the privacy of his own mind with a living Nanami in front of her through her ability alone. He isn’t stupid, he knows fatal injuries when he sees them. Nanami’s neck, too, is not unscathed, the same creeping smears crawling up almost to his jawline. His face, mercifully, is unbroken save for the missing eye.

“I’m guessing that’s a pretty good story,” Gojo says, finally, after a satisfyingly lengthy stretch of time looking at each other, gesturing toward Nanami’s missing eye with a quirk of his head.

“A month of peace over like that.” Shoko sighs then, bending to pick up the tennis ball and return it to her desk. “I’ll pretend not to be hurt over how rude you’re being to me right now only if you agree to get dinner with me tomorrow, Gojo Satoru.”

“Anything you say, Shoko-san,” Gojo agrees, tearing his gaze from Nanami for a moment to grin at her, gratefully, and she smiles back, small and tired, before leaving the room with the deliberate click of the door behind her.

Gojo’s eyes snap back to Nanami, unmoved and discomposed still. There’s one more instant of silence before Nanami breaks it. “A piranha.”

Gojo frowns. “A piranha?”

“My eye,” he explains, sort of. His voice is tight. “A piranha ate my eye. We were in the domain of one of the spirits with Mahito, populated with shikigami. One ate my eye.” He pauses. “You should have seen around my chest where the shark was before Shoko got to it.”

“I’d—” Gojo’s cheesy line about loving to see Nanami’s chest any time catches on a lump in his throat. “I’d—”

“Satoru,” Nanami says then, and Gojo feels something inside him crack open, “come here.”

He does. He goes to Nanami, tearing his hands from his pockets to stumble forward, pulling Nanami against him the way he’d wanted to so many times and never had, stupid fear of ruining something he wasn’t even sure was enough making him weak. But with Nanami’s arms around his waist, palms solid against his spine, his lower back, Gojo feels stronger than ever, like he could take on every curse in the universe at once and win.

Nanami is warm under him, vigorous still even after whatever the last month had encompassed for him, and Gojo’s arms stretch enough over his shoulders and around his neck for his hands to meet his own elbows, sealing Nanami against him, the one who had always been able to move through Infinity, to reach him where he was at. And here, too, he reaches him, his fingers stroking lightly over the rungs of Gojo’s spine, his chin lifting to let Gojo’s face rest where his neck meets his shoulder.

“Fuck, Nanami.” He almost laughs it, with the strange realization that it might be that or crying, his breath hitting Nanami’s collarbone through the sliver between his undone top button and his skin. “Fuck, I missed you.”

Nanami doesn’t say anything for a moment, because he always considers his words before speaking them, and they mean all the more for it. Gojo is somehow patient now, with Nanami in his arms, the beat of his heart echoing into the ear pressed to his skin. “When the spirit with the… volcano head…” Gojo’s lungs squeeze in fondness, the serious adult tone of Nanami’s voice stumbling over the childish imagery, and he tightens his embrace. Nanami shakes his head a little and his jawline brushes against the crown of Gojo’s head. “When I was burning… the only thing I could think of was its missing arm, how I was sure that meant you had fought it. I knew I needed to get to you then, because something was wrong, because you wouldn’t have left a job unfinished.” He pauses. Gojo thinks he might be shaking against him. “Hakari-san saved my life, and Maki-san’s. He exorcised the spirit so we could keep moving. Nitta-kun from Kyoto stopped the damage. All I wanted was to get to you.”

“You’re to me now,” Gojo offers, a very weak but very earnest attempt at his usual light-heartedness. “You’re with me now.”

“Yes,” Nanami says, thoughtfully. Gojo can almost picture the expression on his face, a face he hadn’t seen in a month that lasted an eternity, a face he suddenly feels bereft without, and so he looks up from the curve of his skin, resting his chin on Nanami’s shoulder, looking right into that one remaining eye that somehow has as much intensity as the pair had. “Yes I am.”

