Chapter Text
“Come back soon!” the woman from the bakery yells after him as Nanami leaves, not glancing back to her as he makes his way down the sidewalk.
The depression of the past couple years seems to have lifted like a curse off his own shoulders, exorcised in one swift movement, one split-second decision. He follows that feeling, that clarity of purpose, pulls his phone out, and navigates to his contact for Gojo Satoru, unused for years. He presses the call button. Gojo answers almost immediately, saying his name with a bit of guarded enthusiasm.
“Can we meet?” Nanami asks, and there’s a pause before Gojo starts laughing. “What are you laughing about?”
They make brief plans to meet the following day, on campus. Nanami doesn’t say in so many words that he wants to come back, become a sorcerer again, but he doesn’t have to say it—it’s the clear implication, the only reason he would call Gojo, ask to meet him, ask to meet him at the school.
“See you tomorrow!” Gojo says cheerily before they hang up.
Off the phone now, Nanami pauses, looks around the street. He had been walking aimlessly for a while, not in the direction of his office. He’s on his lunch break, ostensibly, but he already knows he’s never going back. The street and sidewalks are busy this time of day and his sudden stop has created a block in traffic; the pedestrians part around him, like a stream around a boulder.
Suddenly, Nanami feels that he’s being awfully rash. He’s been unhappy, yes. Adrift, living a life devoid of meaning, trying to reject the idea that he needed meaning at all. It’s naive, childish, to pursue that. Look at all these people, with all their jobs—are all of them contributing something grand to the world? It’s impossible. A small contribution is the most that can be asked of anyone, himself included. He remembers what he said to the woman at the bakery—providing bread, simple as that, is a real service, with real value. Why does Nanami think he has to choose between the soulless, selfish drudgery of the financial sector, and the self-sacrificing, brash heroism of jujutsu sorcery? There are a million other options, and he’s tried none of them.
He texts Gojo, Never mind.
Gojo replies, ???, then his phone is ringing.
“Yes?” Nanami answers.
“What do you mean ‘never mind’?”
“I changed my mind. I won’t be meeting you tomorrow.”
Gojo laughs again, but this time it’s tense. “Care to explain?”
“Not particularly,” Nanami says, and hangs up the phone. Gojo tries calling again and he sends him straight to voicemail.
Nanami puts his phone in his pocket, ignoring its continued vibrations each time Gojo texts him. He turns around, walking back toward the bakery and goes inside.
The woman behind the counter glances up at the jingle of the doorbell. “Oh!” she says, smiling wide. “That was sooner than I expected!”
“Does this place need any additional employees?” Nanami asks her.
+
Nanami has always held an interest in food and cooking, but he’s never tried his hand at baking. The owner of the bakery, the woman who Nanami finds out is named Amari Saeko, hires him despite his lack of experience—the fact that she owes him a debt of gratitude for exorcising a curse that’d been plaguing her might have something to do with it, but Nanami doesn’t worry about it. He will try his best to become a valuable employee on his own merit.
It’s going to be a pay cut. A big pay cut, obviously—he had been expecting that. And he has already been living way below his means, saving the majority of his income and spending as little as possible. He still has that nest egg, after all. He won’t get a nice severance package considering he’s walking out with no notice, but he can’t bring himself to go back into that office building for anything.
The hours are earlier than he’s used to, but he’ll adjust. He thinks he may even grow to like it, getting up before dawn, moving through the still-sleeping city—and his afternoons will be free, which is a pleasant thought.
Yes, he could get used to this, he thinks, on his first day, opening bags of flour and pouring them into large mixing bowls, following Amari’s instructions, breathing in the warm, slightly-sour smell of yeast in the air. After the fresh bread is baked and on the shelves, and after the sun has risen and the streets and sidewalks begin to fill with morning traffic, they open for business.
At about ten a.m. on his first day—he’s already been here for four hours—the doorbell chimes and he says, as he glances up, “Hello, what can I—?”
The pleasant words die in his throat.
Gojo is standing there, arms crossed, blindfold on, but his head moves as he glances around the bakery, taking it all in, before he focuses his gaze on Nanami. He smirks. “I see your mid-life crisis has taken you in a new, exciting direction.”
