Archive of Our Own

The drive to the cabin is long. Trees curl over it like weeping soldiers, and Gojo’s car groans as the tires struggle through inches of undisturbed snow.

The door is already open by the time Gojo reaches it. Kento is there, arms crossed, a gaunt look to him that Gojo’s never seen.

He doesn’t speak, and his face is impassive, but Gojo can see the curiosity and the uneasiness in his eyes.

“Let’s get married,” Gojo says, because he’s never been one for beating around the bush and Kento doesn’t seem to have the patience for him to draw it out.

“No,” Kento says, and the door shuts in Gojo’s face.

When Gojo is ten and Kento Nanami is nine, the latter misses an entire month of schooling. Gojo follows him around during recess on Wednesday, pestering him just because it’s fun and because he can tell Kento isn’t as genuinely annoyed by him as some of the other kids, and then Thursday morning his desk is empty.

He doesn’t come on Friday, either, nor does he show on Monday.

On Tuesday afternoon, when school lets out, Gojo takes a detour on the way home. The Nanamis live only a few streets over, and even though the October wind keeps whipping Gojo in the face with brittle leaves and his backpack is dragging on his shoulder blades, he marches right up to the front door and rings the bell until someone answers.

“Hello,” Gojo says when Kento’s mother opens the door. “Is Kento home? I haven’t seen him in school but I’d like to play with him. He’s fun. Well. He’s quiet, and kind of a jerk sometimes, but I have fun with him.”

Kento’s mother gives him a tight smile. Her curly blonde hair is escaping her ponytail and her clothes are disheveled. She keeps looking over her shoulder as though she’s really not supposed to be at the front door.

“I apologize, Satoru,” she says. “Kento’s ill at the moment. I’m afraid he’s not able to play.”

Gojo frowns. Kento’s been out sick from school before, but only for a day or two at a time. Never for this long. 

“May I come in and visit him?” He asks. “Maybe it’ll make him feel better.”

“No!” Kento’s mother snaps, voice sharp. She takes a visible deep breath and her shoulders lose some tension. “I’m sorry. He’s just not fit for visitors right now, but I’ll be sure to let him know you stopped by.”

“Oh,” Gojo says. He tugs at one of his backpack straps. “Okay. I’ll see him later, then.”

“Yes,” Kento’s mother agrees, though her voice is tight, the way Gojo’s mother’s gets when she’s trying to be calm with his father. “Now go on home. The sun’s starting to set.”

The sun is indeed starting to set, painting the sky in cotton candy hues. As Gojo turns, the trees rustle, their leaves catching the last rays of the falling sun.

He’s just made it halfway down the street when there’s an eerie, screaming howl from behind him. When he turns, he could swear it’s coming from Kento’s house, but it looks the same as ever.

Gojo pounds his fist against the door. “You’re really going to make me drive all this way without even talking to me? That’s awful rude for a Nanami.”

The door doesn’t open, but Kento’s voice travels through it. “Go home, Gojo. We have no business together.”

“Bullshit,” Gojo calls back, jiggling the doorknob. “We made that deal. You don’t really think I’d just come here and ask you to marry me without it, do you?”

The door whips open just enough for Gojo to see a sliver of Kento’s face.

“That deal was child’s play. I have nothing more to discuss with you. Go. Home.”

He moves to slam the door, but Gojo slots his foot in and jams it just in time.

“Please,” he says. “Let’s just talk.”

The only one of Kento’s eyes that he can see is staring at him, unblinking. There’s an almost unsettling brightness to it, but Gojo doesn’t budge.

On a Thursday in the middle of March, seven-year-old Gojo makes a deal with his newest friend. Nanami Kento is six, chubby-cheeked, and he’s the grumpiest child in their whole first-grade class. Gojo likes him because he can talk as much as he wants and Kento will listen, and Kento will begrudgingly let Gojo hang and climb and clamber all over him.

Gojo’s favorite part of the playground is the swings and the monkey bars, but today they’re on the edge of the blacktop, where Kento likes pointing out the different kinds of plants that are growing there.

“Are your parents married?” Gojo asks as Kento pokes at some purplish flowers. “Mine are, but I was talking to Shoko yesterday and she said hers aren’t. Isn’t that weird?”

“Mine are married,” Kento says quietly. “Maybe Shoko’s just weren’t happy together, that’s all.”

Gojo tilts his head. He starts pulling at a rock that’s just poking out of the soil; Kento is leaning down and smelling the flowers. “Me and you should get married,” he decides.

That makes Kento look up and frown at him. “Me and you? Why?”

“Well,” Gojo says, drawing the word out as he struggles with yanking at the rock. “My parents said they got married because they were best friends and they loved each other. Me and you are like best friends. Maybe we’d be happy if we got married.”

Kento’s still frowning at him, but he seems to be considering the idea, his fingers running over blades of grass. “Okay,” he says eventually. “We can get married, but not right now.”

Now it’s Gojo’s turn to frown. “Not right now? Why not?”

“My parents didn’t get married until they were twenty,” Kento says. “I think we should wait until then.”

“Twenty?” Gojo yelps, hopping to his feet so he has more room to gesture between them. “That’s forever from now! You want us to be old when we get married? Because my dad says he’s still in his twenties but I told him he looks like he’s a dinosaur.”

“That’s rude,” Kento points out, voice flat. 

Gojo flaps a hand. “Whatever. Listen, how about we get married when we’re ten? We’ll be older and bigger but that’s not half as long to wait.”

Kento rolls his eyes. “Fine. We’ll get married when we’re ten.”

Then their teacher’s whistle blows, signaling the end of recess.

They hold hands the whole way back to the building. 

“Come on,” Gojo says when Kento stays silent. “It’s freezing out here. My ears are gonna fall off. Or a part that’s arguably much more important.”

Kento scoffs. “Being crude isn’t going to make me let you in.”

Gojo bounces up and down on his feet, aware of how childish he looks but completely not caring. “You know, you being a jerk was a lot easier to ignore when you were a chubby kid.”

“It’s not rude to deny an unannounced visit,” Kento says, but his head tilts, his eye scanning over Gojo’s face. “And I wasn’t chubby.”

“We were kids. We were all chubby. That’s why it’s called baby fat.”

“You’re ridiculous, Satoru,” Kento says.

Gojo beams.

The first—and only—time that they kiss, Gojo is twenty and Kento is nineteen, and they’re in a tiny corner room of an old Boston hotel. It’s the first trip they’ve taken to a major city together, and the first trip in years where they’ve been by themselves.

It’s odd not to have Suguru or Haibara here. Haibara had prior commitments with his family and couldn’t come, and for the first time in their entire college career, Suguru wasn’t invited along by Gojo.

It should probably feel better that he isn’t here, but it just makes Gojo unexplainably wistful. Maybe they’d be able to fix things if he were here. Smooth them over.

“Your ears are smoking,” Kento comments from where he’s flipping through their TV channels. They’re taking a small break before they go get dinner after walking around the aquarium most of the day. “Stop thinking so hard.”

Gojo pouts, rolling onto his back and slinging an arm over his forehead. His side settles against Kento’s hip. “Maybe I should have invited him.”

Kento sighs. It’s a long-suffering sound, perfectly honed over a decade and a half of knowing Gojo. “You would have just been fighting the entire trip. You would have regretted the decision.”

“But I regret this decision!”

“Satoru,” Kento says, and Gojo frowns up at his best friend. “I didn’t want to have this conversation on break. We’re having a good time and we rarely get to see each other during semesters. But don’t you think maybe it is time to move on? You and Suguru…the two of you go back and forth so often. It’s like watching a particularly tedious tennis match.”

“It’s just…it’s complicated. We work together so well. He’s the best friend I’ve ever had. And he’s a good partner. All couples argue.”

“Not about the future,” Kento returns, although his tone is so much softer than Gojo is used to. “Your goals are so diametrically opposed. It’s okay if you need to just be friends to keep the relationship peaceful.”

Gojo swallows, tears pricking at his eyes like cactus spines. “I don’t want to be friends with him. I love him.”

“I know.” Kento sighs, shutting the TV off and leaning back on his hands. His hair, longer than usual, flops over his forehead. “I know you do.”

“I hate fighting with him. I hate breaking up with him over and over. Why does it have to be like this? Like love is a curse?”

“I don’t know,” Kento murmurs. His hand settles onto Gojo’s knee and squeezes gently.

Gojo sighs. It’s equal parts so much better and so much worse to hear Kento’s encouragement in person rather than over the phone. Gojo loves going to college in New York, but it’s hard being hours away from Kento, who stayed in their hometown to commute to community college.

Kento’s too smart for community college. Gojo has told him that countless times in innumerable attempts to get him to transfer to another school—maybe even to Gojo’s school. Then they’d get to see each other every day.

Kento never entertained the idea, though, so during the school year they mostly see each other through FaceTime calls. On breaks, they spend time with Nobara, Yuuji, and Megumi almost more than they spend any time just the two of them.