“Nanami,” Gojo says, and he doesn’t necessarily have anything to add, just the name on his breath like an incantation, like the air itself, and he smiles up at him for the sheer pleasure of him smiling back, just a tilt of the corner of that mouth with Gojo’s heart held so gently inside it. “Nanamiiii. Na-na-mi.”

“You have my attention,” he offers in response, his voice careful and serious like he knows exactly what it works its way around. “For as long as you’d like it, you have it.”

For a man as focused as Nanami, this is a promise on a scale even Gojo can’t possibly comprehend. He knows in the morning, when the higher-ups learn he’s back and he has to reckon with what’s become of the jujutsu world in his absence, he won’t have time for this, will probably blow off Shoko too through no fault of his own, to her endless and aggravated understanding. But for now, for tonight at least, Gojo wants Nanami’s attention, and he wants to give Nanami his attention, and for all the times they tried to take each other apart while they stumbled through the dark he wants to try to put him back together.

Gojo tries to convey that, all of that somehow, with one slow, calm press of his lips to Nanami’s jawline, right under the hook of bone where he can feel his pulse thrumming, a line he’d only dreamed of crossing before. But now, in Shoko’s office with the afternoon turning into evening outside, Nanami’s mouth parts in an inhale and his hands clutch at the fabric of Gojo’s uniform — which he’s been wearing for a month, he realizes, though thankfully the outside of time nature of the Prison Realm appears to have extended to his clothes — and his body goes still around him and against him. Gojo lingers for a moment, unable to pull away, and when he leaves space between them, just enough for his own lips to part, Nanami pulls at him, pressing him back against him, hand roving up his back to settle at the nape of Gojo’s neck, to thread his fingers through the hair there.

“Satoru,” Nanami says, quietly and impassive as Gojo had always known him, but now it seems there’s a wealth of emotion beneath the surface that he had just never taken the time to listen for before, “come home with me.”

Gojo grins again, unable to hold it down, releasing Nanami just enough to stand in front of him at his full height, hands lingering on his shoulders the way one of Nanami’s does at his hip. “Want me to drive?”

Nanami considers him for a moment, and Gojo wonders if he too feels like he can’t, or at least doesn’t want to, look away. “No,” he decides, finally. “You might find the amount of attention I get on the train these days amusing.”

//

They don’t make it out unnoticed, although now with the reassurance of his presence Gojo is content to amble at Nanami’s sides, hands solidly in his pockets and blindfold back on. He’s sure the look on his face must give him away in an instant to anyone looking.

Okkotsu is first, leaving Inumaki’s room and jumping at the sound of their footsteps like he’d been caught stealing. “Sensei!” he yelps. “Nanami-san!”

“Forget something?” Gojo chirps, too blissed out for any harder-hitting teasing. “Don’t leave Toge-kun for too long, now!”

“To— Inumaki and I were, um,” he stutters, unnecessarily, “we were going to watch a—”

“You don’t owe us an explanation.” Nanami puts him mostly out of his misery calmly, although Okkotsu’s face goes red down to his neck and up to his ears. It’s a little spectacular. “Have a good evening, Okkotsu-kun.”

“Y-you too, Nanami-san,” Okkotsu stammers, “a-and you? Sensei?”

The last word is questioning, wondering if he’s making the connection correctly, and Gojo doesn’t bother to confirm or deny, merely tugging one hand out of its ensconcement to waggle his fingers at the second-year.

They actually make it outside uninterrupted then, only to run into Maki and Fushiguro on the front steps, just beyond the barrier. Fushiguro doesn’t look surprised. Maki does.

“What the fuck,” she says. She looks rough, face and neck and hands marked up the same as Nanami, one eye gone like Nanami, and Gojo’s grin is like glass. At least she’s alive, at least they all are.

