Work Text:
The incident that truly kickstarts Itadori's career as a domestic accident clown can be traced back to Gojo Satoru. Probably. Nobara can't know for certain. In theory, it could have been someone elsewho stole all the knives in the communal kitchen to set up several death traps everywhere inside the school. Gojo-sensei never admitted to any wrongdoing, but he didn't deny it either, and loudly proclaimed his admiration for whoever had instigated such a brilliant training exercise.
In any case, when in doubt, blaming their trainwreck of a teacher is always a sure bet, or so Nobara has come to understand after months under his gentle care and mindful supervision. Even if by some anomaly in the cosmos he's not directly responsible, then at some point in the chain of events that led to the catastrophe, there is bound to be a bored Gojo Satoru somewhere.
Results are that there are no knives to use except the really blunt ones that couldn't be used to scratch a low level cursed spirit. At the time, they don't know what the missing knives have been used for, or they would have run through the school until they stumbled upon one, one way or another. They could have waited until the school staff took upon themselves to remedy the lack of kitchen supplies, but Nobara has been promised 'the best oyakodon of her life' and is not willing to renounce her prize due to minor technicalities.
So Itadori does the logical next step and barges in Fushiguro's room to ask to borrow his katana.
Fushiguro slowly raises his head from his book to stare at him with such a high concentration of condescension lesser men would have withered or exploded on the spot, and says: "No."
Fushiguro, it can never be stated enough, is a dull, boring, stick-in-the-mud chicken who cannot possibly comprehend the comical potential of using a sword to cut vegetables.
"Told you so," Nobara snickers, sticking her tongue at her loser of a classmate. "We should have asked Maki-san."
Maki, unlike Fushiguro, can in fact comprehend the comical potential of using a sword to cut vegetables.
"If you lose a limb, don't blame me," she says as she throws one of her many cursed tools at Itadori's chest with stunning accuracy.
Maki, unlike Fushiguro, is awesome. She must have snatched all the good genes in her clusterfuck of a family, leaving all the boorishness to her sullen relatives. That's the only reason Nobara can come up with to explain how Maki sprouted out of the same place her bitch sister and Fushiguro did.
At first, the experiment proceeds well enough. Nobara sits on the counter to paint her fingernails while Itadori does all the work, which is exactly the way life is meant to be. She's got that new electric blue color she's been looking forward to trying. It practically cost her an arm, but such is the prize of beauty products that can survive her lifestyle. The saleswoman, though looking slightly baffled by the question, assured her it would outlast blood stains, floods of sweating and repeated hammer smashes.
So, by the time she has finished the first layer over all her fingers and is waving her hands in the air for faster drying purposes, everything is going according to the plan. It seems likely Nobara will get her free meal after all. Itadori, despite being a massive dumbass in any other regard, is actually a fairly decent cook. He looks right at his place prancing around the kitchen, wearing Panda-senpai's kuma-bear themed apron with a lack of self-consciousness few teenage boys can afford. He might make a decent house husband for a tolerant spouse, somewhere in the far away future of distant adulthood.
If he, you know, survives up to that point.
"Hey," she calls out.
Itadori grunts in acknowledgement without stopping his cutting business, tears in his eyes. "What?"
She leans forward. "Can you imagine Sukuna as a house husband?"
Apparently, Itadori and his tiny, tiny brain cannot imagine his demon king parasite as a house husband. The knife rips off its intended course, and Itadori's finger makes a squishy then a cracking noise Nobara knows from experience are not good sounds for limbs to make.
She might not get that meal she so deserves anytime soon.
"The moment I hijack his body for good, you'll be the first to die, bitch." Sukuna spurts out a mouth under Itadori's rather impressive right eyeshadow. Neither Nobara or Itadori pay him any attention. It's not like they're not used to death threats on the regular.
Plus, Itadorii has other priorities to deal with.
"Oh dang," Itadori moans forlornly as he stares down at the severed tip of his index fallen on his cutting board. "My onions!"
