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“What do you mean you won’t marry me, you have to.” Gojo gave his frying pan two intent wiggles and flicked his wrist. An egg sailed end-over-end like a pancake, landing back in the pan with no splash. Ten out of ten. Gojo watched the egg cook with rapturous attention, searching for the ideal moment: edges brown and the whites cooked through with a still-runny yolk.
“I mean that I’m not marrying you. Why would anyone marry you?” Kento asked, glaring at the stupidly perfect egg Gojo unloaded on top of another stupidly perfect egg, both perched atop a perfectly toasted slice of whole wheat bread.
Gojo was so passive-aggressive about these sorts of things.
“That was the point. If nobody marries me, you have to. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.” Gojo dusted the eggs and toast with a generous splash of salt and pepper, then put the plate on the counter in front of Kento, next to a small bowl crammed with some strange seaweed salad that looked like Gojo had originally intended it to be miso soup and then gotten distracted before he managed to make any progress. A showy pair of jazz hands accompanied Gojo singing, “One sunny side up Gojo special for my darling future husband!”
Kento stabbed his yolks and watched them ooze over their toasted wheat bedding. “I keep telling you that’s not the right name for them.”
“And I keep telling you that I’m not calling that”—Gojo flicked his severely underused spatula at Kento’s plate—“Over easy. There is nothing easy about how you want your eggs and I deserve credit for it.”
Over medium, Kento kept trying to tell him. You have to call them over medium when you cook the whites through but Gojo wouldn’t listen and worse, he knew it was irrelevant. Kento wanted his eggs cooked over medium and he didn’t want to explain what that meant to the usual sorts of people cooking him breakfast.
“You want credit”—Kento paused for effect—“for cooking eggs?”
“No, I want credit for cooking your fussy eggs well. Huge difference. Tell me they’re not amazing,” Gojo said.
They were and Kento would not. More to the eggs than to himself or to Gojo, Kento muttered, “And I don’t have to do anything…”
“You’ll be twenty-five, soon.”
“Next week, yes,” Kento didn’t see what that had to do with it at all.
“And I’m twenty-five.”
“For a few more months.”
“So we have to get married.” Gojo cracked two more eggs into his pan and then broke up the yolks with his spatula, racing the heat to get everything swirled together in an unholy abomination he dubbed ‘scrambled.’ “I’m expecting a grand proposal. A picnic out by the lake, under the stars, with a case of happoshu.”
And then, with the cracking ferocity of a whip, Kento realized where Gojo was getting all this from. The lake. The happoshu. Gojo, unbearably drunk and even more unbearably seventeen, desperate for romance. Oh god. “That doesn’t count.”
“Of course it does, we made a pact.” Gojo did a happy little dance and flicked off the burner, pouring his ‘scrambled eggs’ directly onto his plate. An emphatic scrape of the spatula gathered up the stragglers for him to lick off it. At least he wasn’t misusing the ancient and revered technique of his Big Three clan again; that must be a privilege reserved for Kento’s eggs alone.
“That was not a pact,” Kento hissed. “I was drunk. You were drunk! I didn’t get any benefit out of it, so how could it be a pact?”
“It’s not my fault you’re so bad at setting your conditions.” Gojo leaned both elbows on the counter, forearms tucked into his chest and hands clamped in excited fists propping up his chin. “We made an agreement. We sealed it with a kiss. This is our pact—you have to marry me, now.”
Kento refused to dignify this nonsense by arguing against it, so he took an uncomfortably large bite and stared blankly at Gojo while he chewed.
Unbothered, Gojo took dainty bites of his mangled eggs and then, once they were gone, started plucking mochi from the freezer. It wasn’t even ten in the morning; another bullet point under the heading ‘Why is Gojo still so very single?’
Gojo threw out pitiful arguments for his case as he snacked while Kento finished his breakfast and gathered his belongings. He extolled the sanctity of drunken teen promises, respecting pop culture, and something about butterflies and magpies that Kento couldn’t bother deciphering so he threw out a few encouraging hums and one “that sounds like you made it up” when the tempo of Gojo’s monologuing rose too high.
“And another thing—”
Kento grabbed the front of Gojo’s shirt and pecked a kiss on his lips.
Gojo’s smile went lopsided and soft. “What’s that for?”
“Just needed you to shut up for a second. I have to go.”