“You can thank Yuuta in the morning,” Gojo tells her, and her eyes widen — so his return to the school from training overseas had been more surprising than Gojo had anticipated, then, at least to most of the students. Gojo makes a mental note to scold Miguel for not having Okkotsu prepare them more, though maybe it had been out of his control. He turns to Fushiguro then. “You can thank Yuuji at your leisure, he helped. He’s probably still with Kugisaki.”

“So you’re caught up, then,” says Fushiguro, “or at least some of the way.”

“Enough,” Gojo confirms. “Did Yuuji-kun text you I was back? I heard you were sending pictures of the Zen’in estate to him.” Maki practically whirls on Fushiguro, who lets his eyes widen for just a second before controlling his expression again, futilely. “So cute how you two keep in touch.”

“You knew this idiot was back?” Maki asks, smacking one open palm against the top of Fushiguro’s head. He winces, a remarkable testament to his own durability. Maki always hits harder than she thinks. “And you said nothing.”

“There wasn’t a reason to,” Fushiguro mutters. “I’m going to see Kugisaki.”

“Wrong,” Maki argues, as they start to move toward the school without any deference to Gojo, although they both manage courteous farewells to Nanami. “I’m going to see Nobara. You’re going to get Itadori out of there so I don’t have to listen to his babbling for an hour or two.”

“Somehow I don’t think Fushiguro-kun will complain about that,” Nanami murmurs, just loud enough for Gojo to hear as the students fade out of earshot, and Gojo chuckles, and even though the balance of the earth is off it feels right between them.

//

Nanami’s apartment is calm and familiar, unchanged in the last month in any way Gojo can see from the entrance where he deposits his shoes.

“Anything new I should know?”

“Here?” Nanami asks it like it’s unthinkable. “Satoru, I still have mochi in the freezer you left here after Hokkaido.”

Gojo’s heart clenches, again. He pushes past it to ask, “Are we doing that now? First names?”

“You may if you want,” Nanami offers. He’s taking his own shoes off, now that his door is locked behind him, remarkably deft considering how recently he’s lost an eye. Gojo pushes that thought to the back of his mind. Nanami is here, he’s alive and he’s with Gojo, and none of the rest matters, at least for tonight.

“Kento,” he tries, like he has just once before, and Nanami stumbles, removing his left shoe. “Is that too serious?”

“After all this?” Nanami asks, just a hint incredulous, but then he thinks. “You can continue calling me Nanami if you like.”

“I always do as I like,” Gojo says, an echo of a conversation they’ve already had. “What would you like, Nanami? Kento?”

He pauses, straightening over his removed shoes, perfectly aligned by his front door. Like he’s thinking about it. Like there’s a hand full of cards he’s choosing from, and he won’t make an announcement until he’s perfectly sure. “I think I’d like you, Satoru,” he says, and Gojo is already melting, complying, before he continues, “I think I’d like all of you.”

Gojo finds he wants to give everything to Nanami, or rather doesn’t want to hold anything back from him, not tonight and not ever again. “I’d like that too, maybe,” he says, and Nanami doesn’t reply except to turn off the overhead light. In the dark, Gojo can still see him, the angles and meters of him, the forces behind each movement as Nanami steps toward him and, in an act that somehow surprises him with all he can see of him, takes him by the hand.

“Don’t get lost, now,” says Nanami, voice soft, and he leads Gojo to the bedroom he’s pictured in his head a dozen times, a hundred, in the month of darkness.

Without letting go of his hand, Nanami pulls both of them to one side of the bed to turn on the lamp on the side table, and Gojo could ask why but he doesn’t want to let Nanami out of his sight for even a moment, the whole of him, so he stays quiet, watching him straighten back up, turn toward him again, and without speaking Nanami knows what he wants. “I want to see you,” he explains. “All this time, I wanted to see you.”

“Okay.” Gojo’s voice is breathless with how much he wants Nanami, any way he can have him, any way he can give himself to him in return. He tugs on their joined hands, pulling them near chest-to-chest. “Gonna kiss you now.”

