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It starts, like most of their bad decisions in this life that was seemingly at its wits end, with Gojo.
“Let me get this straight,” Nanami starts. “The world is probably ending tomorrow and you want to stop for boba?"
Gojo is in the middle of precariously balancing four bags filled with an assortment of canned goods, instant noodles, hot packets of microwavable meals, and, of course: candy. The lights on the hypermart flicker dangerously through the aisles.
He turns to raise a single eyebrow, nonchalant. “Are you depriving me of the last bubble tea I may have in this life?”
Nanami would groan, would put up probably a bigger fight expected of his more practical personality of them both. But instead he notes the frenzied buying of everyone else in the local grocery they stopped by for supplies, and the sort of agitated way people have been acting for the past few weeks in general; and stops just short of blowing up.
He looks down at their checklist, noting the checked marks on both gas and money and the only unticked one next to food.
Sighing, because he always indulged in the end, Nanami relents.
“Fine. But make it quick—we have to get to the shore before sundown.”
It started small, the beginning of the end, as the news called it back when they still had television: hot rain thundering down windless nights, acidic snow crushing pine trees like termites feasting on wood, wild animals breaking out of their domesticated cages.
It didn’t take long for the conspiracy junkies to blame, as they did with everything, the government’s super secret intelligence agency’s apparently inhumane experiments gone wrong.
That, and of course the more popular fail-safe scapegoat equally encouraged by internet forums: extraterrestrial beings.
Ijichi, a few years younger than them in graduate school and a reluctant addition to their friend group, unfortunately belonged to that same rabid minority.
“Aliens!” Ijichi had said to them then, wild eyes and wilder hair going everywhere as he gripped Gojo’s shoulders.
“They’re here and they’re doing this, like, ethnic cleansing. Weeding out the weak!” to which he proceeded to laugh maniacally, eliciting an aggressive thunk on the head by unimpressed medical intern Shoko who had just about enough of crazy lunatics dropping by her virology lab spouting nonsense.
They learned later on, thankfully, that it was none of that.
No, what it was, and quite ironically: primal human nature. The plastics got too clogged, the sun too warm, the ice too hot—and surely, how long did anyone expect to live in such a state all the while play ignorant of its origin?
The first week the news broke out, they didn’t dare brave the mad town ravaged by people less grounded in their beliefs and acted fist first.
Not so much in disbelief, but more so, at the insistence that this was not happening.
Nanami was the first to break.
Gojo had sensed his dwindling reserve almost instantly, because while Nanami was practical, he was not always the one with soundest mind.
A soft heart, his childhood friend Haibara had told him he had then—before the insanity got to him quicker and he locked his entire family in their duplex with the gas stove on and Nanami couldn’t break the door down faster.
The smell of hydrogen sulfide lingered in him, still, like it took root past his lungs and more into the depths of his conscience.
“Hey,” Gojo had said then, parking them on the highest cliff that overlooked the city and the stars unveiled as dusk settled. Up there the world did not seem so rattled, his breath not so loitered with rotted eggs.
Nanami could, for the first and last time, indulge himself a bit of reprieve from all the surrounding madness.
Gojo’s eyes had been steady, unyielding in the face of all his unravelling. “You couldn’t have known.”
And that, Nanami had thought, was what ate at him the most: he should have.
Some weeks had passed since then, plane tickets soared and train stations overwhelmed with passengers: because the world did not stop. It rotated around it's self-imposed orbit of vanity and payed no mind to the cracks on the surface.
Not for a global scale abomination that threatened the end to humanity altogether, and, Nanami notes with some chagrin: overexcited adults with hypoglycemia.
By some miracle they had made it to the goddamn boba shop.
The chromatic neon “OPEN!” sign lit up like a firework in a darkened sky, so disproportionately out of place between the surrounding foreclosed shops.
Thankfully, too, although in hindsight maybe Nanami should have been more worried about the sheer corporate greed of the hungry men in suits even at the end of the fucking world: the shop was still accepting orders.
Behind the marble tabletop, striped uniform and customer service smile on, is first-year engineering student Itadori Yuji.
Nanami frowns. “Yuji, what—”
Gojo cuts him off quickly. “Yuji-kun!” he cheers in excitement, propping his elbows on the surface, exasperated. “Thank God you’re still open. I’ll have my regular order, but make that 200% sugar and to go. Megumi around?”