He hasn’t seen Gojo in four and a half years, not since he left Jujutsu Tech. He looks very much the same, but Nanami had forgotten perhaps just how tall he is. His presence has always been a little imposing, even if you weren’t privy to the knowledge that he’s basically a nuclear warhead made incarnate. Nanami, on the other hand, is currently wearing a flour-dusted apron, bags under his eyes from the early morning that he’s not yet accustomed to.
Amari glances between them. “Do you know each other?” she asks.
“We went to school together,” Gojo supplies with a broad smile.
“Oh,” she says, then snaps her fingers with a sudden realization. “You’re an exorcist too?”
Gojo turns sharply to Nanami, cocking his head to one side with a questioning expression, and Nanami sighs. “Do you mind if I step out for a moment to speak with him?”
Nanami removes his apron and crosses the store, shooing Gojo out the front door.
On the sidewalk out front, Nanami says, “How’d you find me?”
Gojo levels a supremely unimpressed look at him. Right—it wouldn’t have been difficult, not for him, not if he wanted to find him.
“I think I’m owed some answers,” Gojo says. “If you didn’t want that, you should’ve thought twice before calling me out of the blue yesterday.”
Nanami rolls his eyes but it’s difficult to argue against—and this will be over faster if he complies. “Alright. What do you want to know?”
“You wanted to come back, right? That’s why you called me?”
“It was a momentary lapse of judgment,” Nanami says. “I do apologize for involving you.”
Gojo sighs. “You really haven’t changed a bit, you know that? You used to work at that hedge fund in Marunouchi, right? What happened to that?”
“I quit.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“Before you called me?”
“Yes,” Nanami admits, through gritted teeth.
“And now you’re working here. At a bakery.”
“That does appear to be the case,” Nanami says, voice thick with sarcasm.
Gojo’s mouth presses into a thin line. “Tell me why.”
“I like the bread,” Nanami says, holding his gaze, mediated through the blindfold.
Gojo barks a laugh. “You might think you have everyone fooled—calm, rational Nanami. But you are possibly the most impulsive person I’ve ever met.”
It’s clear Gojo doesn’t mean for this to be insulting. He sounds fond, actually—even admiring.
Nanami sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Will that be all?”
“Not quite,” Gojo says. “I want to buy some of this life-changing bread.”
Nanami reluctantly leads him back inside and gets behind the counter, talking him through the various offerings. Gojo likes sweets so a decadent chocolate croissant catches his eye.
While Nanami places it in a paper sleeve and rings him up, Gojo asks, “Did you make this croissant?”
“No,” Nanami scoffs. “It’s only my first day. Croissants are a level of difficulty I won’t surpass for some time.”
Gojo’s mouth quirks into a smile. “You’re something else, Nanami.” He takes the croissant and takes a huge bite immediately, sending flaky buttery crumbs drifting to the floor, chocolate smudged at the corners of his mouth. “Let me know when you’ve surpassed it,” he says to Nanami through a full mouth, as he heads to the door. “I want to eat a croissant made by you.”
+
Five years ago Haibara died and Nanami subsequently became the only second year at Jujutsu Tech. The thought—I’m alone now—came to him alarmingly quickly and with alarming clarity in the aftermath. He had heard of a class of students, a few years before his time, that was entirely wiped out by curses within the span of four months. This had seemed impossible to him at the time; Gojo was the one to pass on the knowledge, during Nanami’s first week. Gojo had leaned close, grinning ghoulishly at Nanami and Haibara and told them that their rooms used to belong to two of those students. Haibara had laughed with a touch of nerves—it was delivered with the cadence of a ghost story, after all. Gojo hadn’t known the students personally, either. Geto tugged at Gojo’s shoulder, rolling his eyes, telling him to stop trying to spook the first years. But Nanami dryly said that it was statistically likely that all their rooms had once belonged to dead students, given the small size of the school and the high mortality rate. Gojo just laughed, shrugging Geto’s hand off his shoulder. “See, Suguru? This freak isn’t scared at all.”