“Cool.” The tip of Gojo’s nose brushed Kento’s. Another kiss lingered. “Okay. Back tonight?”
“Not a chance.” Kento wasn’t coming back until Gojo started being sensible about his spinsterhood. And he certainly wasn’t going to turn this thing into an actual thing when they were already toeing that line quite recklessly—what, with the spending the night and the perfect eggs and all this ill-advised kissing to get a minute of quiet. “See you around.”
Behind Kento, after he’d stormed out the door but before it had slammed closed, Gojo whined, “But our pact!”
The infamous happoshu incident had occurred one night in the tenuous summer between the world falling apart and flat-out ending. Everyone was still alive, no one was a terrorist. All current murders were sanctioned by the higher-ups as far as Kento knew and he was not asking for any clarification on that point, thank you very much. It shouldn’t have been such an important point—whether or not the murdering was above board with documentation signed in triplicate—but the rationalization numbed something small and frightened, clutching the base of Kento’s spine.
Kento had been sixteen at the time, Gojo seventeen. The rest of their classmates and friends were scattered around and in between, all trapped in some varying state of entering their late-stage teens with all the horrors such a terrible and hormone-soaked era entailed. Gojo had been pissed that night because he’d been assigned to supervise some semi-Grade 1 missions and felt it beneath him, and then he’d gotten completely wasted on happoshu because he’d figured the same about that, too.
“It’s not even real beer, what can it do to me?” Gojo had grandstanded.
The happoshu was happy to demonstrate.
It was something of a special treat, getting to watch Gojo realize in real time that arrogance could not, in fact, shield him from the effects of alcohol. Less of a treat once it became apparent Gojo was a weepy drunk and he spent hours clinging to Kento, preferring to marinate in petty jealousy rather than address the wasteland of his emotional state post-Star Plasma Vessel, post-Toji, but pre-my bestie slaughtered a whole ass village trying and failing to make a point.
“Suguru can’t have a boyfriend before me,” Gojo had insisted. “That’s wrong. It’s just wrong. Shoko is fine but Suguru? We’re gonna have to kill Haibara-kun, Nanamin. It’s the only way.” Gojo deflated, burying his face in the crook of Kento’s neck. His breath heaved a sticky-hot fog across Kento’s nape while his arms draped with the loose hold of an impatient noose.
Kento could easily be strangled with the wrong response. He hoped Gojo would, a little.
“It’s not wrong. You’re just selfish and don’t like people having things you don’t. Why does any of this matter? It’s not like you’re interested in Haibara so why does it matter who he hooks up with?”
Sloppy-drunk and fueled by the sort of mess one only finds within three cans of happoshu, Gojo blubbered, “You have to save me. You’re the only one who can—If we’re not married by the time we’re twenty-five, you have to marry me. I’m awful, I’m gonna die alone, it’s inhumane. So you have to.”
What was inhumane was having to keep listening to Gojo whine about it one second longer.
Under cover of Gojo’s belligerent tirade, Kento turned until they were face to face and his legs were tucked up and curled to the side and still, somehow, knotted up with Gojo’s mile-long limbs. Gojo was pretty up close despite his stupid drunken tongue wagging right off his stupid, drunken face. All long lashes, plush lips, and a ruddy sheen speckled over his cheeks from his ever-growing flush. Infinity wrapped Gojo like a blanket, ends draped over Kento’s shoulders to share warmth. The unsettling, cosmic glow buried in his eyes sputtered. It wasn’t the first time Kento had to reckon with the obvious reality of Gojo not considering him someone to keep out, but that specific moment was more primal than other, more intentional ones.
Kento’s cheeks felt similarly warm to Gojo’s obvious flush. The happoshu had gone to his head, too, the haze mingling with the moonlight radiating off the lake. His fingers itched and his chest felt strange; numb and throbbing in turns. And even though Gojo wouldn’t shut up for anything, he was still all sorts of pretty.
They were kissing before Gojo realized he’d stopped talking.
Gojo had the softest hair Kento ever felt in his life. That was what he remembered most, after. Above the faintly citrus twinge to the hops, above the fresh-cut grass smell, lingering atop the bulging moon looming overhead. In the harsh light of day and for years after, Kento carried that tender brush through Gojo’s hair close to his chest, only letting it out in the similarly dark midnight hours, on the cusp of sleep when there wasn’t much point regulating unwise musings. The kiss had been nice so Kento took another and then a third, savoring the fluttery sensation of someone else’s eyelashes tickling his face and the incredible pleasure of Gojo’s aptitude for any and all things he put his mind to directed squarely at him.