“Don’t narrate—” Nanami doesn’t have time to finish the sentence before Gojo is on him, twining their linked fingers together and threading the digits of his other hand through the short hairs at the back of Nanami’s neck, pressing his mouth to Nanami’s at last. 

It’s almost like relief, the feeling that floods Gojo, and it’s tinged with embarrassment when he parts his lips to deepen the kiss, quickly, before Nanami can even get his free hand on him, and a moan escapes him, involuntary, the most natural thing in the world. Nanami’s lips twitch against his, but before Gojo can pull back and ask if he’s teasing him, Nanami’s palm settles on his lower back to tug him closer and Nanami’s tongue brushes against his and Gojo moans again, like he’s never been kissed before.

Nanami untangles their hands, bringing his to rest against Gojo’s jaw, fingertips brushing the hollow behind his ear, thumb against the corner of his mouth. He touches him carefully, tenderly, seriously, pulling back when their breathing gets too heavy for just their noses, and Gojo grabs a handful of his shirt to the right of his sternum.

“You like this,” Nanami announces, running that thumb over Gojo’s bottom lip.

Gojo pokes his tongue out, catching the loops and whirls of his fingerprint. “Maybe,” he says, voice coy in a way he knows he’s absolutely incapable of being. “I think I’ll have to try it a few more times before I’m sure.”

“As many times as you like,” he agrees, leaning in again.

Nanami is in the driver’s seat for this kiss, which means it’s calmer, he takes his time. The way his lips move against Gojo’s isn’t exactly experimental; it’s scrupulous, like he wants to try every single permutation of connection between them. It’s almost hypnotizing. Gojo finds his mind surprisingly quiet when Nanami opens his mouth, lets his tongue prod against the seam of Gojo’s lips to be welcomed into him again.

Nanami’s tongue is strong, hot, gently insistent stroking along Gojo’s, beckoning him back into his own mouth and Gojo obliges, running his along the back of the top row of Nanami’s teeth, feeling his soft palette, sighing into his mouth.

“You’re good at this,” he accuses, sickeningly soft, when they part again.

Nanami regards him. “I’m good at a few other things, too.”

“I know a little more about those,” Gojo chuckles, tugging at those hairs where his fingers are threaded.

It heats up from there, not the immediate scalding boil that they’re used to, but a slow simmer that finds Gojo panting against Nanami underneath him on the bed, stripped of their shirts while Nanami mouths over his stomach, undoing his pants painfully slowly. Nanami’s good in bed, obviously, or Gojo wouldn’t have come back but he’s better like this, taking his time, indulging himself, taking things that he wants and giving them back in turn. Gojo’s nerve endings feel on fire spread through his body, fanned to flames under Nanami’s attention.

“Fuck, Nanami,” he groans, when his fingers brush just this side of not enough over the outline of his cock as he slides his waistband down his thighs, “you’re killing me here.”

“I would think,” Nanami murmurs, letting his lips move against the skin of Gojo’s thigh, “it would take more than a little foreplay to kill the strongest sorcerer on earth.”

“A little goes a long way with you, apparently.” Gojo means to mutter it but it comes out more like a moan when Nanami presses more firmly against his thigh, creating suction enough that it will surely bruise.

It’s ironic, some part of Gojo thinks, not the part currently dedicated to writhing underneath Nanami, that after so many enemies, so many violent acts, had tried and failed to mark him through that Infinity that this is what gets through.

Nanami stands then, unbuttons his own pants, and Gojo props himself up on his elbows to just watch, to take him in, his entire body as scarred and strong as it is. “You’re amazing, Nanami,” he says, because he can, because it’s been on the tip of his tongue for a day or a week or a month or the five years Nanami has been back in his world.

Nanami pauses with one foot in the air, drawing a line of muscle along his thigh and calf that has Gojo’s eyes following it under his blindfold, mouth parting a little like his tongue can’t wait to get a taste. “You’re back from beyond the dead,” he says slowly, moving again to remove the last leg of his pants, folding them with remarkable care and placing them on top of the long table at the foot of his bed. “And you think I—”

“I know you are.” Gojo cuts him off, patting the bed next to him. “Come here.”