Nanami thought about that exchange while he sat in the morgue. He hadn’t thought about it since it happened, but with Haibara’s lifeless body on a slab in front of him it was all he could think about. Geto prepared to dispose of his body—annihilate it—as is custom with dead sorcerers, and Nanami thought about the students who had died before them. It had felt distant enough that they were able to treat them like ghost stories, like inevitabilities, like warnings. Now Nanami imagines some future generation of students, not too long from now, taunting some first year—you got Haibara Yu’s room! I bet it’s haunted! The thought made his stomach twist. He felt ashamed of his previous teenage callousness and he felt angry at his classmates’. He felt especially angry at Gojo, who was absent at the time, off to exorcise the curse that had slaughtered Haibara. It would be easy for him, was the unspoken subtext. It cost Haibara his life, but it would be easy for Gojo.
The next time Nanami saw Gojo was that evening, at dinner. He didn’t think he could stomach a meal but Geto insisted he come, drink some broth at the very least. Gojo waltzed into the dining hall with an air of ease, his posture loose, relaxed. He flopped down around the table with the two other third years and Nanami, and Geto gave him an inscrutable look, clearly trying to communicate something.
“What?” Gojo asked, dismissive, reaching for a bowl to help himself to dinner. “I made sure that piece-of-shit curse suffered,” he announced, serving himself a heaping portion. “I didn’t make it quick.”
Now, as an adult, with some distance and some empathy, Nanami can see that Gojo was probably coping in the only way he knew how: revenge. But at the time, Nanami only felt a dizzying rush of anger; Gojo was bragging. It had been so easy for him to exorcise the curse that killed their classmate that he got to torture it a little first, play with his food. This is life and death for the rest of them, but for Gojo it’s all a game. Nanami stood up and left the dining hall, walking toward his room.
Behind him he could hear Geto whispering something urgently to Gojo, and Gojo said again, loud and clueless, “What? I was just…”
Nanami left the room before he heard Gojo’s excuse.
+
During Nanami’s first week on the job, Gojo keeps stopping by. Always around ten in the morning, and he waits patiently while Nanami helps other customers before stepping up to the display case and cooing over the various pastries. He tries something new each time which Nanami credits partly to Gojo’s short attention span and partly to Gojo’s obvious actual purpose for being here: to hold Nanami hostage for a few minutes, forcing him into an interaction. A drawn-out decision-making process allows Gojo to stretch that allotted time to the limit.
“Tell me, what did you make?” Gojo asks one Friday morning, after taking a few wrong guesses.
Nanami gestures behind him to the baskets of bread—various buns and rolls, fluffy white shokupan, an artisan loaf with a beautifully split crust of which he’s particularly proud.
Gojo frowns. “No sweets yet, huh? I think you’re purposefully holding out on me.”
“I made the custard for these,” Nanami adds, pointing out a couple golden-brown cream puffs in the case. “But Amari-san made the dough.”
“You should’ve led with that,” Gojo says, pulling out his wallet. “Is that all you have, those eight? I’ll take ‘em.”
“Eight of them?” Nanami repeats, raising his eyebrows.
“For my students!”
“We have more in the back,” Amari says, emerging from the kitchen. She’s holding a tray with another twelve custard-filled pastries.
Gojo beams and Nanami starts packing them in a box.
“I know what you’re doing,” Nanami says while he works.
“Supporting a small business?”
“You’re trying to wear me down,” Nanami says. “Get me to come back.” He folds the flaps of the box in, tucking them closed, and moves toward the register.
“Do you think that’s possible?” Gojo asks, mirroring him on the other side of the counter. “For me to wear you down?”
“No,” Nanami says. “I don’t want to come back. That’s 2500 yen for the dozen.”
“But a part of you did,” Gojo says, thumbing through his wallet, taking his time to find cash. “That’s why you called me. You had a moment of… what’d you call it? A momentary lapse of judgement.” Gojo glances up, smiling—Nanami’s sure he didn’t forget the exact turn of phrase, even for a second. He hands over the cash; Nanami saw that he had exact change but Gojo must be trying to drag out this interaction as long as possible. A few other customers have wandered in behind him, getting in line. “So there’s a part of you that wants to come back,” Gojo says, sliding the box across the counter toward himself. “I’m going to nurture that.”