“Can we just figure out what to eat?” Gojo asks. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

Kento doesn’t answer. When Gojo looks up, he’s being stared at, something unreadable behind Kento’s eyes. The hand on Gojo’s knee suddenly feels iron-hot, his palm melting Gojo’s patella.

Gojo doesn’t say anything either. He just moves his arm, sitting up. Kento watches him move the whole way, and Gojo just barely detects his sharp inhale when he realizes how close together they are.

“It doesn’t have to be,” Kento whispers, blinking at Gojo like he’s looking at some kind of grand treasure. “Love. It doesn’t have to be a curse.”

Gojo swallows. “I know.”

“Good,” Kento whispers. “Good.”

Kento’s hair is tickling Gojo’s forehead. He’s just about to comment on how close they are when Kento leans in further and their mouths press together in the softest kiss Gojo’s ever felt. Kento is gentle, his hand staying right where it is on Gojo’s knee, the other one still loosely holding the TV remote. His mouth tastes vaguely like saltwater taffy, and Gojo’s head is filled with the smell of Kento’s minty shampoo, the clean scent of his clothes.

It’s the best kiss Gojo has had in a very long time, sparks snaking through the live wire armature in his skeleton, and because it’s the best he’s had in years—maybe ever—it’s also the worst. Because it terrifies him. Because he wants this kind of kiss with Suguru. Because he can’t curse himself and Kento to a similar cyclic fate.

Kento pulls back first, and there’s something so alive and pleased in his eyes that it renders Gojo speechless for a long moment.

“I apologize,” Kento says quietly, and the enraptured tone to his voice makes Gojo’s gut twist. “I shouldn’t have…I should have asked your permission.”

“It’s okay,” Gojo says, stopping to swallow when his throat clicks. His whole mouth has gone so incredibly dry. “Just…I don’t know if…I don’t think we can do it again. I’m…sorry.”

The look on Kento’s face doesn’t change, and neither does the tone of his voice. “It was my overstep. I’m sorry.”

They’re silent for a moment, Gojo absently picking at a thread in the duvet. At some point, Kento’s hand has left his knee, leaving an achingly cold spot.

“I’m still here for you, you know,” Kento says. “No matter what happens. You’re the most annoying person I’ve ever known, but I’ll help you with anything. You know that, right?”

Some sense of normalcy starts to slide back into Gojo’s veins. The terror recedes, knowing that they can kiss like they did and nothing has to change. There doesn’t have to be any curse. “Yeah. Of course I know.”

They come home two weeks after spring break for a long weekend at Yuuji’s insistence. And then Gojo never sees Kento again.

Kento rolls his eyes—the eye that Gojo can see, anyway—but the door swings open, a delicious heat wafting out onto the porch. “Come in before I change my mind.”

Gojo hurries into the cabin, kicking off his snowy boots as Kento shuts the door behind them. He looks around the room and lets himself whistle.

It’s homey, and rustic, which is the exact opposite of how Gojo tends to envision Kento. He’s so straight-laced, so organized and clean, that Gojo’s only ever been able to picture him in a city somewhere, living in an immaculate, impeccable studio apartment.

Not that the cabin isn’t clean—there isn’t a hair out of place. The windows are spotless, the firewood for the hearth held neatly in a canvas bag. There are blankets and a pillow folded neatly and arranged perfectly on the couch and the armchair, and there’s not a dish in the kitchen sink.

“I didn’t let you in so you could gawk,” Kento says dryly.

The surly teasing is so familiar it makes Gojo’s sternum ache. For the first time since he got this harebrained idea and showed up at this cabin, a surge of irritation rushes through his marrow.

“Just not what I expected from you,” Gojo says. “But I guess surprises like this come from so many years apart.”

Kento is silent for a moment, but it’s uncomfortable. Charged. Fraught with tension. “You’re angry.”

“No,” Gojo says. “Yes. It’s complicated.”

“You were very jubilant when you showed up,” Kento says. He’s tending to the fire, his back to Gojo. Gojo’s sure he can feel that he’s being glared at, though. “What happened? This is a very abrupt change.”

“What happened?” Gojo echoes. “What happened? I didn’t take you for an idiot, Nanami.”

The use of his last name gets Kento to turn around. He looks resigned, and maybe a little forlorn, but not surprised. “I just want to know what’s changed between the moment you stood on my porch and the moment you entered my house.”

“You—I—that’s it? You’re just going to be so nonchalant about all of this?”

Kento quirks an eyebrow. “Am I supposed to be getting agitated the way you are?”

“At least I care,” Gojo retorts, trying and failing to keep his voice level. “I haven’t seen you in ten years and you’re acting like I’m some—some everyday occurrence. Like this doesn’t matter. That I finally found you.”

Kento straightens up. There’s something more guarded in his stance, but some of the irritation that Gojo used to be so familiar with is sliding into his face. “I never told you to look for me.”

“You never told me anything! I gave you ten fucking years before I came looking. Is that not enough for you? Was I supposed to just let you rot here in the middle of nowhere?”

“I never asked you to find me,” Kento reiterates, something stern and angry in his voice. “I’m not exactly pleased at the moment either.”

Gojo scoffs. It’s an ugly sound, one he seems to have absorbed from so many fights with Suguru, but he can’t help it. “This is—I can’t believe this. This is the worst mistake of my life.”

They’re fourteen and Gojo is on a sugar high when they bring up the deal again. Gojo’s parents are out of town, so Kento is over for a rare sleepover—they usually have to stay at Kento’s house, and even then, he’s not allowed to do so very often. 

“Do you think twenty is too soon?” Gojo asks, spinning an empty soda bottle on the floor in front of them. “I don’t want us to like, get hitched to each other and then meet the loves of our lives, ya know?”

“I didn’t think we were keeping that deal,” Kento says, neatly dipping a carrot in hummus. Those were the snacks Kento brought. These are the times that Gojo’s disgusted they’re best friends. 

“We can’t just drop it,” Gojo reasons. “I mean, it’s a good backup plan. If we’re stuck being bachelors forever, might as well get married. Only one mortgage to pay then. And I think that means tax benefits.”

“You sound so old right now,” Kento says. “And dramatic. If you really want to keep the deal that bad, what do you suggest we do?”

“Push it back,” Gojo says, knocking his foot against Kento’s ankles just so he can laugh at how Kento wrinkles his nose and kicks him away. “Instead of getting married at twenty, we get married at twenty-five.”

“You really think five years will make that much of a difference?” Kento says, sounding far too doubtful of such a good idea.

“Trust me, they’ll make all the difference in the world.” He holds out a hand, bowing dramatically and putting on his most evil grin like some devious creature. “Do we have a deal, Nanami Kento?”

Kento rolls his eyes, but he claps their hands together and shakes on it. “We have a deal, Gojo Satoru.”

“If this is such a mistake, you’re more than free to leave.” Kento’s voice is cold, but there’s an undercurrent of something that feels almost like guilt.

“I’m not leaving,” Gojo says. “Not after I spent so much gas driving up here. Not after so many years of you being a silent, abandoning asshole.”

Kento looks stricken, for a moment, his eyes widening in hurt. Then an impassive mask seems to come back over his face. “I’m sorry if—I’m sorry that my actions hurt you. That wasn’t my intention.”

Gojo resists the urge to grab him by the shoulders. “That wasn’t your intention? Do you hear yourself right now? Do you hear how asinine you sound? You up and leave all of us without so much as a word and even now, after all this time, all you have to say is ‘that wasn’t my intention?’”

“Would it make you feel better if it was? I’m sorry, Satoru, I’m not quite sure what you’re looking for here.”

“I’m looking for—I’m—I don’t know! I don’t know what I did this for. Or why I thought it was a good idea. I guess I thought a deal’s a deal, and I might as well take the chance to reconnect.”

Kento swallows. “That deal was childish. I’m sorry you drove all the way here just for that.”

“You didn’t think it was childish,” Gojo snaps. “I’m sure you thought that deal was the best of the century when we kissed.”

That gets Kento to scowl at him, and it’s the most satisfied Gojo’s felt all night.

Gojo likes Kento’s dad. He’s the one that’s home when Gojo’s mama drops him off for their playdate, and he leads Gojo around to the backyard.

“I was raking leaves,” he explains. “There’s a pretty good pile for you and Kento and Crash to jump in.”

Crash is the Nanamis’ dog. He’s a big retriever-looking thing, and he’s Gojo’s most favorite of any dog he’s ever met.

“Hi, Satoru,” Kento calls. Even with his voice raised, his tone is still so even and calm, if a touch breathless while he fights to tug a stick out of Crash’s mouth.

Gojo beams, waving cheekily at Kento’s dad before he takes off sprinting, gently tackling Crash, who flops over more than he falls, tail wagging the whole way. He’s huffing and snorting as Kento fights to take the stick from him, Kento growing more and more red in the face. Gojo scratches Crash’s belly to distract him, his back leg starting to thump, and his jaws loosen enough to let Kento win the tug-o-war, slobbery stick proudly held aloft his head.

