Chapter Text
When the classroom door slid open that early autumn day, two thoughts immediately came to Toge’s mind. The first was: hey, he’s kind of cute. It carried a formless and pathetic sense of maybe that was immediately wiped from the earth by the second thought:
This guy is carrying one of the most terrifying, nastiest curses I have ever seen in my entire life.
In a fraction of a second Toge was on his feet beside Maki and Panda, scarf yanked to his chin, and in another fraction of a second he was being pummeled left and right, until Gojo put a stop to the fighting and the dust was allowed to settle.
Toge, not dead, got a better look at the transfer student then, and unbidden, that traitorous sense of maybe began to rekindle. Ok, so something complicated and powerful was clearly at play there. He was still cute. Kind of.
Then Gojo explained what that complicated and powerful force was, and of course it was love, and forget it .
Toge was relieved to have Panda as his partner, even if there was something depressingly endearing about Okkotsu’s shaky ‘I look forward to working with you’, under Maki’s furious glare.
A few hours later, he and the cursed corpse were kicking around an old industrial yard, surveying some low level curses.
“What’s wrong?” said Panda, looking over his shoulder as Toge kicked an old can into the bushes with too much force.
“Takana.”
“Maki will be fine. There’s no universe where she goes down because the newbie tripped on his shoelaces, or something. She’d come back out of pure spite.”
That was true.
“Shake. Tsujiko.”
“I heard they made him and that curse of his special grade. Do you think he’s dangerous?”
Toge didn’t, really. But for years, since he left the Inumaki estate, the only thing that had really worried Toge was his friends. The world had been a harsh and confusing blur for as long as he could remember, and there was nothing for it but to try and live anyway.
“Mentaiko.”
Panda patted him on the back a little too hard, and Toge pretended to trip, rolling out of what would have been a faceplant at the last second. Living consisted of pulling stupid little pranks, when he could get away with them. Living was going for runs, and watering the plants in summer, and falling down youtube rabbit holes. Living was protecting as many people as possible.
***
Panda was right, Maki didn’t need protecting. Only maybe she did, considering she had ended up in the hospital, after what sounded like a much more interesting mission than Toge had been on.
'What happened?' he signed at her, the second she was back on campus.
She squinted at his fingers in the low light of the common space, where he’d found her devouring cup ramen. Maki had picked up JSL pretty quickly over the course of the year, after she realized Toge knew a little.
“What a ridiculous mission,” said Maki, around a mouthful of noodles.
She explained, more or less, what had happened.
'So, Okkotsu?'
“He’s weird, I don’t know.”
'But he carried all three of you out?'
“Yeah.”
Maki sighed, tipping the last of the broth to her mouth.
“He’s as fucked as the rest of us, at least. He said… and don’t quote me on this because I was barely conscious alright? He said: I want to feel like it’s okay to keep living.”
Oh. Yeah, okay. All at once, Toge’s anxieties rearranged themselves, three became four, and Okkotsu became Yuuta.
'You should try and look out for him, from now on.'
Maki shook her head.
“Not my job. Gojo says he’s getting a weapon soon, so I’ll be beating him up until he gets at least halfway competent at using it.”
That counted as looking out for him, but Toge said nothing.
“Why bother anyway,” Maki continued, “when he already has you.”
'What does that mean?'
But Maki had already stood up, and was heading off to bed.
'What does that mean?' he signed again, despite the fact she wasn’t looking.
“Konbu? Konbu??”
***
Three months passed in a blur, and frankly, Toge had still barely spoken to Yuuta at all, despite his best efforts. It was too easy for Toge to tell when someone was scared of him, and he saw it all over Yuuta’s face whenever they ended up alone together for even a few seconds. That was fine. Toge was a master of holding back, of patience. It barely even stung when Yuuta flinched a foot backwards after Toge tapped his shoulder outside Hapina Shopping Center…
—
“How did it go?” asked Maki, a good distance ahead of Yuuta and Panda as the four of them warmed up around the school track the next day.
“Shake,” Toge huffed, with a nod.
He left it there, and Maki didn’t press. If she had, Toge might have said something pathetic, like: I think we might be friends now, or, we made a pretty good team. Or that, for a fraction of a second, Yuuta had looked at him like maybe he was seeing something worth the blood pouring down the left side of his face.
Sitting on the bleachers a half hour later, both of them drenched in sweat, Toge glanced away from where Maki and Panda were sparring. Without thinking, he squeezed his water bottle, so a jet of it hit Yuuta directly in the face. There was a moment where Toge thought, as Yuuta’s face scrunched up in surprise, oh shit, is a special grade curse about to murder me for this ? But instead, Yuuta smiled.