“I think there is little you can do about it,” Kento had whispered across Gojo’s lips. “The being awful, I mean.”
And then it was somewhere around an hour later the matter surfaced again with Gojo tucked under Kento’s arm as they lay out in the grass, watching the stars with the detached pleasure of being the biggest thing in the cosmos.
“I mean it. Twenty-five. I’m not waiting around any longer than that.” Gojo yawned with the intensity of a mountain lion, one arm performatively covering his mouth halfway through. He tucked into Kento’s side, breath warming the crook of his neck.
And Kento hadn’t wanted Gojo to dig back into it, so he’d shifted a bit to accommodate him and resigned himself to this night being one made of fuzzy, alcohol-soaked decisions.
According to Utahime, Kento and Gojo’s thing had a name, and that name was ‘situationship.’
Kento liked the term. Situationship. A thing but not a thing. A situation. He was comfortable having a situation involving Gojo; that was much easier to deal with than something Gojo could assign stakes or commitments or anniversaries to.
Other things Kento could not deal with: bright yellow party hats with green polka dots and tinsel exploding from the tops. Matching streamers. Crepe paper dangling from the ceiling and a fringed foil banner screaming “HAPPY FORTIETH” hung over the entrance to the dormitory common area, just to the right of a rectangular banquet table buried under a plastic, daffodil-shaded tablecloth and a massive, chrome cloche.
The banner in particular was distressing because as the only person capable of getting through shopping with Gojo without committing felonies, Kento had been forced to supervise Gojo shopping for these decorations. If he’d known Gojo bought something like that, he would have quit and moved. Again.
“If I’m forty does that mean I don’t have to marry you?” Kento asked. Seemed like a fair enough trade.
“Does that mean you admit that if you’re twenty-five, you do?” Gojo’s smugness pancaked the question until it was merely a statement of fact, flung into the universe with no expectation of being challenged.
What an absolute gremlin.
Kento gnashed his teeth and retreated to fight another day. Off to the side, Ieiri stood with both hands on Megumi’s shoulders, the both of them snickering and captivated.
“Do you want presents or cake first?” Gojo asked innocently, meaning both were rife with shenanigans. He waved open palms on either side of his face and in a goofily menacing voice demanded, “Choose.”
“Absolutely not” was the only rational response.
“Then I’ll choose for you,” Gojo threatened like that mattered at all when he’d curated both options.
Kento looked to Megumi. Megumi mouthed ‘presents.’
“Presents.”
A slight disappointment twitched in Gojo’s eyebrows but he disappeared down the hall toward the staff offices without comment. Kento offered Megumi an appreciative nod, though Megumi seemed to consider Gojo’s reaction reward enough. Good kid. Levelheaded. Kento was fond of him though he tried not to be too obvious about it to anyone besides Megumi. It was more amusing that way. Megumi enjoyed the secret camaraderie.
Gojo returned with a small box draped in gaudy, blue wrapping paper embellished with yellow stars, and a not insignificant amount of glitter. It was impossible to tell if there was any weight to it with Gojo lightly bouncing it off his palm with his technique as if to tempt Kento. The size… the size was very worrying.
This was better than the cake? Megumi nodded in sympathy with a grim, downcast frown.
Kento could go out the window. He didn’t even need his technique, he could just bash the glass out with a chair or a lamp or Gojo’s terrifying little box and then he’d be free. A life on the lam wouldn’t be so bad. It’d be so much better than being proposed to in front of Ieiri and Megumi in some sort of psychosexual power struggle.
“Let’s just get this over with,” Kento said, gesturing for the box.
Gojo handed it over, looking ecstatic.
Inside the box was a penis. Not a literal penis, but penis was the immediate impression evoked by the bright turquoise, leather keychain arranged into a quite phallic shape—shaft, balls, and all—with two keys already wound onto the ring at the tip. Gojo’s apartment was an easy guess. That one had an odd arrangement of teeth near the back and Kento had enough experience to clock the pattern. The other— Kento wasn’t sure. It was familiar but painfully generic.
“Gojo, what is this?”
“They’re your dick keys,” Gojo said as if pronouncing a particularly obvious weather forecast.