“There’s a part of me that wants to do all sorts of things,” Nanami says, handing the 500 yen change back. “A part of me wants to slap you in front of the customers but I’m not going to indulge that impulse.”
Gojo laughs, surprised for a moment. He stays at the register, dawdling, as he tucks his change carefully back into his wallet. “Is it self control or do you just already know you’d never be able to?”
“To what? Slap you?” Nanami says, dryly and a bit too loudly. One of the customers glances away from the price list and toward him, curious.
“Yeah, but…” Gojo says, lowering his voice a notch. “I don’t think you have good impulse control, Nanami. I don’t think you’d be working at a bakery where we had reports of a fly-head manifesting last week if you did. You had an impulse to call me, to come back, but then you had a competing impulse to back out of it. Let’s see which one wins, shall we?” He picks up the box, at long last stepping away from the counter. “Will you be working tomorrow?”
“No,” Nanami lies.
“Yes, he is!” Amari calls from the back.
“I’ll see you tomorrow!” Gojo says, turning to leave.
“Sorry for the wait,” Nanami greets the next customer in line, loud and pointed so Gojo can hear it. “What can I get for you?”
Once the short line has cleared, Nanami peeks into the kitchen and apologizes to Amari for Gojo. “I know it’s unprofessional,” he says, but she shrugs it off. “He buys a lot of bread and he’s a friend of yours.”
“He’s not my friend,” Nanami says, darker—and more childish—than he intends.
Amari gives him a look, amused but not pressing the subject. “Well, he buys a lot of bread.”
+
It had been easy to avoid Gojo for a while after Haibara’s death. He was busy, away so often, and when he was on campus, Gojo didn’t seem to notice that Nanami ate meals in his room or at odd-hours. Gojo would graduate in half a year and Nanami could finish his last year alone and he wouldn’t have to process the building, festering anger inside him.
Of course it didn’t play out like that. Only weeks after Haibara died, Geto defected, casting a horrible shadow over the school. No one knew how to talk about it so they didn’t, and Nanami kept avoiding Gojo. Now it wasn’t just fueled by resentment; he knew some of his own cowardice was mixed in there, too. But with the circle of students steadily shrinking, it wasn’t as easy to slip away unnoticed anymore.
A week and a half after Geto went rogue, Nanami walked into the dining hall only to spot Gojo and Ieiri sitting together, silently eating. He thought he had a moment before he was noticed and took a step back, but it was no use.
“I think you can be in a room with me,” Gojo said, glancing up with a cruel, confrontational smile. “You’ll survive.”
“I’ll come back later,” Nanami said, his hand on the door.
“I’ll stay here all night,” Gojo said. “If you have some kind of problem with me let’s just talk about it, fight about it, whatever, instead of this immature bullshit.”
“Satoru,” Ieiri said with a heavy sigh.
“I don’t have a problem with you, Gojo-senpai,” Nanami said, and he helped himself to dinner, sitting at a separate table. The dining hall was optimistically large, and its emptiness was an unfortunate reminder.
Gojo joined him at the table, sitting across from him and pulling away his tray of food. “Yes, you do. So what is it?”
Nanami didn’t answer, staring back at him, and Gojo got angrier.
“I have some guesses so we can start there,” Gojo said. “You think what Suguru did was my fault. You think I should’ve stopped him, that I should’ve seen it coming—that I should kill him. Right?”
“No,” Nanami said, honestly. “I don’t think that.”
He tried to reach for his tray but Gojo pulled it away and Nanami’s hands rebounded off infinity. “You think Haibara was my fault. As if I can personally attend to every low level curse in Japan—because it was a low level curse.”
Nanami noticed that Ieiri had left the room and they were alone now; apparently he wasn’t the only one who preferred avoidance. He knew Gojo was trying to get a rise out of him and it was working. He felt his emotional control starting to slip, his edges fraying with anger.