Nanami does, his movements sure despite the adjustments he’s surely had to make for his missing eye, sitting next to Gojo and drawing his legs up on the mattress, stretching out a hand to stroke along the lines of Gojo’s ribs, tenderly enough to kill him. Instead he pushes himself up, reaching out on his own end to push at the spot right below Nanami’s collarbone, guiding him onto his back.

“Gonna show you,” Gojo murmurs, hovering above him, connected only by the hand still lightly at his skin, and Nanami’s eye widens and his mouth goes open, slowly. He looks like gold in the light of the lamp, like gold and garnet where his skin still mottles with grafting. Gojo brings his other hand up to Nanami’s hip, fingers sliding over him. “You’re like a miracle.”

“Again,” Nanami begins, but Gojo doesn’t give him a chance to finish, bending to kiss him again, hard and wet and deep, settling on his knees and heels to press their hips together, to grind slowly against him until they’re both hard and panting.

Gojo never gets on top, never had the urge to before, selfishly taking whatever Nanami would give him without much to offer in return besides a hot mouth or a tight hole, but now he finds he likes it, feeling Nanami move underneath him, submitting in his own way to the attention of Gojo’s hands and tongue and fingers over the whole of him — the column of his neck, the breadth of his shoulders, the rise and fall of his chest and stomach. 

When Gojo feels like he can’t take it anymore, even though he isn’t the one shaking underneath him against the bed, he looks up at Nanami from where he’s been kissing his way down each individual rib and sees his attention is already on him. “Let me put on the condom,” he says, tugging a little at the waistband of Nanami’s briefs, and Nanami nods.

“You… know where they are,” he agrees, and his voice sounds like a spell, like something Gojo’s never heard, wrecked under that sheen of composure he always has, that steadiness that is just who Nanami is.

Gojo grabs one from the familiar bedside table with the bottle of lube next to it, standing unnecessarily just to give himself an excuse to step out of his own underwear, tossing it somewhere carelessly just to hear the irritated little huff that Nanami can’t help but let out. He turns back, to laugh at the face he’s surely making, that brow furrowed and the eye narrowed, but Nanami is standing next to him suddenly and Gojo freezes with that grin stuck to his mouth as Nanami reaches for him.

His fingers as he removes the blindfold are so tender, so gentle, almost as gentle and breathless as his voice when he asks, “Is this okay?”

Gojo nods, not sure if he can speak, the unfettered view of everything centered on Nanami, naked in front of him and folding his blindfold like it’s a pocket square, placing it on the bedside table like that’s where it belongs. Gojo goes down on his knees, Nanami’s cock hard and heavy in front of him, and this part he knows, the deft tear of the foil, the smell of latex.

“Nothing showy,” Nanami orders above him, like he can see into Gojo’s mind where he had just been debating sliding it on with his mouth. “I want you back in bed.”

The demand slides down Gojo’s spine like hot wax, and with a half-sarcastic “Sir, yes sir,” he slides the condom on, just like Nanami said, nothing showy. He practically hops back onto his feet, back on the bed, rolling himself over onto his stomach and sliding his knees parallel with his hips. They’ve done this part enough times for him to know what to do, and he glances over his shoulder to catch Nanami’s attention, twitching his hips a little. 

“Ready, big daddy?” Gojo asks, a nickname he’s careful never to use when he could actually mean it because the thought is just too tempting and heaven only knows what Nanami could do with that kind of power.

Nanami places a hand on Gojo’s lower back, right over his kidney to the left of his spine, and the movement is somehow thoughtful. “I think I’d like you on your back,” he says then, “if that’s all right with you.”