“My dick keys.” Those were not three words that should go together.
Gojo stared with beatific calm.
Another approach, then.
“Are you seriously giving me a key to your apartment for my birthday?” Kento didn’t know where to begin with this. It was so outrageous, so egotistical. And it made no sense; Gojo was too weirdly paranoid about his space to give anyone access to his apartment. He never let anyone rifle through his drawers or hang out unsupervised. He would despise having someone around when he wasn’t home—it’d drive him crazy.
So, really, there were some pros to this gift.
“And what makes you think one of those keys is for my apartment?” Gojo asked with faux innocence twined through every leisurely vowel. “Whatever gave you that impression?”
Gojo called them dick keys, Kento realized with a chill. Kento had immediately understood, he hadn’t needed an explanation at all and had taken it as confirmation of what he already suspected. He quashed a rising apprehension for the sins of his personal life. All the while, they stared at each other with agonizing, reverberating pangs of I know you know but I also know you can’t do anything about it.
“Do I even want to know what this other one is for?” Maybe one of the school buildings? Surely its familiarity was an ill omen, not anything to be relieved over.
“The other one is for later,” Gojo said smugly.
Kento made a mental note to toss the whole box in a drain on the way home. “And the cake?”
This time, Gojo’s smile was a bit softer around the edges as he stepped back with a flourish toward the banquet table. “Shoko, if you would be so kind.”
Ieiri, to her credit, shot Kento a somewhat sympathetic look before lifting the cloche to reveal not only a cake but also a gorgeous, braided loaf of bread. The bread was curious, but the cake? The cake would not be silenced.
It wasn’t technically a cake upon closer examination. It was a cluster of cupcakes covered with a sheet of fondant as thick as foam board. The fondant was iced like a convenience store buttermilk atrocity, and printed on that icing was a distressingly accurate rendition of Kento’s freshman student ID picture. Bangs. Scowl. Mid-blink with skinny-boy cheekbones and all.
“Gojo, I will kill you.”
“If you wait until after we’re married, you’ll get insurance money for it.”
“Married?” Ieiri asked. “No, don’t tell me you agreed. I believed in you, Nanami.” A vacuous pause. “I had money on you.”
“I have repeatedly refused, actually.”
Ieiri didn’t seem to believe him at all. At this point it might be easier and less enraging to go register at the city office. But that would validate Gojo’s obnoxious approach and Kento was in far, far too deep to allow that on day zero of being considered marriage material. He had to tough it out, claw his way to the ripe, old age of twenty-six before even considering what lay beyond situationship. For his sanity. For his pride.
“Aren’t you going to say anything about the bread?” Gojo slung his arm over Kento’s shoulder and squared them up to face the table and Megumi, now in possession of the cloche, looking like he was strongly considering its potential as a weapon.
Kento examined the loaf again: a golden braid smelling of garlic and butter from a little bakery on the outskirts of Ginza. A treat Kento rarely indulged—the bakery was far out of the way of his usual commute. It wasn’t anywhere near Gojo’s either, for that matter and the realization sent a funny tremble through Kento’s composure. Poor Megumi looked baffled by the reaction. He’d probably considered the cupcakes unforgivable and they were, in a way, but the bread wasn’t nothing and Kento couldn’t quite reconcile the twitchy feeling fluttering around in his gut over it.
“What’s it for?” Kento settled for asking. Gojo wouldn’t do this for no reason.
“It’s for monsters who don’t like cake, not even on their birthday, not even if they scrape the icing off.”
“How specific.”
Gojo’s bottom lip jutted out barely a millimeter. “And to show you I care?”
Getting closer, there was an “I” in that one. “And the real reason?”
“I really want you to use that key tonight.”
There it was.
Gojo’s arm over Kento’s shoulder tightened and he tilted his head in, folding their little conversation into something a bit more intimate. “What do you think? Did I nail it or what?”
The bread did look amazing, and Gojo had gone out of his way to get it. He must have; a coincidence was too absurd to consider. Gojo had purposefully gone to this bakery thinking about how Kento would not want cake. An irrational terror descended that Kento may have to start caring like he typically did not. As a rule. About Gojo.
Somewhere, in the metaphysical planes of the universe, Kento’s sixteen-year-old self wept into a half-empty happoshu can.
