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Sometimes Kento will think. He thinks at his bedside with the sheets folded and the top drawer open at his desk, with his phone in his hand buzzing with texts that he reads one, twice, thrice each morning before he opens the blinds of his small window and prepares himself for the day.
gm nanamin! - Itadori Yuuji. 7:43
woah isn't the sky pretty today?
He swipes through the pictures on his phone as he eats his breakfast. Pictures of hot meals that don't get posted anywhere, but Kento likes having them, even if he is the only one who sees them. Sunrise after sunrise after sunrise after sunrise after sunrise from the window of a plane taking him across the country to all his potential deathbeds, each snapshot of a domestic flight coloured with the reds and pinks of the daybreak, the clouds soft, tame, domesticated in the lower third of the screen.
Kento is good at taking pictures - he divides all his photos into the rule of three and at a glance, they are lovely, artful to the naked eye. He has, too, pictures of Itadori-kun, selfies the boy has sent him. Kento saved these to his phone, staring steadfastly at the ceiling.
ykno - Itadori Yuuji. 7:52
i kinda wish it was like this forever
Sometimes Kento will think about Itadori-kun's scheduled execution, planned as easily as a trip between cities. He thinks: he could take him away.
"Did you sleep well last night?" Kento says as a greeting.
Itadori-kun grins and tosses an energetic thumbs-up at him, his hoodie patterned with creases that tell Kento that it has been living for a while in a crushed and crumpled up state.
"Yeah! Thanks for asking, Nanamin."
"That's good," Kento nods. He opens the backseat of the car and tilts his head to the driver, a younger assistant, through the mirror. She returns his acknowledgement with a tentative smile. He doesn't recognise her, which means that she must be relatively new, because Kento makes it a rule to catalogue the names of all the jujutsushi he may be in contact with.
It's a habit leftover from his days in the company, keeping diligent track of employers and employees and coworkers and clients alike. Networking in the jujutsu world is in many ways very similar, with the added clutter of clan politics and traditions, the added complexity of curses and cursed techniques. Mostly, he can confidently say that both are shit.
Itadori-kun clambers in from the other side of the car and smiles awkwardly at the assistant, who pointedly doesn't reply, aside from a polite nod.
They are scheduled for a mission outside of the city, so the drive is long. They pass by buildings that fade into trunks and canopies and high branches, all lit up by the light of early day and gleaming with the rain from last night. The road is a grey blur outside the window and the world feels somewhat atemporal, like they are existing outside of the constraints of time.
In the distance, the horizon trembles, a wobbling, fuzzy line - blue melting into the bleak gold of long, dying grass.
Partway through the drive, Itadori-kun's idle singing goes quiet, and he falls asleep on Kento's shoulder. The weight of his head is heavy, his skull feeling strangely fragile.
Kento is aware of the boy breathing. It is soft like smoke.
There was a mission that Kento went on many years ago, one of the last before he left the jujutsushi and buried himself in business and money and that small bakery on the street corner. He remembers the curses they fought vaguely, in blurs of spasming miasma and distorted chattering - Gojo had played around with his share of the targets, curious about what nonsense they were spilling, and Kento remembers wearing himself out on the stairwells and returning to Shoko outside the barrier with blood sticking to the back of his clothes, to the damp threads around the torn fabric.
She had been leaning against a wall, touching the tip of her cigarette to a dark red lighter. The flame had been warm and bright, and something in Kento had the feverish thought that there was no place for it left in the world, that there was no place for warmth to belong. Everything seemed empty back then. Gojo had been colder back then. When he emerged from the building brushing a speck of dust from his shoulder, he looked at the smoke rising from the lighter flame into the air, curling like some flying creature of myth, dragon-like, and they all politely averted their gazes from the manic thing that entered his eyes.
After that mission, Kento thought often about temporality - the linear progression of time, moving forward and onward and outward and backward backward backward because Gojo, these days, still has that ghost about him that rests its hand on his shoulder, strings black through his white strands. Time is not a thing that can be balanced. Not like spreadsheets. Mixing the past and the present and the future cannot cancel any of them out. The future doesn't neutralise the past.
Kento has thought about this, but some part of him still tries. If he rests his hand on Itadori-kun's shoulder and moulds his palm to the youthful curve, will it drain away the years of labour, grief and weariness carved into his face? Will it remind him that there are things that are living? Does it remind him of the cycles of the day, that when the sun sets in the evening, it returns, inevitably, to climb from the horizon the next day over?
The boy asks him once where he would like to go for a holiday.
"I used to just wanna go to Tokyo," says Itadori-kun sheepishly. "I used to think all the lights were cool, and I was gonna try out a capsule hotel, and then I was gonna go home to my grandpa and show him all my photos."
He hums.
"And now I'm living in Tokyo!" says Itadori-kun. "And, well. I guess I could still show my grandpa those photos… Haha, he's kinda living in his own capsule hotel, don't you think?"
Kento runs a hand through his hair.
"I've always wanted to go to Malaysia," he says.
"Oh," says Itadori-kun thoughtfully. "I bet it would be warm there."
The thing is, Itadori-kun has been set out to die. So in him, it all is combined. Beginnings and endings. The past and the present. The dead are dead and the dead will die.
Kento rests his eyes on the boy's back as he runs out in front on the street, excitable and young. They are going out to eat today and Kento is treating them both to something sweet and insubstantial afterwards. He thinks about Haibara. Geto. Classmates and schoolmates and workmates, all dead sooner than their dates should have been.
Itadori-kun will be one of them. Kento would like to take him away. He cannot.
His hands itch for a camera. Something that will capture the tan skin of Itadori-kun's neck, the gleam of his teeth as he grins, reddish mouth stretched wide around bright white. Perhaps there is a manic thing in Kento's eyes in this moment.
Tomorrow, he has a flight scheduled. He can't remember what city, but he thinks that it will be cold.