The smile doesn’t leave Yuji’s face, though it has relatively relaxed into one of genuine nature and less an underpaid working student. His hands go through the motions of preparing the apocalyptic boba order. Glancing at the clock above the wall, he replies, “He’s picking me up soon.”
Nanami notes the duffel bag behind him, no doubt storing everything his tiny life had amounted to.
All too suddenly he remembers the sheer cruelty of it all. It came at him all at once as if resurfacing at just the right time he needed to remember this was happening, because Yuji was only eighteen, and the world was dying.
Yuji caps off the drink and hands it to Gojo, the same easy grin on his face. “I assume you’re on your way to the beach?”
Before Gojo could speak for them again and make excuses about making a detour on this way and that, Nanami crosses over the counter and grabs Yuji’s bag. Spotting his phone charging by the wall, he unplugs it and throws it off his general direction—to which, of course, the captain of the first year basketball team effortlessly caught—and unceremoniously drags them all out.
“Yes, we are. And you’re coming with us. Call Megumi and tell him to meet us there. The sun is almost setting.”
The last Saturday before the supposed end of the world, because the world had felt all too well the stinging rays of the sun and the blinding coldness of the ice and had made no efforts to really do anything about it: they spent it on one of the thousand now empty seats in the university stadium.
There was no game that day.
There hadn’t really been any since the announcement, but there were a couple of people aimlessly kicking a ball around or lounging on the fermented grass in the arena.
It was a lovely day outside, one of the rare ones they could have pretended to still live in the before.
It was as if they could delude themselves into thinking they were still post-graduate students, well into graduation if not for the obvious, and could have been debating life after postdoctorate if that choice wasn’t stripped from them altogether.
“Have you heard what happened to Yaga? The security guard?” Gojo asked, arms drawn up behind his head as his eyes glazed over the mundane activities below.
The air felt stale and the wind still just a little too hot, but it would do.
If they squinted, they could almost make out Megumi’s scowl at a drenching Yuji coming up to put his arms around him below. What they did not need to zero in on, of course: was how the boy was also struggling to hide an amused smile.
They both had been rooting for them since day one, Gojo especially, and more than took pride in the fruitful results of their undisputed match-making skills.
This was only a few days after Haibara, the sulfuric acid still in his system and the nightmares still too graphic. Getou would take the pill with his family not a full week after and Meimei would be found alone in her bathtub no sooner.
Nanami immediately assumed the worst. “Is he dead too?”
“Jesus, Nanami,” Gojo breathed out, the legs propped against the seat in front of him coming down to face him completely, a perplexed expression on his face. “No. But he told me something weird the other day, just before I dropped him off at the airport.”
Nanami raised a brow in question. “What?”
“He said something about the ocean being a safer place,” Gojo mumbled, not having recovered from his cynic remark. He was always the optimist. “For when, you know, that happens. Shoko told me to keep close to the water too, something about the impact being less painful. She has a third eye, that woman, I swear.”
Nanami considered this.
Shoko, as far as they knew, had buckled and booked the first flight out of Tokyo the moment the first panic buying started. She was on board a one-way flight to Paris with Utahime last they spoke. She was also, without a doubt, the smartest of all them: advanced medical degree and pre-med courses and all. Maybe there was something to her words.
But Nanami couldn't find it in himself to care anymore.
He found that was easier these days: to keep a close reign on what he did and didn’t care for, to not give anything away because the world had taken enough.
Nanami turned to look at Gojo, saw the soft smile alighted on his face as he observed Yuji and Megumi teasing each other below, and decided then: Gojo, he thought, would be the last thing.
They play twenty questions on the ride over, or, more appropriately: Gojo and Yuji do. Nanami was keeping a close eye on the road and the darkening sky and trying not to let his growing anxiousness foster into something more.
“Is it a snake?” Yuji asks.
Gojo sighs in near resignation. “I already told you it wasn’t an animal! Now come on, what’s the scariest thing in the world aside from, duh, whatever is going to happen?”
Yuji blinks. Once, twice. Sheepishly, he tries, “Nobara..?”
Gojo clasps his hands together and makes a dramatic show of giving him a thumbs up, grinning from ear to ear. “Ding ding ding! Finally! I thought we’d be playing until the world blows over and you’d never get it.”
Yuji pales at the offhand joke, probably not as immune to Gojo’s dry humour as his boyfriend. The same little one who had begrudgingly admitted, once they had made it official, that: Gojo is indeed a close family friend; yes, his father had asked him to look after Megumi in university; but no, absolutely not, in no circumstance were they friends.