“See?” Gojo says. “You need me. This is why we’re best friends.”

“Yeah,” Kento says, leaning down to pat Crash’s belly. “It is.”

“You’re missing so many pieces of the truth,” Kento says. “I didn’t up and abandon you. I would never have done that without good reason.”

Gojo balls his hands into fists, digging his fingernails into the flesh of his palms, because there’s a lump in his throat and there’s no way he’s letting Kento see him cry, especially not as a grown thirty-year-old man.

“And what reason is that? What’d you, get bored? Need a change? Decide to start over? Me and Yuuji and Nobara and Megumi, we just weren’t cutting it anymore? Your parents were getting older and you couldn’t bear taking care of them? What possible good reason could you have to leave us like that?”

“You won’t want to believe me. Especially not while you’re angry.”

“Likely excuse. So what? Are you gonna tell me, ‘go ahead and leave, Gojo, I’ll tell you the truth when you’ve mellowed our more in the next ten years?’”

Kento sighs. “Stay the night.”

That takes all the fight out of Gojo in one fell swoop, his anger rushing away like Kento’s yanked at the drain stopper. “What?”

“Stay the night, Satoru. We can talk in the morning, when we’re both calmer.”

Gojo just stares.

It’s recess, and Kento is crying. Tears are sliding down his cheeks, fat droplets spattering the ice over the blacktop. He hasn’t taken off his hat or his coat all day, no matter what their teacher says. He argues, saying that he’s not breaking any rules and that he’s cold and that he’d rather not disrupt class. It’s all very straightforward and calm in the way Kento always is, but it’s also not like him at all.

And now they’re on the blacktop, and Kento is ten to Gojo’s eleven, and Gojo’s mom says all the time how big he’s getting now that he’s in fifth grade, but right now he doesn’t feel big. He cries in front of his parents and Kento whenever he needs to, but the last time he saw Kento cry they were six and Kento had to leave to go to a funeral. Gojo has never been to a funeral.

“Do you want to see me slide on the ice?” Gojo asks. “I bet I could get across the whole court.”

“You’ll fall,” Kento says immediately, his voice a little wobbly. “Don’t be stupid.”

Gojo shuffles his feet onto the sheet of ice spider-webbing across the blacktop. He twists a little, letting his feet slick across the ice.

“Get off the ice, Satoru,” Kento says, sounding a little annoyed and very tired. “You’re gonna get hurt.”

“It’d be funny if I fell, though.” Gojo shuffles forward, hands in his coat pockets. 

“It would not. You falling isn’t going to make me feel any better.”

That does make Gojo pause, and he steps off the ice to sit down next to his best friend. They’re both quiet for a moment, and then Gojo leans back on his gloved hands and looks sideways at Kento. “Did something happen? Is Crash okay? Your mom and dad?”

Kento scrubs at his face. “They’re fine. I just…” he takes a deep breath, and the rest of his sentence tumbles out in a rush. “I fell down the stairs and I hit my head and I got some cuts and my head really hurts today.”

There’s something that doesn’t quite feel right to Gojo about that—he’s never known Kento to be particularly clumsy, so he can’t really picture him falling down the stairs—but he also doesn’t really know what to say.

“I’m sorry,” Gojo says. “That doesn’t sound like fun.”

Kento just shuts his eyes. He asks the teacher to go to the nurse when they get back from recess, and he must go home because he doesn’t come back.

Gojo can’t get his teary eyes out of his head.

There are scars on Kento’s back. On his chest, his arms, on his legs. Gojo shouldn’t be staring—he shouldn’t even be in here, he just wanted to know where Kento keeps the towels—but it’s hard to take his eyes off of the torn skin of his best friend.

Kento doesn’t even look at him, pulling clothes out of his dresser. “What, Satoru.”

“Just wanted to know where you keep your towels,” Gojo says. “Unless you want me parading out of the bathroom bare-assed and soaking wet, because that can also be arranged.”

“In the closet across the hall,” Kento says flatly. “Why are you staring at me?”

“What, I can’t stare at my best friend in all his glory?”

Kento does look at him then, and in the dim lighting of the cabin his eyes look ethereal, glowing with an intensity that makes Gojo shiver. He doesn’t say a word.

Gojo isn’t staring at all his glory. Kento is covered in scars, there’s a paleness to his skin that Gojo doesn’t like, and without winter clothes shrouding him, he’s concerningly skinny, the edges of his ribcage jutting out over a stomach that’s nearly concave. The hard curve of his hips is clearly visible over the band of his boxers. Gojo’s never known him to be so skinny, so unhealthy-looking.

“You part of an underground fight ring or something? Kicking people’s asses?” 

Kento just frowns at him. He doesn’t say a word.

They’re playing a drinking game. They’re spread across the floor of Yuuji’s living room, bottles of water and shot glasses scattered on the floor in front of them. 

Haibara and Yuuji are both rosy-cheeked, falling against each other with laughter. Megumi and Nobara are no less drunk, but much more quiet about it, Megumi observing everyone else as he munches on some chips and Nobara talking quietly with Shoko. 

Getting two seventeen-year-olds and an eighteen-year-old drunk probably isn’t their finest moment, but Yuuji had insisted they’d all drank before and that his grandfather wasn’t home and that it’d be fine.

Kento is leaning back on his hands, his obnoxious hair still long and falling over his eyelashes. It’s been two weeks since spring break, and he still hasn’t gotten it cut.

It’s been two weeks since they went to Boston, and two weeks since they kissed, and even with Suguru pressed into his side, all Gojo can think about is how warm Kento’s hand had felt against his knee, how his kiss had been so gentle. Kento’s hair had been so soft against his forehead.

They drink, and they play the game, and Suguru presses kisses to Gojo’s neck that feel good, that make him feel wanted and appreciated, but that don’t carry an ounce of the reverence that had been in every inch of Kento touching him. 

The card asks Gojo to spin a bottle, to sit on the lap of whoever it lands on for the next round. Suguru’s arm is around his waist, mouth hot against the shell of his ear as the bottle spins. He’s whispering, and his words are so full of worship it makes Gojo’s head spin. How can one simple kiss make him want to throw all of this away?

The bottle spins, and spins, amber glass glittering under the ceiling lights and captivating the entire room of drunk college students like moths to light. It seems to spin for an eternity, not intending on ever stopping, before the neck of the bottle starts to sharpen out of the blur, bottle curving into a slower circle. It sweeps past Gojo and Suguru, past Haibara and Yuuji, past Nobara, and then settles, pointing like a beacon at Kento.

Kento’s eyes meet his across the room, and in an instant they are back in Boston, on a hotel room bed, hovering just centimeters away from each other.

“I’m good with it if you are,” Gojo says. Kento nods, shifts into sitting with his legs crossed, and waits patiently for Gojo to scramble across the room. He settles onto Kento’s lap, legs stretched in front of them, and gets lost in the dichotomy of this feeling like home and like the strangest place he’s ever been.

They’ve been best friends since they were kids. Gojo has slept in the same bed with Kento, laid with him in the field at recess, fallen asleep curled into each other on Gojo’s couch. Physical touch isn’t something that’s strange to them.

But Kento is so warm. His arm winds around Gojo’s waist, chin hovering over his shoulder, and it at once feels like the most intimate they’ve ever been. Nobara and Shoko are acting out a sex position right in front of them and all Gojo can think about is Kento’s chest against his back, the secure belt of his arm around his waist.

It’s Gojo’s turn to pull a card all too soon, and he almost wishes for something that will make him want to take a shot so he can feel less confused.

They play the game. Megumi and Suguru are setting up the TV to play Mario Kart now that the deck of cards has been exhausted, and Gojo starts collecting empty glasses and empty bottles off the floor.

He doesn’t even notice that Kento’s helping until they’re both in the kitchen. 

“You made up,” Kento says, and offers him a small smile. “Are you happy?”

Gojo glances back out, where Suguru is balancing controllers on his knees as he ties his obnoxious hair up into a ponytail. “Yeah,” he says. “I am. We are. I’m glad we worked it out.”

“I’m happy if you are,” Kento says, and for someone who kissed Gojo and gave him advice against making up with Suguru only a couple of weeks ago, he sounds impressively genuine. “Although…it is making me think.”

Gojo looks up from where he’s been fighting with fitting more plastic water bottles into the recycling bin. “Yeah?”

Kento nods, washing out shot glasses and neatly placing them on a dish towel to dry. “I think we should change our deal.”

That gets Gojo to abandon the water bottles entirely, coming to stand next to the sink and grin teasingly at his best friend. “Oh, you mean I’m not the one that brings it up this time? What do you propose, casanova?”

“Push it back,” Kento says, not looking up from meticulously scrubbing a plate from one of them snacking. “Time seems to move a lot faster the older we get. Twenty-five feels too early to me. Doesn’t it feel that way to you?”

Gojo hums, thinking for a moment. Those five years will pass in the blink of an eye, and Gojo’s starting to wonder whether he’ll even feel ready to settle down into a marriage by then anyway, deal or no deal. “Yeah. Maybe it’s jumping the gun a bit.”

