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Getou Suguru lounges, chin perched on the delicate crook of his palm and legs crossed, the darkness that had simmered deep in his core in their school days now fluttering on his skin like a brilliant cloak, his smile still serene and otherworldly. His face splits to brandish teeth, tongue dipping grotesquely to trace the edge of his lip. "C'mon, now, Nanami. On your knees."
Nanami stiffens, feels the tight knit of his fingers unsplay, the webbing between sticky with blood a nauseating reminder of the reason he’s here. His face twists momentarily, resignation plastering his eyelids shut, before Getou laughs, sharp and bright and cutting.
“I’m kidding! I’m kidding!” Getou straightens, slips out of the schooled fold of limb and cloth and into a broad grin and splayed legs, calling Nanami over, at which the younger scoffs almost reflexively. He reaches forward--slender fingers, pale and long and outstretched so very like the few times Nanami had seen him call a curse into his orbit--and again Nanami hesitates, finding himself lost. Even in this abstract space, there are rules, there is a structure under which the individuals caught in the webbing operate; Nanami dips his head, lets Getou’s broad palm wrap the span of his chin as the older settles on his knees.
To disengage from one net is to be caught in another, but the grooves that the bindings of jujutsu society had worn in his skin are deep with familiarity and abrasively tender, and here Getou seems delighted to run his nails along their welts as he ties him anew.
“Who do you think I am?” Getou murmurs, pressing fluttering fingers into the ridges of his cheekbones, eyes glittering with interest, sizing him up--the compliance with which he bends to allow Getou access to his head, the cock of his hip and the schooled cross of his hands which rest against the soft dip at the small of his back. “I’d never bother my juniors like that…” He smiles with the crease of his eyes, drags Nanami’s head forward. Unlike someone.
Nanami feels a hot pulse at his temple, an unbidden thought; This is a man rent in two, estranged from his own soul, Nanami can feel the torn edge of Getou’s being brushing against his eyelids as he digs thumbs into the marble planes of his face.
“Did you want me to help you,” Getou breathes against his face, other arm reaching up to hook around his throat, looping like he’s stranded at sea, pulling himself against a buoy. It makes Nanami cringe, before anything else, nose scrunching in another momentary flash of displeasure. He rationalizes these as, from now on, part of the experience under Getou’s hand.
Nanami swallows, swallows the flush crawling from beneath his three-piece suit and the pride stinging bile against the base of his tongue, and uncrosses his wrists. He slides his blood-marred hand against Getou’s cheek, leaves a smear of his print over the alabaster skin of his face, both insult and offering at his altar.
Getou’s eyes widen fractionally, a brief gasp punching from the gap in his maw, before stretching again, grin bordering manic. He giggles like breaking glass to obscure the quiver of his jaw, a spritely counterpart to the smooth, calm register of his voice, and turns his head to press a kiss to Nanami’s wrist.
“You have nothing to confess. You haven’t done anything wrong, Nanami,” He drags him forward until he crumples, lands kneeling before Getou, who shifts to sit back on his ankles, “It’s just pest control. You’ve done the world a favor.” He keeps Nanami’s head cradled against his throat, Nanami’s hand hanging limp in the air.
“Make no mistake, I’m not here for your nonsense. Please save your consolations for someone who would make use of them.” Nanami says, tone clipped and even. Getou’s eyes glitter again, arm unlooping so he can frame Nanami’s face in the clutch of his hands. Here, a man, with sunken eyes and slender face, wrestled into submission by a material reality from which Getou can free him, tongue still vicious in its truths and jujutsu still deft and lethal. The world before his eyes parts, sorcerers affirming sorcerers: he never would have said no. He smooths over the darkened hollow of his under eye with a simmering affection.
“Oh, I know, I apologize,” Getou says. He drops Nanami abruptly, making his neck jerk with the sudden loss of support (a good sign, something that makes Getou lick his lips). He watches with an appraisingly narrowed eye as Nanami gathers himself to sitting, wrists once again crossed as they settle politely in his lap, “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, Nanami-kun.”
He always seems to smile, tranquil, face still smeared in monkey blood, “I guess you’re still the type to prefer talking straight, hm? I guess we have lots to catch up on.” He gesticulates as he talks, but not with the jerky punctuation characteristic of the business world, his wrists loose and fingers splaying, the dance of a snake in the water.
Nanami huffs a sigh.
He finds Getou again on the steps, kneeling with sponge in hand and white rag tied loosely about his head, gojo-gesa reverently flipped along his back so as to not contact the floor. Something about it is oddly humanizing for the other curse user, no leering glare and dramatized lighting, only simplistic humility befitting of his dress; Though, Nanami supposes, he no longer has authority on the qualifications for human, having existed solely for his leash to be passed from hand to hand. Ideologically adrift. Without meaning.
He makes to greet his new master, but instead finds himself met with a smile, a wag of the hand and a soft bark of his name.
“Nanami! The accommodations are to your liking?” He turns to face the younger, weight still resting on his hands. Nanami ignores the trivial question, his state of living is not subject to his “liking”--maybe, one day, he will learn to resolve himself to something greater than survival, but it’s all he can stomach at this point. Instead, he fixes his gaze on Getou’s hands, nods towards them.
“Ah, I noticed you were dripping when you came through. Can’t have my building contaminated with monkey blood.” He explains easily, punctuating the speech with a scrub to a dark splotch against the concrete. In his speech, there is no waver, none of the desperation of his clutch against Nanami’s front, settled well into his skin.
He cleans it himself..?
Nanami clears his throat. “I didn’t realize you had such inclinations. I’ll try to be more careful about my hygiene next time, Getou-san.”
Getou laughs warmly and uses the back of his arm to wipe the sweat gathering at his temples, the dark fabric of his yukata sagging low to bare the svelte shadows of the musculature of his arm. “Not quite acquainted with calling me Master, Nanami-kun?”
It startles Nanami into half of a laugh, a breathy intake that drops his lip and pulls a spasm from his diaphragm, and Getou’s smile simply widens.
Nanami leaves him there, kneeling on the steps, own brow furrowed and scrubbed hands buried deep in the pockets of his slacks.