Gojo’s eyes widen a little, but he complies. “Thought you didn’t like looking at me during,” he says conversationally, adjusting himself a little, tugging a pillow out from under his head to place below his hips for leverage.

“More like I couldn’t,” Nanami replies, evenly, and Gojo’s chest tightens. “You’re so…”

“Much?” Gojo asks, grinning.

“Beautiful.” Nanami blurts it out like a secret, and Gojo knows it’s not his eyes deceiving him when just a hint of pink spreads over his cheekbones. “Don’t let it go to your head.”

“Too late!” Gojo sing-songs, reaching out his hands like it could somehow convey the rush of feeling burning through him when he tugs Nanami down on top of him, kissing him once, firm and promising. “Fuck me, Nanami.”

Nanami looks down at him for a moment, eye flicking over his face with a pained kind of fondness, and then he reaches down between them and takes Gojo’s cock in his hand, stroking him with a kind of precise expertise that has Gojo breathing hard from the second their skin connects. He’s already hard so it’s purely for sensation, maybe to keep Gojo entertained as Nanami takes the lube in his other hand and uncaps it with agility that probably shouldn’t still be impressive but somehow is. 

He lets go of Gojo, sitting up to squeeze the lube over his fingers, rubbing them together a little to warm it up. Gojo watches him as he arranges himself, maneuvers Gojo as he likes with his free hand, setting one of Gojo’s thighs on top of each of his own where they’re folded over his calves, sat back on his heels in front of him. “Ready?” he asks, glancing up at Gojo’s face. His unlubed hand is against Gojo’s hip, resting there in the divot between femur and iliac crest like it was made to slot in there.

“For you?” replies Gojo, trying to grin but he can feel it spreading softer across his face. “Always.”

He thinks the corner of Nanami’s mouth might twitch, thinks the crows feet at the edge of Nanami’s eye might shadow just a bit more, but then Nanami’s slick finger is circling his hole and observational ability leaves Gojo’s mind all at once.

When he sinks in to the first knuckle, Gojo grits his teeth around a moan that threatens to escape, but Nanami looking up at him misinterprets. “Too fast?” he asks, making to withdraw, but Gojo clenches down around him like that could stop him and Nanami hisses, eye closing for a moment.

“Don’t you dare,” Gojo says. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

Nanami nods, sinking in again to the second knuckle this time, and to avoid any more confusion Gojo lets the sound out. Every part of Nanami feels so good in him, with him, near him, even before without this new intimacy. It’s intoxicating, the alcohol Gojo doesn’t want swimming in him like a song rushing through his blood, making him want more, more, always.

And Nanami always knows exactly what to do, second finger following the first into the tight heat inside Gojo, spreading a little at a time while his other hand strokes Gojo’s cock, too deliberately to be idle, too slowly to be conclusive. It’s making him crazy, trying to move his hips in tandem with Nanami’s intentionally off-beat rhythms, incapable of finding what he needs to take the edge off.

As Nanami adds a third finger, slowly sinking into him at a new angle until he finds and presses mercilessly down on that bundle of nerves, Gojo thinks through the howl that tears through him that the edge might be what Nanami wants.

“Nanami,” he moans, when he thinks his brain might have been squeezed out of his leaking cock onto his stomach where Nanami is still methodically jerking him off while he stretches him out, “Nanami, I think I’m gonna die if you don’t fuck me right now.”

“Die?” muses Nanami, back in control the way he always is. “That wouldn’t be good. So soon after you’ve come back.”

“Yeah,” Gojo agrees, lifting his hips weakly to try for more friction with Nanami’s hand, “yeah, so do it.”

“Do what?” Nanami’s voice is dangerous. His fingers still inside Gojo, thick and spread. “Why don’t you be a good boy and ask politely?”

Dangerous, Gojo thinks again, but he’s too far gone for mortal concerns like dignity or self-preservation, and so he whines. “Fuck me,” he says, a little too earnestly, “Nanami, Kento, please just fuck me.”