“What if we get married at thirty?” Kento rinses off the last glass and shuts off the faucet, straightening to turn and look Gojo in the eyes. “If we’re both single and we have no other prospects, we’ll marry each other.”

Gojo sticks out his right hand, and when Kento grabs it they shake on it. “Deal.”

Kento nods. His hand is firm around Gojo’s. The warmth of his skin is almost otherworldly. “Deal.”

Kento interrupts him just as Gojo’s about to steal every pillow and blanket to make himself a cocoon on the couch. He’s already got the throw blanket from both the armchair and the couch itself, as well as the pillow from the armchair. No pillows on the couch. Kento’s a psychopath. 

“What are you doing?” Kento asks, voice absolutely dripping with exasperation.

“Making your living room look less like a psychiatrist’s waiting room,” Gojo answers, dropping the blanket and pillow onto the couch. “Making your couch more habitable to sleep on. Whichever you prefer more.”

“You’re not sleeping on the couch,” Kento says flatly.

“I’ll settle for the armchair, but I’m not going back out to sleep in my car. Or wherever else you want to put me. I get that this isn’t what either of us really want right now, but I’m putting my foot down on requiring humane sleeping conditions.”

“You’re not sleeping on the couch,” Kento repeats, voice still flat and a touch something else—offended, maybe. “Or in the armchair. I’m not a monster, you’re not going to sleep in your car. God, Satoru, I’m annoyed with you but you can’t think I’d be that cruel.”

You were cruel enough to leave, Gojo thinks, but he doesn’t say it. They don’t need to get into another spat right now.

“If you’re comfortable with it, I’d like you to stay in my bedroom with me.” Kento says. There’s something shadowed in his eyes that makes it seem like he knows what Gojo wanted to retort. “This cabin gets very drafty and cold at night. You’ll be much warmer in the bedroom. If you’re not comfortable, you can take my bed and I’ll stay out here. I’m used to the draft at this point.”

Gojo just stares at him for a moment. Kento doesn’t look away, and he doesn’t look flustered, either. He looks like he’s simply stating facts, which Gojo supposes is true.

“It’s not like we’ve never slept in the same bed,” Gojo says. “Sharing won’t bother me.”

Kento nods. He turns, and Gojo follows, turning off the light as they leave the living room. Kento’s bedroom is tucked into the back corner of the cabin, just large enough to hold a queen-sized bed, a nightstand, a bookshelf, and a dresser. Gojo had been so distracted by Kento’s scar-ravaged skin and sickly form earlier that he hadn’t even looked around the room.

Just like the rest of the cabin, the bedroom is neat. There is no clutter on the dresser. Kento’s watch is laid neatly on top of a single book on the nightstand, an alarm clock angled neatly toward the bed, an empty water glass in the back corner.

And it’s warm. There’s a wood stove Gojo hadn’t noticed in an empty corner, glass door lit orange by flame. No wonder Kento made the offer to let him sleep in here.

“Take whatever side you prefer,” Kento says, shutting the door and hovering by the light switch.

“Oh, Nanami, what a gentleman,” Gojo purrs, because he just can’t help himself. He just wants them to be like they used to. “Worried I don’t want to cuddle?”

Kento rolls his eyes. “Worried you do. You’re no less annoying while asleep. Perhaps that’s why you’re still single.”

Gojo pulls back the covers, sliding into the right side of the bed. “Careful, Kento. You’re getting a husband out of me being single.”

Kento shuts off the light, scoffing as he crosses the room and drops onto the left side. “We’re not getting married.”

“We have a deal that says we are,” Gojo teases, rolling onto his side. Behind him, Kento huffs and the bed shifts as he rolls so that they’re back to back.

The room falls silent for a long stretch. Moonlight is creeping in through the gap in the curtains, painting the end of the bed in a silvery stripe. Gojo blinks at it, idly thinking how bright his hair would look in that same stripe. Kento is so quiet and so still behind him that Gojo thinks he’s asleep.

“You won’t want to,” Kento says then, voice quiet and made somehow silkier by the moonlit glow. “When I tell you everything. You won’t want to marry me. I don’t want you to marry me because of it.”

As complicated as it is, as much anger and hurt that’s been scraped raw by the two of them seeing each other after so long, Gojo doesn’t understand. Kento has always been self-assured; it’s one of his strengths. And he sounds no less confident now, but it rubs Gojo wrong. 

“That’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever said to me,” Gojo whispers back.

Gojo and Suguru drive back to campus Sunday night. They’ll have all summer to spend with their friends, but Gojo really just wants a Monday off that he can spend lazing around with Suguru, wringing orgasms from each other and basking in how steady and uncomplicated their relationship seems right now. 

Gojo just misses Kento. Misses spending so much time with him. That’s the conclusion he comes to about how he’s memorized the feeling of sitting in Kento’s lap, how he remembers more about Kento last night than Suguru. The alcohol made him more sentimental. He just misses his best friend.

It’s raining when they get back to campus. They order takeout and watch a TV show while they eat, and then they shut themselves in Gojo’s bedroom, letting the thunder drown out the moaning and the slick slide of two bodies slotting together.

Monday morning Gojo wakes up to a phone call. Yuuji and Megumi are in the hospital. Animal attack.

Gojo and Suguru drive right back. Megumi and Yuuji are in the same room. Their bandages are stained with blood, crescent-shaped claw marks showing through the gauze.

Yuuji is uncharacteristically quiet. Megumi tells them it was a bear.

They wait all day for Kento to visit. He never does.

Gojo can’t fall asleep. Kento is sleeping soundly behind him. He’s been asleep for at least an hour. The stripe of moonlight has shifted a little, sliding off the end of the bed. Gojo’s going to have neon green imprinted on the backs of his eyelids for days from staring at the numbers change on the alarm clock.

He doesn’t get out of bed with the intention of snooping. Really, he just means to get a glass of water and stretch his legs a little before getting back in bed.

But then he’s in the bathroom, taking a piss, and the edge of the medicine cabinet is just barely open. It’s probably nothing. Toothpaste and floss and shaving cream. Probably all arranged in neat rows, too, not a speck of dust to be seen.

So he flushes the toilet, washes his hands, and then opens the cabinet. There is toothpaste, and floss, and shaving cream.

There’s also a few slim bottles with handwritten labels. Wolfsbane. Vervain. There’s a bag of sterile needles and an entire package of suturing thread. Heavy-duty painkillers.

Gojo’s mouth goes dry. He pauses, listening, but the cabin is near-silent; the howling of the wind outside is his only company as he opens the cabinet under the sink. Boxes of medical gauze, extra large bandages, medical tape. Surgical gloves. 

Gojo had been joking when he asked if Kento was part of an underground fight ring, but now there’s apprehension curling into his gut. He’s already lost Suguru down a bad path—he doesn’t want that to be the fate of his childhood best friend.

His phone is in the bedroom. He closes the cabinet doors and shuts the light off and walks back to bed, feeling as though he’s turned mechanical, his joints and synapses working on code rather than conscious thought. He doesn’t even really register getting back into bed, other than to notice that Kento has rolled onto his stomach, his face half-buried in the pillow.

Gojo pulls out his phone. Turns the brightness all the way down. Googles wolfsbane and vervain, tongue flicking at the back of his teeth when the internet tells him both are lethal. The shiny metal of suturing needles pricks at his eyes, and he rolls over to look at Kento, straining in the moonlight to see any of his scars. Did they look like they’d been stitched? What on earth is Nanami Kento, a man as straight and narrow as they come, doing that he’s getting all of these scars and keeping an emergency room’s worth of medical supplies in his bathroom right alongside vials of poison?

Kento looks so peaceful in sleep. Gojo’s throat aches.

Kento dislocates his elbow their sophomore year of high school. He wears a brace for a month. Everyone keeps asking how he did it, and all Kento will say is that it was an accident while hiking.

Gojo knows better. Kento does not hike. He’ll take Crash for walks in the woods, but that’s about five minutes away from his backyard and it’s maybe two acres of woods in total. You can practically see the buildings surrounding it on all sides.

They’re early to history. Gojo leans all the way sideways to put his elbows onto Kento’s desk. “Come on,” he whispers. “Tell me how you did it. You’re a horrible liar, Kento, I see right through you.”

Kento rolls his eyes, but his posture shrinks a little, almost like he’s trying to hide. “I told you. Crash tripped me while hiking. I caught my elbow the wrong way on a stone.”

“Liar,” Gojo teases. “You don’t hike.”

“Walk. Hike. Same difference,” Kento says. There’s a bruise at the corner of his jaw and circles so dark under his eyes they look like stage makeup. Gojo almost wants to reach his thumbs out and see if they would wipe away.

“Maybe you tripped because of your hair,” Gojo says, flicking Kento’s forehead just to make him glare. “Can you even see past it?”

“Your hair is in your eyes too, you know,” Kento points out. “I think this is a situation where ‘takes one to know one’ would be considered accurate.”