Nobara bursts out laughing right at the moment Fushiguro barrels in the kitchen, attracted to chaos like a fly to shit. Damn, he must have been lurking in the vicinity to show up the second it went south. That fucking mother hen. Itadori looks up to him with child-like faith as if Fushiguro is going to rescue his onions out of sheer competence at damage control, while Sukuna's glare is filled with something that is decidedly not childlike.
It might actually be the funniest thing that ever happened to Nobara, and she just can't stop laughing. She can't even be bothered to care that her nail polish has been ruined by the commotion. Whatever has been piling up in her chest pours out of her like a torrent as she rides the tide, unsure where it leads her but well passed the point to give a fuck.
Fushiguro, instead of focusing on the vegetable tragedy, has taken the tough decision to prioritize the delivery of first aid on Yuji's now embarrassingly shorter finger. Once his patient has stopped bleeding like a pig over the counter and has upgraded his condition to bleed like a pig inside the kitchen towel, Fushiguro spares yet another Meaningful Glare to Nobara.
"What?" She rolls her eyes. "It's not like it won't grow back."
"Count on that, bitch," Sukuna growls.
Fushiguro's mouth curves downward. The finger grows back. Nobara has now full legitimacy to laugh her ass off guilt free, and there is nothing holier-than-you Fushiguro can do about it.
She hopes Maki-san won't be mad that Itadori put all his weird blood over her weapon, though.
"Uh," Maki makes a considerative noise when Nobara returns her fiercely cleaned cursed tool. "I wonder what would have happened if I had said 'don't blame me if you get stabbed with it.'"
"Salmon," Inumaki-senpai concurs from the couch.
At least Nobara assumes he's agreeing with the general sentiment. She's not nearly as skilled at Inumaki's decoding as Fushiguro is. He seems to be sewing back his uniform. From what Nobara can spot, he too had an unfortunate encounter with knives.
"Sorry," Nobara says sotto voce, before admitting what she would never admit to anyone else. "It was kinda. A little bit. You know. My fault."
Maki pats her head once. "I'd say don't make a habit out of it, but you first-years are such a disaster team."
"Salmon." Inumaki-senpai repeats with emphasis.
Itadori makes a habit out of it, to Fushiguro's quiet despair. Less than a month later, Nobara is crouching in the street to hunt down the arm that has seceded from Itadori's body after he went under a truck. It's not even that Itadori needs it back, but Nobara knows better than to let body parts lie around where anyone bad-intentioned might use it. Who knows what a high level curse or a curse user could do with such a big chunk of whatever Itadori is now to work with.
On her way back to the epicenter of the clusterfuck, severed arm in hand, she grabs the phone of a kid recording the scene, smashes it on the floor and steps on it to kill it dead for sure.
"Get a life, nerd," she hisses. The kid recoils as if it was his soul she has just destroyed.
Itadori grins up sheepishly when she marches in his direction. He's sitting on the road surrounded by his own blood, truck pieces that have not survived the collision with him, and the remains of Nobara's afternoon of shopping. The arm has already grown back, possibly due to Fushiguro's bare hands on his broken leg.
"Sorry about your new clothes, Kugisaki!" Itadori says with offensive brightness. "I'll make it up to you, I promise! Eh, is that my arm? Dunno what I'm going to do with it but thanks!"
Nobara is tempted to hit his fucking beaming face with his own amputated limb. She might have exactly that if Fushiguro wasn't there to frown disapprovingly at her. Why the hell did he have to ruin their perfectly pleasant afternoon for the sake of one granny they didn't even know? It's always like this with Itadori. She can't even trust him to carry her bags safely.
"It's going to hurt," Fushiguro points out in a flat tone. Even he must agree that Itadori does deserve the pain for being the dumbest fucker to ever dumb fuck around.
"Uh, yeah, I kno-AAAAAAAAAH!"
Nobara kneels down to inspect Fushiguro's work, and whistles. A clean and efficient move. He does have a talent for setting back bones, which is a necessary skill to cultivate when constantly subjected to Itadori's antics.
"Nice." She nudges Itadori's calf with the tip of her foot. Fushiguro swat her shoe away. "Tch, can we go now? We gotta bail out before the meds and the cops show up. Ijichi-san is waiting for us down the street."