“Yeah,” Gojo said, “I totally nailed it. Oh, my god, it was so much work, too. You have no idea what I’ve been through—”
The kiss was a poorly thought play for a moment of quiet and it worked well, at first, but quickly spiraled into a tenuous chase after the nostalgia of being sixteen and secretly, devastatingly, irretrievably enamored by someone not quite as out of reach as Kento wanted to assume. Gojo’s fingers scratched through Kento’s undercut and he was drunk lakeside all over again, tasting hops woven through bites of infinity.
“Aww,” Ieiri cooed from off to the left while Megumi made dramatic retching noises.
“I love it when you kiss me for no reason,” Gojo muttered, his breath a warm caress across Kento’s lips. “It’s so validating.”
“Shut up, you’re ruining it.” And then Kento did what Kento did best when he wanted to ignore the deeper implications of things like keys and lewd keychains and birthday bread for those who don’t want cake.
The mission at hand was out in Yamanashi: a one-hour, straight shot west from Tokyo. Hour and a half, the way Ijichi drove. If it were Nitta, they’d be there in forty-five minutes but the whole ride would be full of Nitta enthusiastically describing her filming schedule for some internet thing she and Ino had going on, and Kento had already tried and failed to understand that nonsense twice. He wasn’t anxious for a third attempt.
As far as missions went, it was a relatively simple-sounding one: an office building long scheduled for demolition was still standing because no one who went inside to clear the site ever came back out. The windows in the area hadn’t been able to get a decent read on the situation. They knew there was a curse but not much else. According to the residuals, it was somewhere in the realm of a Grade 1 but the lack of survivors had floated the mission directly into the path Kento had been forced to straddle since returning to the jujutsu world. The higher-ups sure loved playing games with their promotions but it was still better than the corporate world of self-evaluations and unachievable ‘achievable goals’.
“You’re not even listening, I can tell,” Gojo pouted, hands tucked into his jacket pockets as he slouched in the backseat with Kento, his legs splayed far too wide to be anywhere near polite. Their knees brushed whenever Ijichi hung a left and Kento swore they were just turning in circles now and then for how often it happened. It wouldn’t surprise him. Gojo’s second favorite hobby was bribery.
“I’ve been very transparent with you about this,” Kento said. “I do not care which Digimon could take Mothra in a fight. These are fictional monsters. I’m more concerned with real ones.”
“Who says they’re fictional, you don’t know.”
Gojo was arguing just to argue now. One of his more exhausting personality traits but Kento didn’t find it too bothersome. Throwing in a generic barb for Gojo to swarm like chum in the water was easy enough and the rhythm of it was fun even if the conversation was nonsensical and meandering more often than not.
“Why are you even here? I thought you hated going on semi-Grade 1 assignments.” Of all the universal truths Kento thought he could depend on, Gojo refusing to evaluate others was way up there. The midterm for his first batch of students was a practical combat exercise and not one of them had learned any math in at least four months.
“I do,” Gojo answered easily. “But I hate the higher-ups interfering with my mission roster even more and I’m tired of them delaying your promotion. We all know you’ve been Grade 1 since high school.” Only Gojo said it leering, soaked in braided layers of entendre.
“Not sure nepotism is the solution.”
“It’s only nepotism if we’re related,” Gojo said with the stunning dismissal of someone who didn’t care that they were quite wrong, actually.
Arguing it could kill at least another hour and while Kento wasn’t particularly opposed—especially when he was firmly backed up by the whole of Merriam-Webster.com—they had more important things they were meant to be doing. Besides, the situation was not quite so simple. “They’re holding it up because I’ve proven to be fickle and unreliable. That’s not unfair, they’re just being cautious.”
“I would believe that if you were an untested student or if you’d had literally any evil trends in your behavior, but you aren’t and you don’t,” Gojo said, his attention trained exclusively on Kento despite facing slightly to the right, out the window. Even when Gojo wasn’t looking he was always looking and Kento had developed a knack for spotting the difference between all the perfectly cooked, over medium eggs and the hideous dick keys he kept carrying around because it was surprisingly fun to constantly threaten Gojo’s living space when Gojo was so very jealous of it.
“Why not just put his key on your own keyring?” Utahime asked one night not long ago, gaze far too sharp for how deep they’d made it into their pitcher at the izakaya. “You don’t have to carry around the dick part of your dick keys.”
Maybe Gojo wasn’t the only one with a need for blindfolds.
“They’re just being crusty assholes about it because we’re together,” Gojo concluded.