Gojo scoffs, but seeing the smug look on Kento’s face is worth it. 

Kento sleeps through class. It’s so unlike him that their teacher isn’t even mad. She just asks him if he’s okay, and Gojo watches him lie with a steady voice, saying that he’s fine and just didn’t sleep well last night and that he apologizes for the disrespect.

Kento’s been a horrible liar for as long as Gojo has known him. But right now, the lie is so smooth even Gojo believes it.

And for the rest of the day, all he can think about is what lies Kento’s told him that he has no idea about.

Gojo wakes up first, before Kento. It feels like a rare treat—Kento has always been the morning person out of the two of them. Gojo had fully expected to open his eyes to an empty bed.

The ephemeral band of moonlight has been replaced by the gentle golds and sun kissed pink of dawn. It shines through the gap in the curtains, its light more gentle against the fabric.

Gojo rolls over carefully. Kento has rolled onto his side, facing him. He looks so much the same and so much like a stranger.

Gojo’s not stupid. He knows anyone ages over ten years, including him. While there are no wrinkles on either of their faces, it’s clear that they are no longer kids in their twenties. Kento’s hair is shorter, cropped, near-shaved at the nape of his neck. He doesn’t have the bangs hanging into his eyes anymore, blond hair swooping up softly away from his forehead. Gojo wonders if it’s short enough that his fingers wouldn’t even catch if he ran them through.

Kento’s face has also matured. His jaw is sharper, cheekbones more defined. He looks so much more like a man, just as Gojo looks more like a man when he looks in the mirror, and the ten years that they have spent apart are suddenly strikingly apparent.

What happened to us, Kento? Gojo thinks. Kento’s eyes move under his lids, clearly dreaming. He looks so peaceful. So beautiful. Where did you go? Why?

Gojo sighs. “Marry me, Kento,” he whispers out loud. 

“Answer your fucking phone,” Gojo mutters. 

The phone rings and rings and rings in his ear, before it cuts off and is replaced by a smooth, clean recording. “This is Nanami Kento, please leave your name and number with your message and I will return your call as soon as I am able.”

“I’m going to fill your answering machine to the brim until you answer me,” Gojo threatens. “What the fuck, man? You go to school around here. You live here. Megumi and Yuuji actually need us and you can’t so much as stop by to see how they’re doing? Answer your fucking phone or actually show up, you are being such a Grade A dick right now it’s not even funny.”

He hangs up and resists the urge to throw his phone across the waiting room. Suguru is watching him, and so is a mother and her young son. Suguru looks unsurprised but unhappy, and the mother looks apprehensive. Gojo threads his fingers through his hair and tugs, turning his back to the mother and son and scowling at Suguru.

“Figures when things get really rough Kento just up and leaves. I don’t get it. He’s never been like this and now he’s being a total asshole.”

“At least we know he’s alright,” Suguru says. “Better we know he’s just being an asshole than him being somewhere out on that trail as a bear’s lunch.”

“Yeah, well, Kento doesn’t hike,” Gojo snaps. “It’d be nuts for him to be there.”

Kento takes so long to wake up that Gojo has nearly fallen asleep again. He yawns neatly behind a hand, stretching as he rolls onto his back.

“Good morning, sunshine,” Gojo croons, reaching over to try to ruffle Kento’s hair.

Kento bats his hand away, groaning. “I forgot I let you stay here.”

Gojo manages a fake sniffle. “You forgot about me? We have so many secrets to share and you forgot?”

Kento rolls his eyes again. Even after ten years, he isn’t out of practice around Gojo. “It is ridiculous of me to forget I’m harboring such a huge pain in the ass in my home.”

“You wound me,” Gojo moans, throwing an arm over his face as Kento gets out of bed. With both their brains still sleepy and animosity drained by a night of sleep, their interaction feels so natural, almost seamless. Like no time has passed at all. 

“Everything wounds you,” Kento says drily, opening his dresser. “You’re the most dramatic person I’ve ever met.”

“Excuse you, I could have gotten far less dramatic in the last ten years.”

“You could have. But you tried to get me to let you in by saying your penis was going to freeze off, and you just reenacted a Victorian woman fainting because I called you a pain in the ass. Which you are.”

Gojo throws a pillow at him. Which is a totally mature, definitely not dramatic response. It thumps off Kento’s ass and he just shakes his head when Gojo snorts.

He disappears into the bathroom with clothes in his hands, and Gojo hears the shower turn on. If he hadn’t snooped in the cabinets, his thoughts would probably revolve around Kento being nude, skin turning red under hot water, large hands running all over his skin…but as it is, all he can think about is whether or not Kento’s nursing an injury Gojo has no idea about, whether or not he’s in there right now threading stitches through his own skin. 

Then the shower shuts off, and Kento emerges a few minutes later, hair rumpled by the water. He’s wearing dark slacks and a dark, forest green henley with a collar. It’s just over the line of casual, a little overdressed to just be at home, which is so very Kento it makes Gojo smile. He’s moving stiffly, almost like he’s sore, and he doesn’t say anything to Gojo as he collects the water glass from his nightstand and moves to leave.

“What are you doing?” Gojo says before his brain can catch up with his mouth. 

Kento gives him an odd look, pausing in the doorway of the bedroom. “I have medication I take every morning.”

“Oh,” Gojo says, and then pastes a smirk onto his face. “Thought you were getting an extra surprise while you still had me in your bed.”

“You’re insufferable,” Kento responds as he moves down the hall.

Gojo listens, to the sink faucet filling the glass, to the sound of the medicine cabinet being opened. There is no rattling of a pill bottle being opened, but Gojo can hear the sound of something else glass clinking onto the counter. He gets up from the bed and pads down the hallway on quiet feet, stopping in the doorway of the bathroom with forced nonchalance, as if he just happened to be walking down the hall and decided to stop.

Kento looks at him. He’s stirring the glass with a spoon. The liquid inside is just barely tinted gold, the consistency a little thicker than water as it coils into a small whirlpool around the handle of the spoon. There are two little vials on the counter, labels pointed away from Gojo. But he knows what they are.

“Is there a reason you’re staring at me?” Kento asks. His voice is smooth, if a touch wary.

“Whatcha stirring?”

“My medicines are liquid. I take a tonic every morning.”

“Ah,” Gojo says. The single syllable comes out sharper than he intended, and Kento narrows his eyes.

“Why are you acting strange all of a sudden?”

“You’re—it’s—you’re drinking poison!” Gojo bursts. “Bullshit that’s medicine, you’re killing yourself!”

Kento sets the glass down. He turns away, staring down at the counter for a minute with his head tilted so Gojo can’t see his face. When he speaks, it isn’t a question. “You went snooping.”

“That’s not the point-“

“That is the point,” Kento says firmly, turning back to glare at Gojo. His lip is twisted nearly into a snarl, the curl of anger in his shoulders almost animalistic. “I wanted to put all of this aside just for the night so we could both calm down and you still stuck your nose where it did not belong. You’re acting like you know everything, just like you did when you showed up here last night.”

“Then tell me,” Gojo snaps, scowling right back. “Get off your stupid high horse and tell me what the fuck is going on, then. Stop giving me this bullshit about me not being able to believe you and underestimating me like I’m some dumb teenager. It’s so disrespectful to the friendship we used to have that it’s not even funny.”

“Oh,” Kento says, voice gone so cold and low that Gojo can almost hear the fury rattling around his diaphragm. “You want to talk about disrespect? How about showing up here and demanding answers, acting like you’re God’s greatest gift on Earth for hunting me down and giving me a headache I did not ask for, and then going through my things so that you can point fingers and accuse me of killing myself with things you know nothing about. How is that for disrespect, Satoru? Does that paint a clear enough picture for you?”

Gojo grinds his teeth together, the tension so thick between them it may as well be a physical wall. “I was wrong,” he bites, something mean streaking hot through his belly. “Love isn’t a curse in my life. You are. You’re a curse, Nanami Kento. Is that what you want to hear? That you cursed your friends by leaving them when they needed you? Yuuji needed you. Megumi needed you. I needed you, you were my best friend. You selfish dick.”

Kento growls. Actually growls, and it makes Gojo’s hair stand on end all down his arms and at the soft base of his neck. He has to resist the urge to look around the room for a dog, because Kento’s teeth are ground together and the sound came from him, his eyes flashing preternaturally bright. 

They both freeze for a moment. The growl cuts off, no longer rumbling out of Kento’s chest, and he still looks furious, but there’s something worn and resigned in his posture. 

“Get out,” Kento mutters. 

Gojo opens his mouth. He’s irrationally determined to continue this argument, and after the initial shock, his anger has only been spurred into a higher gear by Kento growling at him like an animal instead of just using words.

“Get out,” Kento repeats, voice pitching into a yell. “Get out. I didn’t ask for this. Get. Out.”

Gojo has so many things to say coiled under his tongue and nothing to say at all. He stalks through the house, grabs his bag, and lets the door slam shut behind him without saying a word, and the scowl on his face doesn’t slide away until he’s ten minutes out on the snowy road, his foot far too heavy on the gas pedal.