"Aw, you called Ijichi-san?" Itadori, that ungrateful bitch, has the nerve to pout.
"Of course I called Ijichi-san, that's what he's here for."
He's probably crying behind his wheel at the PR nightmare he'll have to deal with. As long as he can keep driving while sobbing his eyeballs out, Nobara doesn't care. Multitasking is the main quality to look for in a good minion.
Either as a payback for his trouble or an excuse to see his crush, Ijichi forces them all to visit Ieiri-sensei. She takes one look at Itadori's blood stained clothes and the severed arm he put in the front pocket of his hoodie, and blinks.
"Can I have that?" She asks, pointing at Itadori's belly and the white hand poking out.
"Yes?" Itadori squeaks.
"Wonderful. Leave it next to the corpse on your left. You can go now."
It doesn't stop there. Itadori is not one to stop, oh no. Itadori is the type that escalates. Itadori is a goddamn accident elevator in an endless tower. If there is a ceiling, he broke it along ago and kept climbing up. He sliced himself, burnt himself, froze his fingers, fell down the stairs too many times to count.
That's not even mentioning the injuries he inflicts upon himself during fights, but that's just the job. Nobara too repeatedly resorted to using her own body to win an advantage over her opponent, and she's not fucked up like Itadori is. A sorcerer's body is their weapon and all that jazz. If you can't stand the blood and the pain, then you should switch courses before you break down or die, whichever comes first.
"I sure hope you treat your weapon better than Itadori does his meat, Kugisaki," Maki says flatly.
Nobara beams in what she hopes is an endearing way. Gojo-sensei once told her she grew on people like mold, but what does he know anyway? He's the living embodiment of what happens when rot deludes itself into believing it's a person. "My weapon won't fix itself back to normal spontaneously though."
"That's a good point," Panda-sempai, who has been at least partially responsible for Itadori's rough meetings with the stairs, agrees. Eh, it's not like Itadori didn't explicitly ask for the extra training. "It always grows back anyway."
"That's what I said!"
They high five each other. Panda-senpai's palm is incredibly soft to the touch, so Nobara ends up cooing at it and momentarily forgets about The Itadori Problem that shouldn't be her problem anyway.
Still, in spite of Panda-sempei's more than welcome external validation, she keeps on thinking about it. The idea that Itadori may not actually be escalating in his extremely casual lack of respect for his own body, but she's the one who started to pay attention to a long on-going issue, moves rent free in her head and refuses to leave.
She keeps on thinking about it so much, in fact, that even Gojo-sensei takes notice.
"So, like, do you need to see a counselor or something?"
Nobara reacts to that appealingly awful statement the way any sane person would. "Ah? Who said I was going crazy? I'll fucking kill them."
"Aw, no one said that, Kugisaki!" Gojo-sensei beams as he pats the top of her head. He narrowly avoids getting a nail drilled in his palm. "We all already know you're crazy!"
"Why are you asking then?" She snaps, before the implications of what he said fully sinks in. "Wait. Do we even have a counselor? I have never heard about it."
He laughs brightly. "Haha, no, we don't! How would we explain the dangers we put you kiddoes through on the regular to someone who isn't a sorcerer?"
"What about someone who is a sorcerer?"
Not for her sake, obviously. Rumors of her instability of mind have been greatly exaggerated. But maybe if they had a shrink on hand, she could throw Itadori at them until they find whichever head screw has been lost to the warfare against Sukuna and put it back. She's pretty sure she can count on Fushiguro to hold down Itadori if she needs to drag him to the brain doctor.
His smile turns even more unhinged. "Hm? Oh, that's not possible. Sanity and our line of work are hardly compatible, Kugisaki, you must have noticed by now."
So Nobara takes all those wanted, persistent, wimpy thoughts, and she does what she does best: nail them to death. Quickly enough, her head turns into a mass burial ground, and it's all Itadori's fault. Why should she have a fuck to give on how he bullies his stupid, cursed living corpse and doesn't even seem to notice? What should she care about the way Fushiguro shatters over and over the glass Itadori breaks every other day?
