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Nanami should consider himself lucky, he supposed. Lucky to be alive, if the ability of the curse he had confronted in the sewers was to be believed.
When its hand touched his chest, only for the briefest moment, the feeling of something shifting inside him, rippling grotesquely beneath his skin, sparked a hint of panic. When he regained his cool precision to swiftly knock the curse away, he hadn’t felt an immediate change, but he wasn’t foolish enough to believe he got away without any consequences. He had seen the deformed humans in that movie theater, heard the tearful confessions of the young man Itadori had befriended. After gathering as much knowledge as he could, he had carefully come to the conclusion that a touch from this patchwork curse spelled death.
So why was his fate so much worse, then?
"Oi, Nanami."
Why.
"Nanamiiiiin."
Why.
"Pspspsps-"
His head whipped towards Gojo, eyes narrowed behind his glasses. Though the dark lenses hid them from view, his usually unreadable emotions were betrayed by his quite prominent new features: two remarkably realistic cat ears disrupting the flow of his carefully styled hair, flattened to his head and turned back in a clear display of agitation. It didn't help that the tail he had tucked into the waistband of his pants had broken free and was currently flicking from side to side to further display his annoyance.
"Yes, Gojo?"
The silver-haired man held his hands up in a placating gesture, apologizing with a laugh, but to a trained eye, he was neither as sheepish nor as apologetic as he was putting on. The man was faker than AstroTurf.
"I thought you couldn't hear me, Nanami! I'm sure you weren't ignoring me, right? I was asking if you could hear out of both sets of ears," he said with a grin, gesturing at Nanami's predicament like it was just another casual Friday. "These might help you out."
He accepted the earplugs tossed his way accompanying Gojo's last words, putting them in his ears (the ears that belonged on his head) immediately. It did help the overstimulation, but it also annoyed him that it helped.
The need to call Gojo for help after the incident had annoyed him as well, but he knew he needed assistance getting to campus to see Ieiri about the wound in his side. He would have simply called Ijichi to pick him up...if it weren't for the fact that he was holed up in a public restroom looking like an anime convention attendee donning nekomimi. He could not, would not be seen in public that way.
Therefore, his only option was to call on the man currently standing before him. The only one capable of nearly instantaneously transporting him to the school, annoying the life out of him now that he had been released from Ieiri's care.
"Thank you," he responded in a clipped tone once the earplugs were firmly in place. He turned his attention instead to the other set of eyes on him: Itadori, who had been shifting in place, waiting for a break in Nanami's internal monologue so he could speak to him.
"Nanamin!"
That nickname again. It was slightly less irksome coming from his new charge, at least.
"I heard you got hurt," Itadori continued, "so I wanted to come see you, but...um..."
"Yes, my injury has been dealt with, but I'm left with this predicament. You shouldn’t concern yourself too much about it."
His tail gave another agitated flick to punctuate his sentence, and the young man shifted on his feet again, full of nervous energy. Itadori was always an open book, and his wide-eyed expression betrayed one thing: he desperately wanted to touch. And it was not going to happen.
"At any rate, Itadori. Haven't you been assigned to watch over that boy who made first contact with the patchwork curse?"
"Oh, yeah!" Itadori chirped, grinning. " We're supposed to eat dinner together tonight! Yaga is sending Fushiguro with me since...I guess you can't go anywhere?"
"For the time being. Well, get a move on, then."
The finality in his tone had no effect on Itadori, who broke eye contact to glance once more up at the accursed ears.
"Can I-"
"Don't waste time," he broke in, taking his leave before Itadori or Gojo had time to get another word in.
He had research to do, after all.
Ijichi, bless him, had been kind enough to offer up his office for Nanami’s use. At his disposal was a steaming hot cup of coffee, two stacks of books he’d quickly snagged from the school’s library, and Ijichi’s computer with access to a database of a wealth of restricted information.
The books wound up being pretty useless, too archaic and vague in nature to give helpful advice on his current predicament, so they were discarded to the side rather quickly.
He sat there for quite a while, tail naturally coming to curl over his thigh as he leaned forward in the chair, logging into the database with the credentials Ijichi provided. The only sound in the room was that of his fingers deftly typing in various keywords, searching through reports and articles, though it came up mostly fruitless.
“That curse mentioned changing the shape of the soul,” he muttered to himself as he drained the last of his coffee. “Why is there so little information on it? It can't be the first of its kind to do this.”
There were orange beams of afternoon light hitting the desk by then, filtering in through the half opened blinds. Impulsively, he laid one arm in the warmth of them. Then the other. And then, really, it only made sense to cross them and rest his chin on them, fully soaking up the heat that made him sleepier by the second. Maybe he was starting to understand cats a bit more clearly.