“Go fuck yourself,” Gojo mutters, and then lets himself yell. Kento can’t hear him, but he doesn’t care. “Go fuck yourself!”

It’s September and they’re both sixteen, in the months between Gojo’s next birthday, when he has the guts to finally bring it up.

They’re sitting out on Gojo’s lawn by the fire pit. It’s just that point where the weather is the hazy in-between of summer and fall, the sun stays out late and the breeze is crisp and cold.

Kento is braiding blades of grass. Gojo watches for a moment, Kento’s fingers deft and sure as he twines the blades together. 

“I have a question for you,” he says, dragging his fingers through the grass.

Kento glances at him. “Hmm?”

“Is everything…okay? Like at home?”

Kento lets the braid he’s working on fall into his lap. He tilts his head, giving Gojo a sideways look. “Yeah…? Why wouldn’t it be?”

Gojo sighs, fighting the urge to chew at his lip. “I don’t remember you getting hurt this often when we were kids.”

Kento raises one eyebrow, his head tilting a little. Something wearied slips into his expression, and he all at once looks so much older than sixteen. “I would say I don’t remember you being this annoying as a kid, but I’d be lying. I don’t follow your point.”

Of course Kento is going to make him spell it out. Gojo shouldn’t be surprised; Kento values honesty and is sometimes painfully straightforward. He doesn’t tend to appreciate beating around the bush.

“Nobody’s hurting you, are they? Because you could stay here for probably forever if anyone was. Not that they’d survive what I’d do to them, but. Offer still stands.”

Kento looks down for a moment, huffing out a bitter sound. “No,” he says. “No, Satoru. Nobody’s hurting me.”

Gojo flops over, letting his torso fall onto Kento’s lap, and raises a hand. “Pinky promise?”

“You’re ridiculous,” Kento groans, rolling his eyes, but he still links their pinkies together. “But yes, I promise.”

“You pinky promise,” Gojo corrects. “Say it right, or it doesn’t count.”

“Fine,” Kento says, looking down at Gojo with an annoyed expression that he knows for sure is filled with fondness. “I pinky promise.”

Gojo just smiles at him.

It takes two full nights for Gojo to even think about going back. He’d been so angry the whole drive into town, and the whole way through getting a hotel room, and the whole way through buying himself dinner. The first night it took him hours to fall asleep.

He knows it was a harebrained idea to try to find Kento in the first place. He obviously didn’t want to be found, considering his parents didn’t even know where he was—or did, and just never wanted Gojo to know—and his cell phone had eventually gone out of service. He had up and left all of them without so much as a trace, and for all they knew had gone and died at some point in the past decade.

For all intents and purposes, their deal was off. Kento was gone, and they weren’t best friends anymore to even see each other at thirty. 

And there had been a part of Gojo that had almost expected to see someone in Kento’s cabin with him, or a golden band around his finger; something that signified Kento had at least found something that kept him so far away. But the cabin was empty, and smelled like Kento, and there wasn’t a single thing that Gojo could see that would have belonged to a woman or another man. There was no wedding band or pictures of smiling anniversaries on the walls or the fridge.

It was just Kento. And perhaps that’s what keeps Gojo so angry through the second day and the second night, like a fever that refuses to break. Because sometime between the kiss in Boston and the game of spin the bottle and Kento disappearing, something changed under Gojo’s sternum. He and Suguru fell apart shortly after, for good, and Gojo couldn’t help thinking about Kento; about his warmth, his gentleness, how nicely they played off of each other when they bantered. It’s silly to say that he’s been in love with Kento for the past ten years; it’s more like he’s been standing on the precipice, waiting on the edge of the cliff, looking for a bridge or maybe bungee jumping gear before he did something stupid like fall in.

Because Kento is, in many ways, the one that got away. Because Gojo was selfishly thinking that if he put in the effort to find him, maybe Kento would embrace being his friend again. Maybe they’d be able to explore the inexplorable from when they were young. Maybe the stupid deal that asked them to marry each other would lead to something real and as warm and saltwater-taffy sweet as Kento’s lips on his or his arm around Gojo’s waist.

The third day, Gojo’s phone starts blowing up. He’d had plans with Yuuji and Megumi, and his original intention had been to surprise them by bringing Kento along with him. Now he’s sitting in a hotel room with the curtains still drawn at four in the afternoon, and his friends have no idea where he is.

He tells them he’s fine, he’s sorry, he had an emergency come up. Suggests they reschedule for next week. Yuuji answers with something chipper about there being no worries, message covered in emojis, and Megumi just sends a thumbs up.

Gojo rolls over, screams into his pillow for a second. Just for the catharsis of it. Sometimes screaming is nice. And then he gets up, and gets clean clothes out of his bag, and goes to take a shower. He shaves his face, deep conditions his hair. When he gets out, he feels a little better about life, and he opens the curtains before he repacks his bag, checks out of the hotel.

He’ll give it one more good college try before going home. Because Gojo is nothing if not stubborn, and nothing if not charming. Sure, he’s had mostly one night stands and short-lived flings, but he knows what to do to show someone he appreciates them.

And if he really is going to pitch this whole marriage thing one more time, he should at least show he’s serious about it.

The cashier at the grocery store in town gives him an almost sickening grin when she sees the flowers—chrysanthemums, Kento’s favorite—and the ingredients for a fancy dinner. Twenty-year-old Gojo knew a few basic recipes, but thirty-year-old Gojo has learned quite a few things and is a pretty good cook, if he does say so himself.

The moon is full and bright overhead as Gojo pushes his car to make it down the winding drive to Kento’s cabin. It’s snowing, fat flakes quickly covering the tracks that had been here just days earlier. Gojo really hopes that Kento doesn’t leave him out on the porch for too long, because the cold was biting even just walking to his car. The trees on either side of the road seem to threaten to keel right over, snow weighing them down, and it’s a relief when Gojo gets around the bend and the trees fall away.

There are lights on in the cabin. It’s a beautiful sight, lit golden and gently glowing under the wintery onslaught. For a second, Gojo sees movement and thinks it’s Kento coming to stop him, but the shape is wrong; lower to the ground and hulking, more like an animal than a human. Gojo lets his foot fall onto the brake, slowing a little. Kento lives well and truly in the middle of nowhere, and the thick snow is making it hard to see details. The last thing Gojo needs is to run right into a moose or a bear.

Whatever it is, it turns its head, eyes glowing eerily in Gojo’s headlights. It stares for a long moment, and then the eyes start moving and Gojo realizes it’s coming closer.

“Shit, shit, no, go away,” Gojo mutters. He doesn’t have time to get cockblocked by wildlife.

The light of the moon is almost blinding reflecting off of the snow, and it only makes the contrast starker as the animal finally comes into the beams of the headlights enough for Gojo to see it better.

It’s a wolf, but there’s something…off about it. Its limbs are long, seeming to fold almost uncomfortably under itself, like a human trying to run around on all fours. Its body is lithe, covered in golden fur that’s dull and matted in the shine of the headlights. 

And its head is, well, wrong. It’s hard to tell with the falling snow and in such bright light, but Gojo could swear there’s no fur anywhere on its face, just skin. Its snout is longer than Gojo remembers being typical for a wolf, and the ears are definitely wrong, long and almost elven in shape, tufted with fur and pointed straight at the car and Gojo. It all feels very uncanny valley, like someone tried to draw a wolf from memory and failed miserably.

“Good doggie,” Gojo mutters to himself, heart pounding uncomfortably in his chest. “Good doggie. Just run along into the woods now. If you don’t, I’m sure Kento’s going to come out and scare you away with a BB gun or something. You don’t want to see him when he’s angry, trust me. Scary stuff.”

The wolf doesn’t move. Snow is building up along its back, and even in a locked car Gojo begins to feel afraid. It’s staring at him, directly through the windshield and into his eyes, and Gojo moves as slowly as he can while he pulls out his phone.

While Kento had made dinner the other night, Gojo had taken the liberty of calling himself from Kento’s phone so that he had the number. Now he dials it, barely breathing as it rings and rings in his lap.

“Pick up, Kento, come on,” Gojo mumbles. “There’s a whole ass Cujo in your yard, man, I don’t have time for you to be pissy.”

The call goes to voicemail. Gojo curses, looking down just for a second while he disconnects the call and redials, and when he looks up the wolf is gone. For a moment, Gojo thinks maybe it took off, and then there’s movement out of the corner of his eye and he turns his head.

The wolf is outside his window, now, face eerily close to the glass. The hot breath from its snout fogs up the glass, but its eyes bore straight into Gojo’s. Even without any light shining directly on them, they’re unnaturally bright, and even though Gojo’s never seen this creature before, there’s something about the eyes that tug at the back of his brain, like something familiar is buried in the cobwebs there.