“That actually felt nice!” he said, far too earnest for his own good.
It wasn’t much, but Toge never asked for much. It was as warm a winter’s day as anyone could hope for, Yuuta was his friend, and Toge was perfectly content.
***
When Gojo told him to protect Yuuta and Maki with his life, Toge agreed so readily it barely counted as an order. He didn’t have to think about it laid out over a piece of torn up concrete either, when he pushed Yuuta’s name out of his ruined throat in a last ditch effort to save him. The way Yuuta shouted his own name back at him was still ringing in his ears after Getou had gone, as he and Maki each grabbed one of Yuuta’s arms before the unsettling vision of Rika, the child.
So yeah, Toge loved him, the same way he loved the other first years. Yuuta wore the scarf he bought him. Yuuta was comfortable with the silence that came so naturally to Toge. Yuuta seemed to understand him almost as well as Maki, after barely half a year. Toge loved him for all of it in a highly sensible way, because for all his jokes, Toge was a highly sensible person when it came to himself. So it caught him completely off guard when Maki entered his room without knocking and asked:
“Do you have a crush on Yuuta?”
“Okaka?”
It wasn’t a lie. Honestly. His mind raced for a moment, trying to figure out why Maki might have asked, before signing:
'Do you?'
She crossed her arms, frowning.
“I don’t know. I’m going to try and figure it out though.”
That was so Maki, giving notice. The way she had chosen to phrase it was funny, but Toge didn’t blame her. It wasn’t like any of them had, well, any experience being normal teenagers, so approaching feelings like a math problem was fair.
He spent the whole rest of the day wondering what Maki was actually planning, how that was going to work out, and when he asked her about it the next morning (Maki had never been one to waste time), he wasn’t quite sure why his heart was beating so fast.
“Oh, yeah. I’m not interested, not like that. Look, I gave it my best shot, but in my head he’s still a beanpole. An incredible beanpole, but a beanpole all the same.”
Two thoughts occured to Toge almost at once again. The first was that Maki loved Yuuta the same way he did, as the friend that would do anything for them, who they would do anything for in return. The second was that if Yuuta didn’t have opinions on breasts, if he hadn’t been engaged to a cute albeit dead girl since the second they met, if he wasn’t still wearing that very wedding ring , Toge would be interested in the exact way Maki wasn’t.
***
It was clear, following the night parade of 100 demons and Rika’s subsequent release, that Yuuta was dealing with that and probably would be for a while. Maybe forever. Toge knew he still didn’t sleep well, so it was no surprise to find him in the common room at two am, staring at the ceiling as if wishing it would collapse on him.
“Takana?”
Yuuta started, then sunk back into the couch when he saw who it was.
“Sorry, Inumaki kun. Did I wake you up?”
Call me Toge , Toge thought, before immediately backhanding that thought out of existence, disturbed by how hopeful it sounded. Anyway, how could Yuuta have possibly woken him up just lying there?
“Okaka,” said Toge, heading for the kitchen, where he climbed on the counter and started to rifle through one of the highest shelves.
It was possible this was a stupid idea. Still, Toge had never been one to give advice. He wouldn’t know how to begin trying, especially not for something like this. The best he could do was try and distract his friend with something, well. Dumb.
“Where did you even get those?” Yuuta asked, eyeing the bag of multicolored marshmallows.
Toge whipped out his phone, not prepared to attempt the answer in onigiri:
Big international store near Tokyo Station. Maki ended up hating them. Gojo would take them off my hands right away, but I kind of want to deprive him .
“You guys are so mean to Gojo sensei,” said Yuuta, with half a smile.
Toge shrugged, and started typing again:
We don’t have anyone else to be mean to. Now let me explain the challenge …
It really was lucky that Yuuta, incredibly powerful, once special grade, probably soon to be special grade again Yuuta, could still be counted on to go along with whatever Toge suggested. There were tears of completely silent laughter rolling down his cheeks, even as Yuuta wrested him to the ground in an attempt to lay hands on his phone.
“Mentaiko, men-” he gasped, pushing Yuuta away with one foot, showing him the screen as he deleted the offending clip. Sure, he’d already made and hidden a copy, but there was nowhere he was going to share a video of Yuuta spitting fifteen marshmallows into every corner of the room. This one was for his own personal collection.
“Imagine if that’s how I died!” said Yuuta. “Choking doing the… what did you call it?”
Even if Toge could say ‘chubbi bunni’ out loud, he wouldn’t trust himself to get the words out without crying again.