At his first name, Nanami’s half-smug composure stutters, just for an instant, the Six Eyes catching it more than any conscious effort on Gojo’s part, but it’s back all the more quickly for it. “Well,” he says, and when he pulls his fingers out Gojo keens, “I did hear please.” Nanami slicks up his cock then, and the speed of it tells Gojo he’s not the only one burning for this, not the only hungry person in the room. When he settles again between his thighs, he takes one of Gojo’s legs and, with a look that asks a question and gets an affirmative and wordless answer, props his calf up against his left shoulder. “I can go deeper like this,” he explains, not that Gojo needs any kind of decoding, and then without any further introduction he pushes inside him, the head of his cock breaching the tight ring of muscle without difficulty.

Gojo groans, reeling Nanami toward him like a lifeline by his ribs with one hand, his neck with the other, pressing him farther in as he crushes their lips together in an inelegant kiss. “Fuck,” he manages against Nanami’s mouth, not letting him loose even through the burn in his hamstring as Nanami bottoms out inside him, panting hard, breaths mingling between them. Gojo’s cock is pinned between their stomachs, and he knows if Nanami would just move he could get that friction he’s craving, but Nanami’s right hand is fisted into the sheets by Gojo’s head and his jaw is clenched even as his mouth hangs open.

“Tight,” he manages against Gojo, and he grins up at Nanami, that spun-gold hair, that sunset-cirrus cloud skin, and kisses him again, tongue first. When they part again, one spider thread of saliva between them, Nanami’s eye flashes open filled with something that puts a fire in the pit of Gojo’s gut. “Gonna move now.”

“Thought you’d never— ahhh.” Why Gojo had thought he could speak with any kind of coherence with Nanami’s thick cock, the ridge of the head, moving inside him even through the inhibition of the condom, he’ll never know. Nanami’s pace is quick, strokes like hammerfalls into him, relentless, incessant, until Gojo isn’t sure he knows which way is up and which is down. His hands are on Nanami still, one clamped around his neck, the other spread across the middle of his back to feel the movements of his hips, in and out, over and over again. Nanami has stamina beyond belief; Gojo had known this from reports of his missions, durability outside human expectations, but in bed it means without an extraordinary amount of effort he can make a mess out of Gojo every time, and this time is no different in some ways even though it is profoundly different in so many others. The stretch of Gojo’s thigh, the friction of their stomachs against his aching cock each time Nanami moves, Nanami’s hands on either side of his head, caging him in, it’s overwhelming.

“Fuck,” Gojo moans, when he can’t help it anymore, “I want to come, I need to, fuck.”

“Not yet.” Nanami has said this more than once during their times before, but never like this, a murmur in his ear rather than a harsh command. It still carries the same weight, but in a much more pleasant package, and Gojo with his sweet tooth swallows it down with a whine. “You feel so good… I want to go longer.”

Gojo groans, hitching his leg higher on Nanami’s shoulder, wrapping the other one around his waist to pull him deeper, and Nanami’s breath catches in his throat. “Nanamiiii,” he whines, tugging the hand at the back of his neck to pull him closer, pitching his voice lower, “Kento.” Gojo knows he’s playing a little dirty, watching Nanami’s eye go wide, but he really wants to come, and he slides the fingers that had played across the expanse of Nanami’s spine to his ribs, and with clinical precision he presses down on a bruise he’d left earlier.

“Satoru, fuck.” His name and the curse tear from Nanami’s mouth like ripping fabric, and his hips piston out of that steady rhythm, brushing against a spot that lights Gojo up from the inside out and he gasps. “Fuck, okay.”

“Come on, Kento, give it to me,” Gojo demands, pressing against the mark again before moving on to find the next one, letting Nanami’s momentum create the pressure this time, over and over on the constellation of bruises dotting him from collarbone to thighs.

“You,” Nanami says, pausing for just a moment, adjusting the angle of Gojo’s hips a little, “are a brat.”