The phone goes to voicemail. Gojo doesn’t dare move, just glad that he’s locked the car as the wolf licks at the seam of the window. It’s massive up close like this, its head taking up the entirety of the window. Gojo was right; there’s no fur, just smooth skin, and it makes it even more apparent when the wolf’s snout wrinkles, lips curling up as it shows its teeth.

My, what big teeth you have, Gojo thinks almost feverishly. Its fangs are easily as long as his index finger. The wolf’s head tilts slowly one way, and then the other, and then it makes a loud huffing sound that Gojo can hear even from inside. It shifts, and then it seems to stretch up and up and up as it raises itself onto its hind legs. It must be a good eight feet tall. 

Gojo realizes two things in that moment; one is that this is not a wolf, because wolves can’t stand on their hind legs like that for long and no wolf is this big, and the other is that he better hope his car doesn’t tip over, because there’s no way the wolf—the thing—just stood up for fun.

Sure enough, there’s a momentary pause where Gojo barely breathes, and then there’s the weight of something on the roof, and Gojo’s car rocks violently from side to side.

Kento won’t answer his phone, and Gojo is about to be eaten in his front yard. This is some Grimm’s fairytale type shit, and Gojo is absolutely not happy about it.

The beast rocks the car again, and Gojo hears the vase of chrysanthemums tip and fall into the footwell of the passenger seat. The beast growls, and Gojo’s blood runs cold as it gives one great shove to the side of his car and Gojo feels himself begin to tilt. The weight on the roof is replaced by the groaning of metal, one gigantic clawed foot pressed against the window, the other out of view. Gojo’s phone slides out of his lap, his seatbelt groaning as it holds his weight. His car tips and tilts until he finally feels it fall all the way onto its side, the passenger side crushed into the snow.

He doesn’t see anything for a moment, craning his head to look up at the driver side window. The moon glares at him, the only witness to the terror thickening his throat as the wolf’s head appears, and then the entire driver’s side groans and starts to buckle. There’s the horrible sound of claws scraping on metal, hundreds of times worse than nails on a chalkboard, and Gojo is immediately aware that the beast has climbed onto his car.

He scrambles for his seatbelt. There are claws and teeth scrabbling at the edges of the windows, and a spiderweb crack is already spreading over the driver’s side window.

He lets himself slide into the passenger side, angling his body and pulling his leg back as much as he can. He pours all of the panic and urgency he can into the kick that he aims at the windshield, battering it again and again as he begins to hear the glass above him give way. Just as a paw suddenly bursts into the cab of the car, Gojo’s boot shatters the windshield, and he wastes no time shoving more glass out of his way as he climbs through it.

Gojo ran track in high school. He’s never been so grateful for the sport and for how long his legs are as he is right now, sprinting as fast as he can through the snow. Behind him, the beast is quiet for a moment, and then it must see him, because it looses a howl like nothing Gojo’s ever heard before. It makes every hair on his body stand on end in an instant, the sound eerie and filled with anger, with hunger. It’s so loud it makes Gojo want to clamp his hands over his ears.

There’s impossibly fast footfalls behind him, but suddenly Gojo is ten years old and down the road from Kento’s house, listening to a howl carry through the neighborhood. His breath catches in his chest, that familiarity starting to turn into something dreadful that pulls at his sinew and threatens to make him trip.

The cabin is close, but the beast is fast. In what seems like an instant, it’s caught up to Gojo, and claws catch at his calf, swiping his legs out from under him. Gojo goes down hard into the snow, the cold and the impact shoving the air out of his lungs. He almost rolls over before he realizes he should do everything he can to protect his belly from the beast.

There are claws at his back, scrabbling at his thighs. It’s a burning, almost mind-numbing pain, and Gojo knows without a doubt that he’s going to die, right here, right now, with a plea for love from his best friend dying on his lips.

The beast growls at him, hot saliva dripping onto the base of Gojo’s neck as it lowers its muzzle and roars, the sound tearing at the treacherously calm atmosphere of a snowy cabin in the woods. Gojo gathers what breath he has and screams back, rolling over and reeling backward. He kicks the beast in the face, getting it right in the eye, and it recoils, rearing back onto its hind legs.

Gojo scrambles to his feet, running faster than he’s probably ever run in his life as he reaches the porch stairs. They’re icy and slippery under his feet, but he refuses to fall as he opens the door and slams it behind him, sliding the deadbolt and immediately looking around the room. The kitchen table is thick wood, and it scratches the floor as Gojo moves it, tipping it to brace against the door. He struggles with it far more than the beast had struggled with his car.

He moves the chair and the bookshelf into the barricade as well. Outside, it’s still snowing, and the beast won’t stop howling. It’s an enraged sound and an anguished sound all in one, and it makes Gojo shudder. He rushes through the house, opening doors until he finds a staircase leading into a basement. 

There are clothes on the floor in the hallway. Kento’s phone is among them, and Gojo picks it up, intending to call the police or maybe animal control before the clothes themselves give him pause. They’re torn to shreds, almost completely destroyed, and for the first time, Gojo feels a stab of fear for Kento. Is he dead somewhere in the snow? In a bloody heap in the woods? Is he already in the beast’s stomach?

“Kento?” Gojo calls, wheeling around in a circle. His feet refuse to take him away from the basement door, but he strains his ears to hear over the incessant howling and the pounding of feet as the beast circles the cabin again and again. “Kento! Are you here?”

There’s no answer. Gojo sweeps the house as fast as he can, but there’s no sign of him, and there’s scratching at the door that immediately makes his blood run thick and cold and sink to the very bottom of his feet. The basement door slams behind him, and he’s overjoyed to find a deadbolt on it, sliding it and looking immediately for things to use as a barricade. There’s old boxes down here and a broken shelf that he stacks in front of the door, because it’s better than nothing. Because he meant it when he said he’d come here to see Kento again, and he’s still going to even if he has to find a way to kill this beast with his bare hands or he has to go talk to a dead body.

The basement is stone, floor made of dirt. It’s freezing down here, but the thick stone cuts off most of the noise. Every once in a while, Gojo can pick up on part of a howl, but for the most part, it falls quiet. The sudden silence is almost eerie, putting Gojo on edge in a way he hadn’t expected it to. He picks up a piece of firewood and holds it out like a weapon as he turns on the lights and cautiously circles the basement, but there’s no movement down here. He’s alone.

He’s soaked all over, both from falling in the snow and from the blood he can feel pulsing out of the claw marks in his legs and his back. His heart is still pounding so hard he can feel it in his ears and the tips of his fingers, his nerves so shot that it’s making him nauseous. There’s an old leather armchair in the corner and Gojo collapses into it, adrenaline making him unsteady on his feet.

He’s suddenly exhausted, but he doesn’t dare close his eyes. The basement is tidy as he looks around it, as organized as the rest of the cabin. There’s a shelving unit and a desk in the corner, a stock of firewood along one wall, and the hot water heater in another corner. It’s a lot of open floor and stockpiles.

Gojo’s legs hurt, but he moves to the shelves and the desk anyway. He should try to bandage the claw marks if there’s stuff down here he can use.

There is indeed a box of medical supplies on the middle shelf; bandages, gauze, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. There are also neat rows of vials of wolfsbane and vervain. There’s a calendar over the desk, and Gojo leans in to look at it. On each day, there’s a drawing of the moon and notes on what phase it’s in. The full moon is marked in bright red on today’s date, and there’s a sticky note under it that reads “get Gojo OUT by today.”

Gojo’s eyes slide over the moon calendar, the bottles of poison, the medical supplies. He thinks of the torn clothes in the hallway, and then his eyes fall on a stack of books on the desk, old mythology tomes. He flips gently through the one on top, and even though he’s expecting dust to choke him, there isn’t any. Page after page is filled with drawings and diagrams, passages where the word werewolf pops up over and over. Kento’s neat scrawl is on sticky notes pressed into the margins, some of them marked with dates. There’s a bookmark toward the back, and Gojo flips to it.

Full-color illustrations of the wolfsbane and vervain plants greet him. Gojo reads over the passage underneath, his heart starting to thud uncomfortably all over again. The book tells him both plants weaken werewolves, making transformations slightly less painful and werewolves less aggressive during full moons. The side effects are a mile long, and all Gojo can see is a withering Kento standing in front of him, sickly-looking and hollow. 

None of this feels real. Beside the passage there’s a folded piece of notebook paper that’s filled with calculations. At the bottom, it’s been broken down into a chart of dosages, the numbers steadily climbing throughout the month.

It feels like an elaborate prank, but Kento has never been the pranking type. That’s Gojo’s realm. The claw marks in his back and thighs and on his leg throb, and suddenly all Gojo can see is the curving scars on Yuuji’s face, on Megumi’s chest, Megumi’s uneven voice saying it was a bear.

The pale face of Kento’s mother fills Gojo’s brain, expression twisted by stress. Looking back, he can almost feel her fear and her grief as she explained Kento was ill. The beast outside howls, and the nine-year-old Kento inside his house that October day howls right back. The myriad of injuries flicker through Gojo’s mind like a macabre slideshow, landing on the image of Kento’s skin gnarled by scars only a few nights ago.

