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The first time Nanami drinks alcohol he is surrounded by people he reluctantly calls friends. He wouldn’t have even called them friends if it weren’t for the circumstances. In middle school his friends had been boys from his club, girls who shared his music taste and didn’t mind how withdrawn he was. There had been options, a smattering of corners and tables where he could eat lunch, a list of names he could call if he wanted to do anything during school breaks. Now, there were four people, only one of whom was actually in his year.
Sitting across from him are two boys who had been introduced to him simply as ‘the strongest:’ special grade sorcerers whose very existence tilted the cosmic scales towards the victory of sorcerers over curses. They sit shoulder to shoulder, the taller of the two nursing a strawberry soju -- his first, and already he sports a high blush and an even stupider grin than the first one Nanami had seen -- while the shorter drinks a tall can of beer like its water. The girl to his left is on her third beer already, and he can see the polished steel of a flask peeking out of the pocket of her skirt. It sloshes quietly every time she readjusts her legs under herself.
The boy on his right, the only other first year at the school, has a bottle of melon soju in his hand but hasn’t opened it. He rolls it between his palms as he listens to their upperclassmen talk. They’re telling what would amount to horror stories to anyone other than sorcerers: curses and horrific injuries melded haphazardly back together by the girl, Shoko. At one point she produces a scalpel from her boot and begins to twirl it between her fingers. She’s dextrous, and Nanami doesn’t think she’s showing off. It’s just a way to occupy her hands.
On the other hand, the special grades are undeniably showing off. Geto ties up his hair and begins to produce small curses one after the other, letting them run around briefly before squashing them in his hands. Gojo, words smashed together in a stream of consciousness Nanami can’t follow, challenges them to try to land a blow on him. For a second Nanami thinks he’s an idiot, because Geto immediately turns and punches him in the stomach, sending him curling in on himself, laughing and coughing in equal measure. But when Shoko tries to kick him in the head when he’s down her foot stops five inches from his head as if she’d kicked an invisible wall.
Both he and Haibara decline the invitation when it's first extended, but three hours later, when he’s two bottles of soju and a can of beer in and has had his fill of listening to poorly veiled bragging he invites Gojo to stand. He is fifteen, has never drank in his life, and not only does his cursed-energy filled punch roll of the infinity that Gojo creates between him, but he loses his footing and stumbles, only managing to stay standing because Geto and Haibara catch him under each arm.
It really is an incredible technique, he thinks, to have a suit of armor pulled around you at all times. Still, there are always weaknesses. The impressive kick that Haibara aims at Gojo’s hip doesn’t connect, doesn’t even come close, but in the next second Gojo’s head snaps forward with the force of the slap Geto aims at the back of his head. The weakness in Gojo Satoru’s armor drags him back to the dorm, clearly not paying any mind to his exaggerated accusations of cruelty.
Nanami is left with Shoko, who stares up at the stars with a lit cigarette hanging between her lips, and Haibara, who stands at his side and lets out a stream of consciousness that’s only barely more lucid than Gojo’s. Still, he can’t credit the gentle warmth that thrums through him purely to the alcohol, or to the breeze that still holds on to the vestigial warmth of summer. He listens to Haibara talk excitedly about already making friends in a place he was more nervous than excited about.
In all that Nanami had imagined or tried to anticipate about the college, he had never imagined laughter, or a smile as wide as Haibara’s was. He had thought that they, like himself, would have felt that their lives, their youths, their innocence ended the first moment they saw the gnarled form of a curse. Maybe they had and they were just better at hiding it, but Haibara’s wide smile, the easy way Gojo flung his head back in laughter; these things made him think that maybe this was not the end of his youth, but the beginning of a facet of youth he had just never considered.
From that night most of the time the five of them spent as a larger group was on the steps of conbinis or of the college, just outside the purview of their teachers. Geto had to buy any alcohol or cigarettes they may have wanted, as he was the only one among them who could pass for an adult, a fact that he credited to having to put up with Gojo for a full year already.
Alcohol didn’t particularly interest Nanami. He enjoyed that it dulled his irritation for Gojo enough that he could actually enjoy the boy’s stories and that it softened the world at its hardest edges, so that everything was softer and kinder.
It took him a few weeks to realize that the softening of the world wasn’t an effect of alcohol, but of company; not the company of his upperclassmen whom he respected but didn’t seek out, but his partner who dragged him to these nights out. Haibara was the most perplexing part about the jujutsu world: a boy who had seen curses since he was incredibly small, who was surrounded by the blood and viscera of the same inhospitable world Nanami found himself in but still managed to be one of the most genuinely joyful people Nanami had ever met. Even when he didn’t make it easy Haibara was still exceedingly kind, pushing him to care for himself better after missions, to interact more with their upperclassmen, to focus less on the evil they encountered and more on the good they did. He didn’t realize that the softening of one's world could be credited to love until their summer together.