“It was misreported as a grade 2,” Nanami said levelly. “It was actually—”
“It was actually a grade 1, yeah, that’s what they told you. Don’t speak ill of the dead, right? It wasn’t even a particularly strong grade 2. That’s the truth, Nanami. Haibara didn’t die because of some mistake on the higher-ups’ part. He was just weak.”
Nanami clenched his jaw. Nothing good could come of fighting back, he knew that much. He tried reaching for his dinner again but Gojo abruptly stood up, taking the tray with him. He crossed the room and dumped Nanami’s uneaten food in the trash and left the dining hall without another word.
+
Early Saturday morning, in the cool kitchen, before any of the ovens are fired up, Nanami learns how to roll dough for croissants. Amari retrieves the batches of dough that she started the day before from the fridge and walks through each step with Nanami as he follows along. It’s a precise process, involving weighing ingredients on a scale, measuring out perfect squares of chilled butter, resting the dough in the refrigerator at intervals. But it’s also a physical process, involving at times pounding the cold butter into pliability with the blunt side of a rolling pin, pinching and stretching dough with his hands, using his senses to guide him.
“The dough is fighting you,” Amari advises at one point. “Let it rest for thirty minutes.”
He does, tending to other things while it rests.
Finally, he rolls out his dough for the last time, into a long rectangle, and cuts it into neat, narrow triangles with a sharp knife. He rolls his croissants plain, no filling, and moves them to a slightly-warm oven for proofing.
The croissants aren’t fully baked until mid-morning, well after they’ve opened for business. Amari’s batch is perfect of course, but Nanami’s croissants are wide and flat, not holding their form nearly as well.
“Over-proofed,” she says without ceremony. “Take them home or give them to your friend.”
He doesn’t petulantly correct her this time.
Predictably, Gojo shows up late that morning, nearly lunch time, in his casual weekend-wear and sunglasses, which makes him look almost normal.
“Yo, Nanami,” he says when he walks in, grinning broadly.
“Hi,” Nanami says shortly. “What can I get for you?”
“What do you have?” Gojo asks, sidling up to the counter.
“Same as always,” Nanami says, then pauses. The pause gives him away.
“Oh?” Gojo prompts, catching it.
Nanami sighs and steps into the kitchen for a moment to retrieve the tray of reject croissants he had baked earlier that morning. Gojo’s eyes light up when he brings them out.
“Did you make these?” Gojo asks.
“Yes, and—”
“They look great! I thought croissants were too hard for you.”
“And,” Nanami says firmly, “they’re over-proofed. They’re free if you want them. They’ll be good for sandwiches.”
“Oh.” Gojo finds his footing again, a smile settling on his face. “So they are still too hard for you.”
“Croissants are the pinnacle of pastries,” Nanami says evenly, and Gojo stifles a laugh. “It will take more practice.”
“Can I?” Gojo asks, reaching a greedy hand toward the tray and Nanami lets him take one. He takes a bite, thoughtfully chews it and shrugs. “Tastes good to me. I can have ‘em all? For free?”
“Are your students sick of pastries yet?”
“Are you kidding? They think I’m the best sensei ever, thanks to you.”
Nanami starts packing up the batch of croissants and Gojo tucks some change into the tip jar by the register.
“A sandwich sounds good. Do you get a lunch break or what?”
“Not until—” Nanami begins to say, but Amari interrupts him from the back, “Go now, it’s slow.”
Gojo laughs and Nanami sighs, slipping off his apron. He takes the croissants and they head out the door.
After a stop by the conbini down the block to buy sandwich fillings, drinks and snacks, they walk to the park and nab a bench to sit and assemble the croissant sandwiches.
“How do you make a croissant anyway?” Gojo asks him, sounding genuinely curious.
As they assemble their sandwiches, Nanami tells him the process that he worked through that morning: the dough made and rested the day before, rolled out with butter, folded and rolled out again and again, to create those thin, flaky layers. It’s a precise process, and repeating it to Gojo helps Nanami work through the logic of it; Amari took care to explain why each step was necessary, what it accomplished. He feels he understands it now that he has to tell it to someone else.