Gojo had feigned hurt then, more out of theatrics than actual wounded ego.
It was also that time Nanami met Yuji for the first time. He seemed all too much a bubbling little boy with so much of a cheery disposition, that, he found it hard to believe someone like him would ever get along with someone as subdued as Megumi.
It wasn’t until a few months after when Nanami—by direct affiliation with Gojo—had been coerced into spying on the two because apparently the father wanted detailed reports and would skin Gojo alive if he didn’t deliver.
They both saw, more than once: the longing looks the younger ones shared on the library filled with honest, unquestionable admiration; the same unshakable ones that reminded them too much of their own early days, that they had collectively decided to give Yuji a glowing recommendation.
They don’t know how it’s going to happen, whether through a meteor crashing the earth or a giant wave breaking through the surface.
There was no government now, not that there was ever any in the past few weeks. It was mostly self-governed people who still had enough wits about them to try to chase the doom and hope they break it out of the ice.
That maybe this was all a bad dream, and they’d no sooner wake up and find themselves in a haze, as if coming to only after a hundred years of a lucid slumber.
The shore is mostly barren save for a few people, some familiar faces they had only passed down in silent halls, the select few who had stayed despite everything else that had bound them to go: Maki and Nobara were huddled close to the fire they had made, Megumi not a few feet away from them drawing lazy circles in the sand, Yuuta and Inumaki in an animated conversation just beside him.
There were others, too, people they weren’t necessarily close with but were glad for the comfort in the last pages nonetheless.
Noritoshi with his arm around a pale elderly woman Nanami could only tell was his mother, his expression gentle and earnest; Todou, somber for once, gazing out into the vast expanse of the sea; and others, who had come out of hiding and decided this last moment would not be spent in solitude.
Yuji came barreling down Megumi as soon as Nanami had parked his car.
The same bone-crushing hug they had always shared no matter they had spent an hour or a year apart, and how they always seemed to resemble a key and lock stringed together; the undoubtful sense of belonging they had always embodied.
Nanami recognized that, and, as he turned to see the same gentle smile on Gojo’s face—knew that he did too.
It started, their thing, much like three years after where they spend the last day racing down to the last open boba store and rushing to the shore: with Gojo, charming and beautiful and confident, even then.
Nanami was a postgraduate student, determined to spend the better part of his doctoral days slaving over finance books and balanced sheets in hopes of trying for a corporate career in the footsteps of his ancestors.
This had been set in stone from birth, as the son of a salaryman who was the son of a lawyer who was the son of a president and so on.
His was an easy life, if he played his cards right and followed the mold.
But a couple things Nanami never saw coming: the sound of a chair being pushed back next to him in the library, the smell of leather and peppermint, the ashen locks that framed a nonchalant stranger who assumed his place next to him so casually; who had looked at him, with eyes so blue it frosted him in place, and a smile as charming as it was damning.
Hello—Nanami’s voice lodged in his throat when they locked eyes, at what, he couldn’t yet dwell on during that moment; astonishment, anger, bewilderment?—Is this seat taken?
They started, none too ceremoniously, with a cliche that had been told in too many variations it edged on comical.
He could have very well skipped to the end to find the famed happily ever after and gotten it over with.
But, and at this Nanami will take pause over the years in reminiscing, was the other thing he had never counted on: the story straying too far from the plot, the pages bleeding into the spine, the anticlimactic finale where they were robbed of a happy ending; that Nanami decide he would forge their own instead.
Dusk falls over the sandy shores, the last strips of sunlight filtering through the haven they had concocted for themselves.
They braced themselves for impact: they had each, all of them, so painfully young in their memories but indulged themselves in that last bark of comfort—that this too shall pass.
They never knew what happened to Yaga after he landed, they don’t even know which European continent Shoko and Utahime decided they would spend this day on, where Ijichi ended up in his dazed state; a little too late, Nanami realized, he still had too many things he didn’t know.
How this would end and start, would it be by the god’s hands or man-made destructions, of whether there was really life before death and did it really matter, and maybe he did not yet want to know just yet, maybe he’d like one more day and more time—
Nanami doesn’t know if they burn, drown, or disintegrate: only, at this he finally knew, as the sky strobed in flecks of red and pink and black and white and the world came crashing down in that fraction of a second—his hands tremble against Gojo’s as he feels his entire body shut down, the eyes that meet his halfway do not quiver, still the same charming smile on his face like that first day, nor does his voice waver: It ends with you.