The only subject Haibara was less than forthcoming about was family, which was a subject many sorcerers hated. Gojo’s family was ubiquitous and terrifying. He couldn’t tell them the name of his mother nor his father, and he didn’t speak of the attendants whose names he did remember. Shoko’s family had never had much interest in her, and even her announcement that she would be attending medical school had been met with disinterest. Geto’s family was a notable outlier. He spoke of them fondly, and would often come back from school breaks bearing bags of side dishes his mother had made for them. They always sent Gojo and Shoko birthday presents in addition to one for their son. Haibara didn’t receive mail, and though he sometimes went away for breaks Nanami didn’t think he went home.
Though Nanami would have credited asking his partner to come home with him for their summer break as a momentary lapse of sanity had anyone asked, he knew that it had just been because he couldn’t bear the thought of not knowing if Haibara were alone or not.
Unlike most of his peers, Nanami’s family was exceedingly normal. His sister had moved out when she went to college but that still left his mother and his father and the few cats that hung around their backyard because his father was softhearted and couldn’t turn away their pitiful meowing. His mother was just overjoyed that he had brought a friend home, and Haibara overjoyed to meet people who were as important to Nanami as Nanami had become to him. It didn’t occur to him that he had also become that important to Nanami.
That summer is the first time he sees Haibara drink, though he still doesn’t drink much. They’re lounged on chairs in the backyard, watching the blinking lights of low orbiting satellites and pretending they’re stars. Haibara’s eyes aren’t on the almost-stars though. He watches out of the corner of his eye as Nanami tells a story about his childhood and scratches absentmindedly behind the ears of a cat resting on his lap. None of them have names, he had explained, but all of them are loved. Things don’t need to be named to be important, he had said as he handed Haibara an unopened bottle of melon soju.
The sound of carbonation cut through the night air, followed by the sound of Haibara’s laughter. Nanami and the cat in his lap had turned towards the noise with the same curiosity.
“You’re drinking?”
“This way you don’t have to deal with your tipsy partner and three drunk upperclassmen. Just me.”
“I like it better when it’s just you.”
That night he learns that Haibara might have a better tolerance than even Shoko; his smile gets more relaxed the redder the tips of his ears become, and he’s just as good at listening as he is at speaking; he is the type to catch fireflies in empty soju bottles but leave the cap off so that they can fly away when they tire of being the lamplight between two boys. His words grow softer the more tired he becomes, until he’s all but whispering into the skin of his arm. A firefly lights briefly in his hair before it goes to rejoin the blinking satellites. That night he learns that melon soju tastes best when kissed off gently upturned lips.
Summers had never been special to Nanami. There was nothing particularly attractive about a designated season for sweating and swarms of insects, but Haibara didn’t mind that their hands were slick with sweat seconds after their fingers interlocked, and Nanami found he didn’t mind the bugs as much when Haibara was pointing them out, explaining their coloration and taxonomy as if it was the most fascinating thing in the world, because it was Haibara explaining it Nanami began to think that it was.
When they returned to the college neither Haibara nor Nanami drank when they sat on the steps of the conbini with their upperclassmen and the new first year. There wasn’t really a need for it, though Nanami did find himself tempted to test the limits of Gojo’s infinity far more often without the buffer of alcohol. The buffer of Haibara’s arm pressed to his was enough.
That year he noticed that Shoko and Geto drank more, and that Gojo no longer drank at all. He still acted like a fool just the same, but he sat a little straighter, turned a little quicker at unexpected noises. They were all different in small ways. He smiled more. Haibara’s smiles were softer, though no less radiant. For a while their days were quiet.
The week after Nanami carries all that he can recover of his best friend home he learns that the man who works at the conbini down the street from the college doesn’t care if he’s old enough to buy alcohol. His red rimmed eyes and uncombed hair are not the markers of an adult, and his hands shake as he sets his change down on the counter between them. He isn’t afraid. His hands just haven’t stopped shaking yet. Shoko had told him that a persistent tremor was a common stress response and he had told her he thought she would be a good doctor. His hands stop shaking about the time that the world becomes soft enough that it feels as if Haibara hadn’t left it, and he finds himself wondering if Shoko would recommend self medicating like this. He guesses she would. It’s an effective treatment.
That he wakes up with his tongue rancid in his mouth and his limbs still so heavy and unyielding isn’t a concern to him. It allows him to focus on becoming human again in the morning, rather than the emptiness of the room next to his. He notices other things, though. His mind is cruel and sharp no matter how much he drinks, and it points out the empty sink beside his own with a toothbrush he still can’t bear to throw out. It mocks him as he wretches into the toilet, reminding him of the time he had gotten sick and Haibara had knelt at his side, pinning his hair out of his face and rubbing his back while he wretched until he felt that the only thing left of him was what Haibara held in his hands.
The night after he finally manages to clean out Haibara’s room he wakes to the sound of far off rain, though he can’t see clouds. There is a patch of light across the grass outside his window though, and for a moment he thinks that if he waits long enough he’ll see Haibara’s shadow cross it. He had forgotten to turn off the lights in the room. The rain is the sound of moths hurling themselves at the window in search of light and warmth. When he turns off the light and curls atop a bare mattress to sleep, the rain doesn’t stop.