“Sounds finicky,” Gojo says, finishing his sandwich in a few huge bites. “It suits you.”
Nanami takes a bite of his own sandwich and it tastes good, even if his croissant doesn’t look aesthetically perfect.
“So how long are you gonna do this?” Gojo asks him. “Forever, or like…?”
Nanami scoffs a little, chewing his sandwich. “What do you mean? Working here?”
“Resisting,” Gojo says. “Look, I get it, you’re prideful—we all are. You made a big deal out of leaving. It can’t be easy to admit you wanna come back.”
“I didn’t make a big deal out of it,” Nanami says. “I just left.”
Gojo sighs as if Nanami is being obtuse. “Leaving is a big deal.”
“Gojo-san,” Nanami says and the direct, polite address must catch his attention—and his amusement. Gojo turns to him, half-smiling. “You shouldn’t claim to know what I want. You look foolish.”
The easy smile fades slowly from his face, and Nanami watches it extinguish with no small amount of satisfaction.
“You shouldn’t deny what you want,” Gojo finally says, his expression serious. “It’s a waste of time.”
“A waste of whose time?” Nanami says, taking another bite of his sandwich. “I’m on my lunch break.”
He doesn’t have to point out the obvious in so many words: Gojo is the one who’s clear across the city from the school, using his surely limited free time between missions and teaching to pester Nanami and buy bread. If they’re playing a game of chicken, Nanami has time to burn.
Gojo stands up from the bench. “You’re right. This is a waste of my time.”
He turns to walk away, leaving Nanami, and the bag of free croissants, behind.
+
In his first year and a half at Jujutsu Tech, Nanami was rarely the focus of Gojo’s attention. There was the occasional generic taunt here and there, but it was the type that could have been directed at any of his juniors, and as such was easy to brush off. For the latter half of Nanami’s second year at Jujutsu Tech, things were distinctively different because Gojo began tormenting him in a way that felt personal. There was the incident in the dining hall and it only escalated from there. Thankfully they both had missions to keep them apart but for the periods they were back on campus Gojo seemed to have built up steam to blow off and there were few remaining targets.
One particular afternoon in late October they were on the training pitch—Gojo, Nanami and the small collection of first-years—under the guise of a sparring demonstration. Yaga was ostensibly instructing them but he had been distracted lately so he left Gojo in charge and returned to the building, promising to check back soon. Gojo looked sickeningly eager as he and Nanami circled each other, in the middle of the field.
“I’m not going to use infinity,” Gojo announced, to Nanami and to the on-looking first years. “So this will be a fair fight. Don’t hold back.”
From the moment Gojo lunged at him it did not feel like a particularly fair fight. Nanami dodged and blocked, but Gojo was just inhumanly fast, and each blow packed a ridiculous dose of cursed energy behind it; Nanami wasn’t weak, even back then, but he could hardly keep up. On top of the sheer power differential, Gojo was clearly taking his own advice to not hold back, whereas Nanami still fought with some restraint, focusing on defense and, when he got the chance to attack, not using nearly the power he would if he were engaged with a curse.
After one of Nanami’s blows skimmed past Gojo’s face, barely knocking his head back, Gojo laughed and said, “Come on! Really hit me!”
If Nanami had been in this situation as an adult, with more maturity, he would have put an end to it there. This was not providing any educational benefit to the first-years, and it was plainly a bad idea to engage. But at the time Nanami was seventeen years old and angry so he did what Gojo told him to do.
His fist, imbued with everything he had been holding back so far, collided with Gojo’s gut, the vulnerable space below his ribs, and Gojo skidded back across the field, wheezing. The victory was short-lived; Gojo looked exhilarated by the hit and when he charged Nanami again, he gave him no openings for retribution. Nanami tried to block and block but soon the grass of the pitch was at his back and he felt his nose crunch, tasting warm iron in the back of his throat.
“Satoru!” Yaga bellowed, tearing Gojo off of him. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Sparring,” was Gojo’s answer, paired with an innocent smile. He had blood on his knuckles.