Yuuta gave a weak and incredulous laugh of his own. He was smiling. Mission success.
I hear these are good over a fire , Toge typed, tilting the screen so Yuuta could see. We have a stove, but apparently that’s not the same .
“Can’t you just ask it to toast?” said Yuuta vaguely, staring off into space before blinking, straightening. “Wait… could you?”
Toge fidgeted. Yuuta still didn’t understand just how careful he was with his technique. He knew what he could do, he knew his limits as they stood, and he never tested them without heavy precautions and supervision. It was very possible that nothing at all would happen, if he told the marshmallow to roast itself. It was also possible Yuuta might erupt into flames.
He shrugged, and Yuuta seemed to understand that this meant he didn’t want to talk about it. Five seconds later however, Yuuta was the one fidgeting, looking a little like the anxious mess he had come to them as before starting:
“I think cursed speech is really cool. Sorry. I know its been…I know you’ve…” there was no need to finish the sentence, “I just think it’s interesting, especially since I kind of used it. I want to learn more about it, and I was wondering,” he glanced up at Toge, “I was wondering if you would use it on me , sometime.”
Toge stared at him. No one in his entire life had ever asked to be cursed. Well, Gojo technically, during training, but nothing could touch him, so that probably didn’t count.
“I know you probably wouldn’t want to. I just want to understand it better, that’s all.”
Yuuta was looking at him like he trusted him. They were sitting closer on the couch than Toge usually got to anyone, and with no warning that awful, traitorous notion of maybe burst back to life inside of him, clawing its way up his oh so recently healed throat.
It was still stupid, Toge knew that, and he did his best to swallow it, to focus on the ridiculous question instead. The thing was, Toge never used his technique on his friends. Never. Not for a joke, not on accident, never.
“Sorry, Toge,” said Yuuta, truly looking it, “I–”
“Sleep.”
—
Yuuta was heavy, such an incredibly dead weight that for a few terrifying seconds Toge had to check he was still breathing. He’d put everything he’d had into the curse, knowing it would be tough to win over Yuuta’s insane amount of energy even when his guard was down. He shouldn’t have done it. He really really shouldn’t have done it, and the guilt was sitting in his stomach almost as heavy as the teenage boy draped over his back, being dragged down the hall.
Toge kicked Yuuta’s door open, grunting a little as he stumbled over the threshold. He all but dumped his friend onto the bed, breathing heavy. Yuuta’s chest rose steadily up and down. He looked more peaceful than Toge had ever seen him. Disappointed in himself, Toge shut the door quietly on his way out, locked himself in his own room, and spat blood into the sink.
***
Well, that was dramatic , Toge thought, the moment he woke up the next morning. Toge didn’t do dramatics, not for real, and yet just last night he had cursed his best friend, broken his cardinal rule. Why? He didn’t think answering that question would do him any good.
When he padded into the kitchen a half hour later, his scarf wrapped as high up his face as it could go without becoming Gojo, the three other first years were already there, an empty plate for Panda (he liked to feel included), rice for Maki and Yuuta.
“You look terrible,” said Maki, flatly, “and Yuuta looks well rested for once. How does that happen?”
Toge looked up, half terrified at what he was going to see. Maki was already focused back on her breakfast, but Yuuta was looking at him, smiling softly.
Thank you , he mouthed.
Toge felt as frozen to the spot as if Yuuta had used his own technique on him. Maybe it was only the morning light streaming through the high windows, but Yuuta’s cheeks looked slightly pink. Maybe .
—
Of course, less than a week later, Gojo had an announcement for all of them. Yuuta was leaving. Yuuta was leaving for ‘at least a year’, to train the shadow Rika had left him, to regain his special grade status. Toge wasn’t surprised, not really, and he hid what was in fact crushing disappointment with reassuring Yuuta that it was going to be cool, and Miguel literally had to be less annoying of a teacher than Gojo.
One more week, and Yuuta was getting in Ichiji’s car. Toge was sure it would feel like losing a limb. He’d expect to see Yuuta at breakfast, at training, and be shocked for a while every time he remembered he was gone. But then, he’d get used to it. Toge spoke in fillings; he could get used to anything.
Yuuta waved goodbye with a wobbly smile on his face. Then he was gone. Maki gave Toge a harsh pat on the back, which he recognized as a sign of affection.
“Come on,” she said, sighing and nodding in the direction of the training grounds. “Business as usual.”