Any retort Gojo has is driven out of him as Nanami pounds into him, and if he’d thought he’d been getting him before he’s probably only 95% right. Nanami fucks him like he’s stupid over it, finally, finally reaching between them to get his hand around Gojo’s cock again, and by this time he’s so hard, so slick with his own precome and so heavy with wanting Nanami even as he has him that it’s only a minute or two before his eyes are flashing up to Nanami’s, meeting his gaze as he comes with a gasp, thick white painting his own stomach, his chest, rubbing onto Nanami’s skin with that relentless, brutal friction as he chases his own release, spilling with a choked sound and falling forward onto his hands on either side of Gojo’s head.

They’ve never seen each other like this, Gojo realizes when he returns to himself, Nanami softening inside him, panting above him like he’s just finished a marathon. Maybe this isn’t an every-time thing but Gojo could certainly get used to it. Nanami looks attractive beyond belief, disheveled and magnetic with sex, broad and strong and sensible. He looks like he belongs in this bed, like he would belong anywhere, the polar opposite of Gojo who has never belonged anywhere at all.

Nanami winces a little as he pulls out, apparently ignorant to Gojo’s staring, sliding off the bed and tying the condom off in one smooth movement. He disappears into the bathroom for a moment, and Gojo can hear the sound of the faucet.

It doesn’t feel like other times, still, even though this part is familiar. They don’t linger, usually, even if they sleep afterwards, firmly on their own side of whosever’s bed they end up in. But somehow, now, the air feels warmer even with the chaos on the other side of Nanami’s front door. Somehow the thought of Nanami coming back from cleaning up fills Gojo with a kind of hard-edged excitement, instead of strange trepidation, the unpredictability of his actions.

Before Gojo has too much time to get into his head about it, Nanami himself emerges from the bathroom with what looks like a towel in his hand, and he leans over Gojo to clean the mess off of him, which is also new and so, so tender, so Gojo grabs him around the back of the neck and kisses him, again, just because he can.

“You were right earlier,” Gojo says, and Nanami raises one eyebrow infinitesimally, heel of his hand lingering against Gojo’s stomach at the edge of the towel. “I like that.”

“You’re fairly clear about your preferences,” Nanami says, a little drily.

“Not always,” argues Gojo, stroking his nape with fondness that sticks in his throat, spreads through his lungs, until he thinks he might burst with it. “It took me a month in the Prison Realm to make me understand that I was always going to want more from you than what I had.”

Nanami looks down at him, that one eye thoughtful and clear, and then he rests his free hand against Gojo’s cheek, index and middle fingers running along his cheekbone. “I think eventually you will have everything from me,” Nanami says then. It’s amazing, really, how he can be so composed, saying something that feels like it’s crawling down Gojo’s windpipe to curl around his heart like a lick of flame.

Tomorrow looms at the lintel like a dark cloud, an energy signature that will sap from both of them, but for the moment all Gojo can see is Nanami, all he can feel is the heat of his body next to him, all the living meters of him. Even among the calculations, the permutations and computations and iterations of the Six Eyes, Nanami is solid in front of him. “I guess that could be enough,” Gojo manages, smiling up at him, and Nanami, bless him, smiles back — tiny and brief but bright as the sun. Gojo flicks at the patch over his left eye. “Do you sleep in this?”

Nanami catches his hand as it drops, pressing a kiss to the inside of Gojo's wrist where the veins hover deceptively close to the surface, and he sucks in a breath. “Why don’t you stay the night and find out, Satoru?”

Nanami is not a stupid man. Probably the farthest thing from it, and as much as he doesn’t like to let it get out, Gojo is a realist. There are so many problems waiting for them on the other side of dawn that no one could possibly imagine what might come next. But as Nanami returns from depositing his towel in a laundry basket, stepping into his underwear and offering Gojo his before pulling his body next to his, twisted in his streets, Gojo doesn’t think there’s anywhere else he’d rather try to come back to.