Yaga shoved Gojo toward the building, followed with a smack to the back of his head—it definitely made contact. Nanami could hear it. “Go inside, I’ll deal with you later.”
Gojo skulked away, rubbing at the back of his head.
Yaga pulled Nanami to his feet and the move from horizontal to upright sent blood pouring from his nose. He leaned forward, letting it drip onto the grass instead of his shirt. He caught a glimpse of the three first-years lingering wide-eyed on the edge of the field.
Yaga frowned. “Put ice on it. If it’s broken Shoko can help you with that.”
And that was it. Nanami went into the building, holding his sleeve against his nose, absorbing the steady blood flow. Inside, he passed Gojo, who was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, awaiting whatever scolding he’d get. They didn’t say anything to each other but Gojo turned his head, tracking Nanami’s movement as he passed him in the hallway.
+
Gojo doesn’t return to the bakery once the following week.
Nanami makes croissants. He gets better at it.
On a Tuesday morning, around eight, one of Nanami’s former coworkers from the hedge fund walks in the door. He’s a short man with glasses named Saito and he blinks when his eyes land on Nanami, behind the counter, slowly piecing it together.
“Nanami,” he says, gaze drifting down to the apron. “Do you… work here?”
“I do,” Nanami says shortly. He’s not ashamed, but he can tell what Saito is thinking. But Nanami knows that people will think unflattering things about him and he can’t control it. He doesn’t need to be liked or understood or even respected by every single person with whom he crosses paths. Making peace with that has granted him a lot of maturity that many others even older than him lack.
Saito hums, his eyes sharp with something like pity, but meaner. Disdain? He says, “I would’ve thought you got head-hunted by one of the other firms, considering how suddenly you left.”
“What can I get for you today?”
Saito blinks again, squinting up at the menu board as if he’d forgotten where he was. “Right. It’s my wife’s birthday.”
Nanami helps him select a few different pastries, things that his wife and kids will like, and boxes them up.
“Best of luck to you, Nanami,” Saito says with condescension and then he’s out the door.
Guys like Saito, Nanami knows from experience, felt powerless in their younger years, not particularly athletic or smart or handsome or charming. In adulthood, their high-paying financial sector jobs act as a form of revenge on the world. They suck value from people who actually produce, bleeding them dry and feeling entitled to it.
Nanami used to think that he was different from his colleagues; he was only doing this to forge his own escape. He would only take what he needed. He knows now he wasn’t any different, and that’s the only thing that leaves him feeling ashamed.
+
Late in Nanami’s second year, he was promoted and this meant an evaluation process and that meant additional missions. He took it in stride, with a kind of steely determination, accompanying various grade 1 sorcerers on missions. At the time it didn’t occur to him to even wonder whether he wanted it. It was the trajectory he was on.
Then in March came a mission assignment: he was to accompany Gojo to exorcise a grade 1 curse in the Iwate prefecture. “Satoru will behave,” Yaga assured him, responding to Nanami’s wary look. Nanami had little confidence in this promise.
Gojo was fast approaching graduation and as such was even busier and less-present on campus than usual. He was already on a mission in Hokkaido so he would meet Nanami in Iwate rather than returning to Tokyo and traveling together. This was fine by Nanami since it limited their time together.
When he met Gojo at the train station in Morioka he had prepared to start the day on the right foot and hopefully minimize conflict.
“Gojo-senpai,” Nanami said, while they traveled from the station to the location of the curse together, in the back of a cab. “I know we’ve had our issues this past year but I hope for this mission we can put that aside and get our job done quickly and effectively.”
Gojo looked at him, his gaze inscrutable through his blindfold. “I hope so as well.”
That was not a particularly reassuring response since Gojo was the sole source of their issues, even though Nanami had magnanimously neglected to say that.
Nanami’s trepidation only rose, and his anxiety was not misplaced.
The curse was a grade 1, its shape amorphous and fluid, ever changing, which proved a challenge for Nanami’s technique, but Gojo stood back and let him attempt to exorcise it first, saying, “Let me know if you need help.” Nanami had a very impulsive, stupid thought which was that he’d rather die than ask Gojo for help. It wasn’t rare for the more experienced sorcerer to let the trainee have the first crack at things; what was rare, was that even as it became increasingly obvious that Nanami was struggling, Gojo did not step in.