***
Three months into Yuuta’s ‘study abroad’, Toge felt he had gotten something resembling a grip. They were texting, all of the first– no, second years now, and if his heart gave an involuntary leap every time something came through from Yuuta, well, Toge had a handle on that too. He had wrestled and reasoned his reactions into what they were: a small, ultimately pointless crush. No harm no foul. What did it matter if he and Yuuta talked a little outside the group chat, too?
🍘 とげ
?Hows the food<<
Read 4:00 AM
Yuta ユータ
>>Stong. But good? I don’t want to be rude… so im just eating everything they put in front of me.
10:34 AM
“Are you smiling?” said Panda, walking back from class one day. “Oh, you are. Smiling and texting huh? Who is it?”
“Take a wild guess,” said Maki, shooting him a look.
'Not smiling,' Toge signed, safe behind his new uniform.
Maki was still giving him side eye, and he slipped his phone back into his pocket. Not. Smiling.
Toge was not smiling when Yuuta sent him pictures of interesting foods he had eaten and could never remember the names of. He was not smiling when his friend responded to his stupidest texts almost right away. He was definitely not smiling when it was obvious Yuuta was lonely, rambling, maybe not even expecting an answer.
“Toge,” said Maki, a sense of resigned exasperation in every syllable.
She had found him crouching on top of the refrigerator, holding his phone as high in the air as it would go.
“I know you’re texting Yuuta, and I know you know our wifi isn’t the problem. It’ll get through when it gets through.”
She crossed her arms, as Toge hopped down, reluctantly.
'He had a rough day, I can tell.'
“Gojo’s always telling us he wants us to feel normal. Why can’t you take his stupid advice and admit you’ve got it bad?”
Toge crossed, then uncrossed his arms right back at her
'It's literally not a big deal.'
***
Yuta ユータ
>>Ha, thanks. I’ve been sleeping okay, just a bad week.
11:28 PM
>>Wish you were here.
11:33 PM
Toge stared at the time stamps for over an hour the next morning, all through training and first period history. Wish you were here…to put him to sleep again? Or just. Wish you were here.
“Aw,” said Panda, who had sneaked up silent as the grave behind his shoulder. “Yuuta is such a sweet boy. He never texts us stuff like that.”
“Yuuta likes Toge,” said Maki.
He moved to sign NOT A BIG DEAL a little too close to her face, and found his own shoved into the nearest desk.
***
It got easier to focus on anything but Yuuta when the new first years started showing up in earnest. Megumi, who was fun to mess with, and Kugisaki, who, bless her, actually knew some of the Youtubers he followed, and Itadori, who being dead probably didn’t count.
The summer dragged on. A lot happened. Toge’s hair got longer. Yuuji came back to life. The exchange event took several of them out for a week. He took a base during the baseball game. The air around Gojo’s office was tense more often than not, as if their remaining resident special grade was making jujutsu-world-shaking decisions inside.
And yet the event that really shook Toge happened early one regular morning not long after the Kyoto kids had gone home, sitting alone in the kitchen with Maki. Panda was somewhere with Yaga. Everyone else was still asleep. Toge had dragged himself out of bed, craving a bowl of the sugary American cereal Maki usually kept hidden, and was shoveling it into his mouth with eyes half closed.
His phone buzzed, and he squinted at it from a distance.
Yuta ユータ
>>Gojo visited yesterday. He made me pose with camels…
7:45 AM
There was an image attachment Toge would have had to unlock his phone to see. He put it back down instead, wondering why Gojo would have been visiting Yuuta. Just to check in? Because he missed his favorite kind of relative? Because when you could teleport, why not, probably. Unfair… thought Toge, taking another bite of cereal.
He flicked open his messages, viewed the photo Yuuta had sent, and promptly inhaled milk directly into his windpipe. Soggy, half chewed cereal went everywhere as he choked, and Maki slammed a hand into his back, cursing.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
Toge, still wheezing, passed her the phone, which she took and appraised with eyebrows raised. They shot up even further, as she zoomed in on the photo.
“What the fuck? Did Yuuta swallow Miguel or something? What are they feeding him over there?”
To be fair, Toge knew the answer was ‘literally everything’, because Yuuta was too polite to turn anything down. But still . Most of the picture was taken up by a string of camels standing in a golden stretch of desert. In the corner was Yuuta, pointing sheepishly at them, looking like Gojo was taking the photo while holding him at gunpoint. Yuuta’s shirt was tied around his head, but the bangs peeking out from under it were much longer than Toge remembered. More strikingly, Yuuta had put on muscle. His shoulders were at least twice as broad as before, his chest and abs especially well defined in the harsh sun. He looked taller too, and tanner, and oh shit .