As time goes on it takes more and more alcohol for the world to feel as soft as it once had. It never feels as kind. Eventually, it stops even feeling soft. Eventually, it’s him with the flask in his jacket pocket. He accepts every invitation to drink with his coworkers. His hands begin shaking around midday.
It’s the girl at the bakery that makes his hand hesitate as he reaches for a bottle. The curse on her shoulder, her gentle concern for him, the way her smile pulled at the corners of her eyes. It’s all perhaps a little bit too familiar, and he finds he can’t open the bottle. He doesn’t sleep that night or the next.
His cursed technique requires him to be calm. Unflinching. Unshaking. Unhindered. The fifth day his cursed energy begins to flow properly again. When he exorcises the headfly on her shoulder the next week his hands don’t shake at all. He pours every bottle in his apartment down the sink and wonders briefly if he could blame calling Gojo on withdrawal psychosis.
As it turns out, he didn’t regret coming back to the jujutsu world as much as he thought he would. To sit safe in an office for the rest of his life would have killed him far sooner than any curse would manage. His liver would have given out or he would have found his way to the roof eventually. If he had died then he wouldn’t have been there to be the one to keep the pieces of Gojo Satoru together when he drank for the first time in over ten years, when his infinity fell apart for the second time.
Rubbing circles into his back as he wretched away peppermint liqueur was the first time he had touched Gojo. Part of him had always thought the first time he touched him would be to punch him in the nose; he never would’ve thought that he would one day find himself having to iron out the wrinkles from where Gojo had clutched his shirt or blot out flecks of sickness from his jacket. It didn’t matter to him that Gojo couldn’t do the same for him in the days after Haibara’s death, as he mourned the loss of his own best friend. What mattered was that he was there, alive and with steady hands, to ensure the world didn’t lose its strongest force for good as he felt it had so long before.
“I’ve got someone for you to look after. Itadori Yuuj.”
“The child whose heart was ripped out?”
“He got better.”
Good hadn’t left the world when Haibara died, as much as Nanami had believed that to be true. He saw goodness in Gojo, though he would never admit it. He was more willing to admit to the goodness he saw in the students at Kyoto Tech and the second and third years he’d met at Tokyo Tech, but he became a proponent of the goodness that he saw in Itadori. For anyone to look at the boy and see the marks of Sukuna’s vessel before the kindness and gentleness of a child was a failure he couldn’t easily forgive. Though he and Gojo had always agreed in their hatred of jujutsu leadership, their hatred grew with each insistence that Itadori should be killed.
To Gojo he represented a once in a lifetime possibility, someone who had broken into the jujutsu world from the outside and had the chance to better it by reducing Sukuna’s influence and by bringing his good ideals into a world dominated by greed for money and power.
To Nanami he represented a failure by adults to protect the future of children. When he thought of how Itadori had died, however brief his death had been, he couldn’t help but remember his last mission as a student. Both he and Haibara and Itadori and his friends had been sent into a situation with bad information, pitted against something they could never hope to overcome. By all accounts, they all should have died in their respective situations. However, Haibara and Itadori had put their lives at risk to save those they cared about. They had both gambled against the evil and unfairness of the jujutsu world with their limitless love and compassion and lost.
To say that Nanami had found himself invested in Itadori despite himself would be putting it far too lightly. Though his assistance wouldn’t have even been necessary, if they had heard of any further plots against Itadori by the higher-ups, he knew that he and Gojo would both be deemed curse users within hours.
In the end it made sense that he would die a jujutsu sorcerer rather than a salaryman, stuck rotting behind a desk. While he would have preferred the latter option, he had never paid any mind to his own thoughts on the matter.
Haibara...
What the hell was I trying to do anyway?
It would’ve been easier to drink myself into a stupor missing you. It would’ve hurt less. My whole body was burning. Every step hurts. Would the fall have hurt this much? Would alcohol poisoning? How did I convince myself this would be worthwhile without you?
The boy in front of him, stuck in time with the same soft smile and bright eyes Nanami had known so well, pointed across the train platform, and because he had always wanted to follow him, he looked over. Itadori, so much older than he had been when they’d parted ways. If he had done any of that, drank himself to death or let himself fall to his own personal curse, he never would’ve been able to see the familiar goodness he saw in Itadori. There would have been no one to pick up the pieces of Gojo Satoru on Christmas of the previous year.
Who had he seen on his way to this platform, to his funeral pyre? Kugisaki, Maki, Nitta. He must’ve killed a dozen curses on the streets above, a dozen transfigured humans now. He had helped Ino become a better sorcerer, and had allowed him to retain his innocence in the process. It had been a good life. He’d said it once before, to the same curse whose fingers now hooked around his ribs, but he had no regrets. Even the alcohol, despite how close it had come to killing him, had brought him some comfort. Even now he wished for the taste of melon soju.
“Itadori. You’ve got it from here.”
Finally, I can follow you.