Nanami ducked and rolled, dodging the curse’s tentacle limbs—but not avoiding all of them. He was snagged around his ankle and he hacked at it with his cleaver, not along a forced weak spot, just a wild, desperate swing of his weapon to free himself. Each time he attempted an attack, it seemed the curse changed shape right before the moment of impact, negating the power of Nanami’s technique. He knew that sometimes curses were a bad match for sorcerers; it happens, even to strong sorcerers. But he had a hard time accepting this reality in front of Gojo, who stood back and watched without intervening.
He realized he wasn’t getting Gojo’s help until he actually asked for it.
Nanami abandoned his technique and threw his power into plain fighting instead, connecting with punches and kicks that slowly chipped away at the curse’s immense energy. It wasn’t going to be enough, not by himself.
Then the curse had caught him again, tendrils wrapped around each of his wrists. Nanami still tried to fight back, struggling and kicking, but the jellyfish-like tentacles were beginning to burn his skin.
“Gojo!” he yelled, thrashing wildly.
“Yes?”
The stinging pain on his wrists was enough to break down his pride and he yelled, “I need help!”
“All you had to do was ask,” Gojo said coolly and in a moment there was a flash of light and the curse burst apart, dissolving into the air around them.
Nanami fell to the floor, hissing through his teeth as he pulled back his sleeve to see at the red mark circling his wrist. His skin was blistered and raw.
He looked up at Gojo who was standing there, hands on his hips.
“I wouldn’t have let you die,” Gojo said tiredly, seeming to react to Nanami’s venomous glare. “I was just giving you a chance to fight.”
“You remember when you asked me if I have a problem with you?” Nanami said as he got to his feet, rage lighting up his chest even though his voice stayed steady.
“Of course,” Gojo said, starting to smile. “Do you finally have an honest answer for me, Nanami-kun?”
“I don’t respect you. No one does. People are afraid of you and you know that, you take advantage of it. But I’m not afraid of you so I’ll tell you what no one else will. You are an insolent brat, so blinded by your own power—”
“You think no one’s called me an insolent brat before?” Gojo scoffed. “Dig deeper.”
“—So blinded and obsessed with your own power, that you have no real empathy or compassion for anyone around you. It would be pitiable except I think you like it this way, which makes it despicable.”
“Yeah? What do I like about it?”
“You like that people worship or fear you or hate you, or all three at once, because it makes you a god to them,” Nanami said, stalking closer to him. “You want to stay above and apart from everyone else, only deigning to save them when it’s convenient to you. You know, Geto has cultists worshipping him as a god, controlled by fear, helping them only to help himself—and he’s considered the worst curse user in the world.”
Gojo looked almost intoxicated at that point, leaning in, soaking in every word. Nanami couldn’t stop, even as he realized with a sinking feeling that Gojo was actually enjoying it.
“Do you think I’m as bad as him?” Gojo prompted, his voice low. He sounded hopeful, which disgusted Nanami. He wanted Nanami to say yes, so Nanami refused to.
“Neither of you are gods,” Nanami said instead. “You’re just high on your own power, addicted to it. You’re broken but I don’t feel bad for you. And you’re enjoying this, too, because you’re incapable of feeling shame and everything is a game to you and I would’ve felt better if I’d’ve just let you break my nose again. You’re not worth even talking to.”
Nanami shoved past him to leave the abandoned fish market and he went to the train station by himself, returned to campus by himself. It wasn’t until later that he realized when he bumped his shoulder forcefully against Gojo’s it actually made contact, it didn’t rebound off the thin invisible shield of infinity. He had deactivated it, while Nanami yelled at him, seething with anger. Nanami instantly knew why, remembering the training pitch months ago, remembering Gojo egging him on, come on, really hit me. He was glad he didn’t hit him; he couldn’t bear the thought of giving Gojo exactly what he wanted.
Nanami transferred out of Jujutsu Tech before the start of his third year, finishing his education in a regular school.