Even before Maki looked back up at him, Toge was scrambling to put his usual, impassive face back on. He wasn’t quick enough, apparently.
“Are you finally going to admit you have a thing for him, now that Yuuta’s gotten objectively two times hotter?”
Toge raised his hands to sign something clever, then dropped them and crossed his arms instead.
“Okaka.”
“I’m going to kill you.”
***
Toge was seriously considering going to Shoko and asking if she could turn his hormones off. His situation was spiraling quickly out of control. It was one thing to admit you had a pointless little crush on your best friend, to yourself and yourself only. It was another to be lying face down, in the dark, doing everything in your power not to picture your best friend’s back performing various activities. Peeling a shirt off. Slipping into an onsen. Standing up out of bed.
He couldn’t look at the photo again, hadn’t looked at it in three days. It was too dangerous. Against all of his enormous efforts, something like want was slipping though the carefully constructed barricade. Maybe it would be easier if he pretended it was all physical, jerked off once then made some sad dating site profile and called it a day. But he was past that, and he knew it, somewhere between all the texts, the eight months apart that hadn’t helped at all, and all the ways Yuuta was familiar like no one else was, even from across several oceans.
Toge’s head snapped up. His phone was ringing, from where he’d buried it in a pile of unwashed clothes. Grateful for the distraction, he kicked them apart until he found it, his heart sinking and rising all at once when he saw who it was.
Why was Yuuta calling him? They never talked on the phone, for obvious reasons, so why now, shit, why now? Was he in trouble? Was he hurt?
“Yuuta?” said Toge, concern blocking everything else out momentarily.
“Oh,” came the reply, slightly breathy, before Yuuta cleared his throat. “I mean, hi. Don’t worry, everything’s okay.”
Toge waited. It was so good to hear his voice, deeper maybe, more confident, but retaining it’s edge of hurried reassurance. There was something else too, a tension that suggested Yuuta was trying not to sound too excited.
“I was just wondering… do you know Maki’s favorite color? Yours is blue right?”
Do not think about Yuuta’s eyes right now.
“Shake… Mentaiko.”
“Fair enough. I’ll just guess.”
What on earth was going on?
“I’ll talk to you later okay? Thanks for picking up.”
Literally infinite question marks were zooming around Toge’s head.
“ Yuuta ,” he said, stressing it as far as he dared.
“I’ll explain later, I promise.” A pause. “I just wanted to-” there was an indistinguishable shout from somewhere behind him, “-oh, sorry, gotta go. Later!”
Toge dropped his phone back into the laundry, heart racing. How had he been about to end that sentence? Surely not, ‘I just wanted to hear your voice’. Toge’s stupid brain was making things up, it was so unlike him, and it needed to stop, right then and there.
***
Toge nearly kicked Maki’s door off it’s hinges. To their credit, neither she nor Nobara flinched, thought this might have been because they were currently practicing throwing a butterfly knife back and forth.
'I like Yuuta,' he signed, not caring if Nobara understood, at this point, which was good.
“I know you like Yuuta,” Maki repeated out loud. “Not news. And?”
'And I need you to beat it out of me.'
“No,” said Maki, simply, as a joyful grin spread over Nobara’s face.
'I'm serious. I can't like him.'
“Why?” said Nobara, shrugging when Toge stared at her. “What? We’re friends, I’m picking it up.” She performed a tiny round of jazz hands.
He turned back to Maki.
'He's probably straight.'
“Wouldn’t bet on it.”
'He's engaged.'
Nobara scoffed, as Maki flipped the butterfly knife erect and pointed it at him.
“Toge I will grant you that Yuuta probably still has some sort of strong feeling about Rika, but, look into my eyes…she’s dead. We literally watched her ten year old soul leave this mortal plane with our own eyes.”
'I just can't. I'm making it up. You know how nice he is, he doesn’t really like me that way.' Toge’s hands were moving at light speed.'That's why I have to keep it under control.'
He should have been able to keep it under control. Who was he, if he couldn’t keep himself under control?
“Have you considered,” said Maki, breathing in hard, “that you don’t have to keep this particular thing under control? That Yuuta might actually like you back?”
Toge made a big X with his arms, then threw them down.
“Okaka!”
“Fine! Then deal with it yourself and don’t ask me to punch the gay crisis out of you. And don’t you dare ask for my help again when you see him next week.”
Toge’s hands fell. What had she just said?
“Taka-?”
“Panda heard it on his way back from Yaga’s after dinner,” Nobara cut in, grinning again, unable to restrain herself. “Apparently Gojo thinks there’s another large scale attack coming for us, sooner than later. They’re bringing him home.”