The odd glowing of Kento’s eyes. The growl before he told Gojo to get out. The guilt twisting his face whenever he talked about leaving, about the truth.

The dots connect like a synapse snapping, and Gojo’s knees give, landing him on the dirt floor. 

“Oh, Kento,” he whispers, and then his mind goes blissfully blank for a while.

It’s freezing. Gojo wakes shivering, body sore against the hard dirt of the basement floor. He rolls onto his side, sitting up, and when his shoulders move it pulls at the skin of his back and makes him groan. He’d managed to bandage his legs and his back at some point, but exhaustion had taken him into the inky depths of sleep before he’d made it to the armchair on the other side of the room.

There’s one lone window up at the edge of the basement wall, but it’s grayed out by the snowfall. Gojo listens for a long moment with his breath held, but everything is still. It’s a much more peaceful silence, and for the first time since the drive back to the cabin Gojo feels like he can breathe.

He’s careful moving the barricade away from the basement door. He undoes the deadbolt as slowly as he can so that it doesn’t make a sound, and then he eases the door open a sliver.

The hallway is bright. He pokes his head and shoulders out, and the window at the end of the hall lets him see the glimmering snow under the sunlight, still tinged a little pink. It must not be long after sunrise.

Gojo carries through the rest of the house in a daze, pausing when he sees the front door. The top of it is bending inward, the door clearly forced off of its hinges. More weak daylight shines through, but the barricade did its job and hasn’t moved more than a couple of inches.

Gojo’s hands are shaking as he moves the furniture out of the way and forces the busted door open. There are birds flying overhead, and the sound of snow sliding off of the roof.

In the next second, as Gojo crunches down into the yard, something else splits the silence.

“Satoru! Satoru? Are you out here?”

Gojo has never been so happy to hear Kento’s voice in all his life. His calf makes him limp just slightly, but he rushes through the snow anyway, following the sound of the yelling.

“Satoru!” Kento calls again. His voice is shot, hoarse and cracking, and even from far away Gojo can make out the utter desperation and despair in it.

“I’m here!” Gojo calls, spotting Kento in the middle of the yard. At the sound, Kento whips around, his shoulders heaving. He’s completely naked, and he’s holding one wrist at an odd angle, but it doesn’t stop him from running toward Gojo with what seems like all he’s worth.

“Satoru,” Kento says again, like it’s the one word he can manage to get out of his mouth.

Gojo’s still moving toward him as fast as he can. “I’m here, Kento, I’m here.”

Kento all but slams into him, his arms wrapping so tight around Gojo’s ribs and sore back that it knocks the air from his lungs. Kento’s face is at once buried in Gojo’s neck, hot tears hitting his skin.

“I thought—I saw your car, I thought I—did I hurt you? You were limping.”

Kento’s absolutely trembling in his arms, gasping for air like he can’t quite fill his lungs.

“I’m fine, I’m okay,” Gojo says. “You caught my calf and my thighs and my back a little, but I’m okay.”

“I’m sorry,” Kento says wetly into his neck. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Shhh, love,” Gojo says. He presses a kiss into Kento’s hair, tugging at his shoulders. “I’m okay. Let’s go inside, it’s freezing out here. Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

“Broke my wrist, did something to one knee,” Kento says, still not loosening his hold on Gojo. “I’m so glad you’re alright. I thought I might have killed you.”

“You would never kill me,” Gojo says, carefully disentangling himself so he can guide Kento into the house. He goes pale at the sight of the door, marred and wrecked by hatched claw marks, and all the upturned furniture inside, but Gojo marches him straight past and into the bathroom, turning the shower on immediately.

In any other moment, he’d make a joke about being able to see Kento nude. But now he just lets Kento run his fingers over the bandages on his leg and back, his throat clicking as he swallows.

They shower together. And it should be awkward, the level of intimacy as they lean on each other and Gojo lathers Kento’s hair, but it just feels easy and soothing, the salve they both need to calm their frayed nerves.

After, they lay in Kento’s bed, and he explains everything. He tells Gojo how he’d been bitten by a werewolf in his backyard at the end of September, and he’d had to stay home for a month because the pain of the venom changing his body had rendered him immobile. The day Gojo had stopped by had been his first full moon.

Gojo saves him from explaining the vervain and the wolfsbane. He owed Kento an apology about snooping and finding them in the first place, although he doesn’t apologize for snooping in the basement. Kento, still trembling a little and pressed into Gojo’s side, is suddenly very adamant that he doesn’t want an apology.

He’s crying when they get to Yuuji and Megumi. 

“We turned around on the trail before the sun set,” he says. “But we followed the wrong marker somewhere and got lost, and the moon came up, and when I woke up in the morning they were both bleeding. And I dropped them off at the hospital and told them that I would never hurt them again, and then I packed up a bag and left. Because I didn’t know what else to do. Because my parents had always taught me how to keep from hurting anybody, and I’d failed, and I could have killed them. So I came out here, where I’d be miles away from people even on full moons, and just tried to leave everything behind. If none of you knew where I was, I could never slip up and hurt any of you ever again. I could have killed them, Satoru.”

Gojo holds him tighter. He reaches a thumb over and wipes away the tears from Kento’s cheeks. Even after so many years, he still hates to see him cry. 

“I almost did kill them,” Kento says. “If I had wandered anywhere else and I didn’t find them, they would have bled out. I’m surprised they even survived the night as it is. At least that couldn’t happen here.”

“Until your resident dumbass came and ruined it,” Gojo says, and to his surprise it makes Kento give a wet laugh.

“I’m sorry,” Kento says. “You don’t know how guilty I felt leaving you like that, knowing what I was doing. Knowing that after a decade and a half I was just going to disappear without saying a word. You called me over and over again while they were in the hospital and I had to keep biting my arm on the train to keep from answering and telling you everything.”

“Why didn’t you?” Gojo says softly. “I would have never been scared of you. It wouldn’t have changed anything.”

“My parents were scared,” Kento murmurs. “People don’t think werewolves are real. They were afraid that I’d be taken to be tested on or that people would be scared and turn to trying to hurt me. I wanted to tell you, but they wouldn’t let me. And I wanted to tell you after spring break, because I…I loved you, Satoru, and I wanted to share everything with you even if I couldn’t have you. And then Yuuji and Megumi…and then I was here, and I thought you would never want to see me again, let alone talk to me.”

“It took me a year to track you down, you know,” Gojo says. “I should have done it years ago, but I didn’t know why you left. I figured having the stupid deal as an excuse would at least be foolproof enough to maybe get to talk to you for a few minutes.”

“The deal.” Kento sighs. “I suppose it’s off. I meant it when I said you wouldn’t want to marry me knowing this. Knowing that I almost killed our friends. And now…I could have killed you last night, Satoru.”

“You didn’t,” Gojo says firmly. “And that wasn’t you. Either time, it wasn’t you. Right? Didn’t you just spend twenty minutes earlier explaining how you lose consciousness when you transform? Like you’re asleep, or passed out? Don’t be a fool.”

“I’m a beast,” Kento says. “And isn’t that the key point of so many stories? That no one can love a beast?”

“I’ve never been one for tradition,” Gojo says, delighting in the way it makes Kento swallow, his eyes widening. “And I don’t see it that way. I don’t see you that way. Wasn’t it you who said love doesn’t have to be a curse?”

“Satoru…” Kento breathes, like a warning. Like a plea.

“Marry me,” Gojo says. “Nanami Kento. Marry me.”

Kento blinks at him, eyes big and owlish and lined with tears. “You can’t be serious.”

“We made a deal,” Gojo says. There are tears pricking at his own eyes. “You’ll be thirty in a few more months. Clock’s ticking on the engagement front. There are flowers in my car, I was gonna make you a fancy dinner and everything. Do a real proposal.”

Kento swallows. There’s hope in his eyes that Gojo hasn’t seen since Boston. 

“But this’ll do instead,” Gojo says. He takes Kento’s hands in his, presses a kiss to the backs of his knuckles. “I love you, Nanami Kento. Marry me. Please marry me.”

“Yes,” Kento breathes, one tear sliding over the curve of his lips. Gojo leans in, presses their mouths together to chase it away. Kento’s hand breaks from his, buries itself in his hair like a drowning man. It’s an achingly soft kiss, made salty by both of their tears. Kento still kisses as gently as he did ten years ago, and he still smells like shampoo and clean laundry. His mouth tastes like toothpaste.

Sparks snake through the live wire armature of Gojo’s skeleton. It’s the best kiss he’s had in a very long time, or maybe ever, and it electrifies him. Because he’s been waiting ten years for this. Because he’s going to marry the best man he’s ever known. Because after so much strife, they can still have this, this warmth and this softness.

They part, and Gojo presses their foreheads together. He can’t resist saying it one more time, just for the thrill of Kento’s response, and he gets right to it because he’s never been one for beating around the bush.

“Let’s get married.”

“Yes,” Kento says, and presses their mouths together again.