It's not like it's his body anymore, anyway. That's what being a receptacle of the king of all evil means. It means wounds run deeper than skin, flesh and bones, deep enough no one can see them anymore, so deep their existence might as well be hearsay.
It means it won't matter in the end. It doesn't matter now. It doesn't matter at all.
"Hey, Itadori?" She muses, idlessly tinkering with her hammer.
He turns his head. "Yeah?"
They have been left to their own devices once again due to Gojo-sensei having some kind of emergency or whatever. Or he just didn't want to come, that's also a distinct possibility. Fushiguro, still a dull, boring, stick-in-the-mud chicken, has decided to put his free time to 'good' use and work on his homework, like the nerd he is at core. Nobara still can't believe he used to have street cred in middle school.
So Nobara and Itadori find themselves drifting in the school with nothing constructive to do, which may not be the best idea ever, in retrospect.
"How many nails do you think you can destroy with your spiritual energy before I manage to bury one in your hand?"
Itadori takes a moment to ponder on the question. "I dunno. Wanna try out?"
The answer is: more nails than Nobara has on her presently, and zero if she distracts him by yelling: "Oh my god, Jennifer Lawrence!" and pointing dramatically behind his back.
"That's so lame, Kugisaki," Itadori laments, staring at the nail tearing his hand apart from back to palm. "Don't give a guy false hopes like that! I thought we were bros!"
Nobara is laughing so much her fingers shake when she tries to remove the nail. She could just make it explode, and it would go as fast as to struggle to pull it out. Isn't this the funniest thing ever?
"Itadori. Kugisaki."
Itadori freezes. Nobara's laughter withers in her throat as she tilts her sideway to check the intruder. Uh. It's that stiff old man Itadori went on a mission with a while ago, the one who fought against the patchwork curse on a vendetta with Itadori. What does he want?
"Oh, hey Nanami! We were just-"
"I know what you were doing," he drones on like a robot. "I'll be confiscating this."
And then the bastard takes Nobara's hammer.
"Oh shit," Itadori quickly realizes the urgency of the situation. "Uh, Nanami, you do not want to do that, trust me. It's cool, I"m totally fine, look!"
Nobara stands up. Everything feels cold and hot at once, disjointed, unbearable, unacceptable. Something within her keeps on snapping and pulling back together and snapping again, at a frequency too high to follow. "Give. It. Back."
Garbage Man remains unfazed in front of his incoming demise. "You may have your weapon returned to you once you have proved you can be trusted with it."
Itadori has to hold her back from throwing herself at him to claw his face with her brand new nails. "THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, ASSHOLE? YOU'RE NOT OUR TEACHER!"
"And I thank god everyday for that blessing." he says as he walks away, Nobara's hammer in the pocket of his dumb, ugly suit. "Still, I am the adult in the room, and I have the responsibility to intervene when children are in danger."
Nobara bucks against Itadori's chest like a crazed horse. No matter how hard she kicks him, he doesn't let go. She may or may it be foaming at the mouth from sheer rage. She may or may not have cursed his mom, and his mom's mom, and his mom's mom's mom. She may or may not have bitten to the bone the hand she nailed earlier.
"Nanami, man, that's not cool!" Itadori yells at his back. "You can't take her weapon, what if curses attack again?"
"I doubt Kugisaki only has one hammer." Which is true, because Nobara is not an idiot. Still, he has no right to take what's hers. It's hers. Her weapon. Her first weapon. He could have stolen her panties and she wouldn't have felt so humiliated. "Come to me once you have pondered over the consequences of your actions."
The only thing Nobara is going ponder about is where in the school grounds she can safely bury his corpse after she slaughtered him. The second Itadori shows a weakness, she'll bolt forward and kick the bastard to death.
Itadori remains calm, unwavering and unforgiving, an ocean to Nobara's torrent or Fushiguro's pound. Nobara breathes, then breathes, then breathes. Slowly, joints are put back together.
"Okay, you can let me go now."
"Can I?" Itadori wonders in a disturbingly
"Yeah."
"'kay."
He lets her go. Nobara doesn't run.
"What's the plan now?"