The chirping of a bird outside made his right ear swivel, diverting his attention, and he let out a sigh as his eyes cracked open. He wasn't even sure when he had closed them. At the sound of a tap against the glass, he turned his head expecting to see the aforementioned bird, but was instead greeted with the sight of...Satoru Gojo. Surely that idiot wasn't also the one who had been whistling.
'No, it's entirely possible that he was,' he conceded mentally.
“Hey again, Nyanami!”
Slowly, Nanami reached up and pulled the blinds closed, losing the blessed warmth that had been filtering through. The sacrifice was in vain anyway, because shortly after, Gojo burst through the door with dramatic flair. He had swapped his blindfold for his favorite glasses (a habit he seemed to have once work hours were over), and his hair was falling into his face messily in the sort of accidentally-on-purpose way that only men like Gojo seemed to pull off.
“Cats are just so hot and cold.”
“I’m still very much a human. Just one with additional, unwanted parts.”
“Any luck on the research?”
“None,” he replied with a quiet huff, all the more frustrated at admitting defeat out loud. "But I plan on staying late to keep looking."
"Overtime! Your most hated word! Want some company?"
"Do whatever you want," he replied, expression mild as he swiveled the chair back to properly face the desk. "We both know you will, anyway."
"Oh, you know me too well."
Gojo's company wasn't so bad to have, really. Annoying as he could be, he brought with him a levity that was rare in the Jujutsu world, full of stuffy traditionalists and depressed trainwrecks. Nanami himself sat somewhere inbetween the two, he supposed.
"You have to get inventive with your search terms, by the way. We've got guys like you doing reports like they’re creative writing projects, trying to look fancy. Makes it hard to find anything. Try 'modification'," he supplied, hands coming to rest on Nanami's shoulders.
His reports were perfectly unbiased and plainly written, but he wasn't going to argue that point. Gojo's thumbs were rubbing over the tense muscles between his shoulder blades, and it was distracting. He typed in the term, hit the enter key and skimmed the search results briefly.
"Nothing relevant."
"Alteration?"
More typing. Gojo's hands sliding dangerously from rubbing his shoulders to card through his hair. He narrowed down the search further but still found nothing of interest.
"Afraid not."
"Ah, I've got it!" The other said with a click of tongue against teeth, making his ears perk up at the sound. "'Transfiguration' is just pretentious enough!"
'Idiotic,' Nanami thought. 'No one would write a report using terminology like that.' And yet, as soon as he hit enter, there were two results in the database, each looking promising: Curse-Caused Transfiguration and Transfigurative Curses. The obtuse wording of the titles furrowed his brow. Was transfigurative even a real word? Who wrote this trash?
He ignored Gojo's triumphant snickers to open up the first article, as he was slightly less offended by its title than the second. Finally, as he skimmed through it, he saw information that could be of use, and he snatched up a notepad laying off to the side to start jotting down notes. Gojo's restless hands were in motion again, though. His fingers found the base of each of his new ears, rubbing softly where hair gave way to short, soft fur. It forced his eyes closed for just a moment, head involuntarily tilting back a bit, but he regained his focus with a hard blink and carried on scratching the pen across the page feverishly.
"Don't distract me."
"Distracting? I thought I was helping," the other man replied with a mock pout.
"Don't distract me," he repeated, unyielding as he gave his attention back to the article.
Gojo, being himself, didn't relent. That was expected though, considering the previously stated information that, well...this was Gojo. So he settled somewhere between ignoring the man's presence and allowing himself to enjoy the impromptu massage. Besides, his words had been chosen carefully. 'Don't distract me,' not 'don't touch me.' His intended meaning was clear enough.
Strong fingers skimmed along where the ears met his scalp, smoothed over the backs of them, pinched gently to rub swirls near the tips with the pads of his thumbs. Every few moments he found himself slumping forward a bit too far in his chair, eyes falling half-lidded, and he'd have to pull himself out of it to refocus his attention. He'd managed to make it through the first report, at least. His tail unfurled from its resting place on his thigh of its own volition, swaying back and forth languidly.
"Really got the engine going, huh?" Gojo asked, mirth obvious in his voice.
He was about to ask what on earth he was talking about, until he suddenly tuned in to the low rumble filling the small office, then promptly realized it was emanating from his own chest. Purring...how humiliating. It seemed the curse that did this to him had quite the sense of humor. He would give it one hell of a punchline the next time he encountered it.
"I distinctly remember asking you not to distract me," he chided, shaking his head to rid himself of the man's hands.
Unperturbed, Gojo's hands found their way into his pockets as he stepped back from the chair. "I'll make it up to you with dinner. My place?"
"If the food you offer me is any sort of joke or play on cats, we will fight."
No response from the ever-annoying man, so he continued.
"Yes, fine. Dinner at your place. I’ll pick this up again in the morning."
'Dinner' was a can of albacore tuna and a shallow bowl filled with cream. Coincidentally, that evening Nanami broke his personal record for consecutive uses of black flash.