Itadori gives her the thumb up. "We steal it back, of course! But without hurting Nanami. Not seriously, at least."
That's one way to 'prove she can be trusted with it.' A campaign Nobara can get behind. Slightly hindered by the fact they can't even find him. They look everywhere in the school, and stumble upon three knife traps that had yet to be triggered, but no Nanami.
At some point, they have no other choice but to require the input of 'high forces'. Nobara has no idea how Fushiguro qualifies as such, but if anyone can understand what goes through the brains of boring old men, it would be him.
"You need to apologize."
Nobara bristles immediately. "I'm not apologizing to that dick."
"Not to Nanami-san."
Fushiguro stays blank-faced. Nobara blinks. Glances around. Stares insistently at Itadori.
"What, me?" Itadori scratches the back of his head. "I don't see why you would need to apologize to me, though?"
And that's exactly the problem, isn't it? He doesn't see. He's head deep into the mire of crass, blood and entrails the sorcerer world is built on, and he can't see anything else. Fushiguro doesn't know how to pull him out, despite being part of the reason Itadori ended up there in the first place.
No one knows.
"Fine," she snarls at Fushiguro, at Itadori, at the whole goddamn world. "Fine, you want it, you can have it. I'm sorry. I'm sorry we're all fucked up in the head. I'm sorry I'm fucked in the head too. Are you fucking happy now?"
She takes all her not quite dead thoughts and all her useless apologies and all her unasked for feelings, and she bails out. Itadori finds her maybe two hours later, throwing pebbles at birds from the roof.
"There, I, uh, I made oyakodon?"
Nobara grants the offering a scathing but reluctantly hungry look. "Is it finger free?"
"Duh," Itadori takes that question as an enthusiastic invitation to sit next to her. "I mean, I did use my fingers to cook, but they stayed where they were supposed to, upon my word."
He hands over chopsticks. Nobara gives it a try. She's forced to admit it's by far the best oyakodon of her life.
"So, Fushiguro and I have been talking-"
Nobara immediately cuts in. "If you confessed your gross gay feelings to each other and had awkward virginal sex, I don't want to know about it."
"What? No!" Itadori chokes over nothing in the most hilarious way possible. "We talked about the fact my repeated injuries can, uh. Bother you guys."
"Okay," Nobara says without any intonation whatsoever.
"And that I need to be more careful."
"Okay."
"Cause my body is. Precious, or something."
"What did I say about gross gay feelings?" Nobara narrows her eyes at him.
"It's not!" Itadori spurts.
"Okay. Cool. Whatever you say."
"Look, contrary to popular opinion, I do know I'm. How did you call it again? Fucked up in the head. Yeah, I'm fucked up in the head. I just want to make as much good as I can before I kick the bucket before I die, you get me?"
Not really. Itadori is one of a kind. Whoever is up there broke the mold after they made him. It was too good for this world. "Yeah."
"Okay. Cool. Well, I'll try to be uh. Less self-destructive."
For you guys, if not for me, goes unsaid. Nobara doesn't address it.
"...I'm sorry I put a nail in your hand. And the other stuff. That wasn't cool."
By a mutual and unspoken agreement, they classify the feeling talk as over and done with, not to be reproduced anytime soon.
Nanami returns her hammer in the evening. Nobara can only assume rumors of her public apologies have spread to his ears and have been deemed decent enough.
"Good job," he only says. "Take care of your teammates."
A week later, she uses her hammer to smash Itadori's head against the bathroom cupboard when he cuts his cheek shaving. A mountain of beauty products, pills and what looks like one of Gojo-sensei's curse experiments crashes over him.
"Learn to take care of yourself, moron," she yells, her mouth full of toothpaste.
"The hell?" Itadori screeches in return. Her spare conditioner has fallen on his head and spread over his hair. Considering his terrible hair care routine, that can't hurt anyway. "T'was an accident, just a scratch! This is not even your bathroom! You have your own!"
"The light is shit there! How am I supposed to exorcise my pores in these subpar conditions?"
"I hate you both," Fushiguro declares as he walks in to save his toothbrush from the disaster. "I hate you both so much."