“But we’re not together,” Kento said. That was important to point out; else Gojo would claim things had changed.
“Well whose fault is that?” Gojo asked. Then, with Shakespearean petulance, he swiveled that blindfolded stare to Kento and asked, “Seriously, why won’t you date me?”
Like Kento didn’t have a dozen reasons. “It’s nothing personal, I just don’t know how I would explain you to my friends.”
“Friends? You don’t have any friends. Your friends are all my friends.”
“Exactly,” Kento said. “They know you.”
And then six blissful seconds of utter silence while Gojo processed with his mouth gaping half-open like a particularly bulbous koi.
Ijichi took another three lefts in a row.
“Savage,” Gojo said. “I mean, I knew you had it in you but I never thought you’d unleash that barbed tongue on me. How could you be so mean?”
“You’re trying to bully me into marrying you. Why would I be nice?”
“Same reason you always invite me in when I show up on your doorstep, instead of sending me home.” Gojo grinned as Ijichi pulled into a derelict parking lot tucked behind an abandoned, four-story building with crusty windows, and put the car into park, letting it idle.
“It’s not like you’d leave if I tried,” Kento said, but it was a weak comeback and meant little in the grand scheme of who here was making the more reckless decisions.
“Probably not,” Gojo agreed.
“Go ahead and draw a veil,” Kento told Ijichi before getting out of the car.
There was definitely a curse loitering somewhere inside the building but the residuals didn’t feel right. The impression was closer to a proper spirit or the sort of energy Kento imagined a ghost might give off, wafting about the hollowed-out shell of the office building. Grade 2, maybe a weak Grade 1. No way to tell without getting closer; no wonder the windows had so many problems assessing the situation.
Gojo shoved his hands in his pockets and joined Kento looking up at the building. “Oh, this should be fun,” he said like he wasn’t a lesson in overkill.
The scenery inside was bleak and somewhat therapeutic for it. Capsized desks, abandoned rolling chairs, dirt caked into the short, coarse carpeting, and a firm layer of dust covered every surface even thicker than the grime blotting out the windows.
“Good riddance,” Kento muttered under his breath as he and Gojo wove through the through the mess, navigating through the first floor to a stairwell near the back of the building.
“Tell us how you really feel,” Gojo teased. He gestured up with his pointer finger.
So, the floor above or maybe one higher. The building was only four stories but if their destination was the top rather than somewhere in the middle, Gojo would gloat about being able to tell.
Kento gestured for quiet and unholstered his cleaver. The weight felt comforting in his grip, soaking ease through his muscles as he took three deep and even breaths. In through the nose, out through the mouth. It was a good day for a simple mission like this and loathe as he was to admit it, having Gojo along was soothing, too, in a way. Gojo would give him a favorable review unless Kento screwed up so badly, he literally couldn’t. No pressure. Just an easy curse to exorcise before it was time to clock out.
The stairwell was too dark to do more than feel for the way up, but on the second floor, sunlight spilled through a long corridor lined with windows on one side and offices on the other. The nameplates beside each door told bureaucratic stories of Human Resources and Receivables. Gojo kept up endless chatter as they stepped through the rubble between a door labeled ‘Filing’ next to another with a half-crumbling wall designated ‘Communications’, droning on and on about a movie he wanted to see that was based on a book he hadn’t read, but he was certain he had it somewhere in his apartment—had he stolen it from Kento? Did Kento want to read it? Gojo hadn’t heard it was particularly good but if they were making a movie…
Nothing on the second floor so Kento ascended to the third without contributing to Gojo’s one-sided conversation, and it was between the sixth and seventh steps up that the temperature plummeted and the air went saggy with a cloying texture. The curse wasn’t too strong—Kento was right, a weak Grade 1—but no wonder it’d been so hard to find, its residuals were faint, delicate etchings; small and subtle.
“What a weird curse,” he mused. The grip on his cleaver shifted. He should go for a one-hit-kill. Curses so obviously delicate nearly always had tricks up their sleeves.
“It’s basically a fly head,” Gojo sniffed, face angled up, towards the presumed location of the curse on the floor above. “You’re going to obliterate it without even trying, why are we dragging this out?”
“Because it’s important to do things the proper way, that’s how assessments work.” Kento was forever trying to make Gojo understand that the world did not simply bend to the whims of everyone—only Gojo was so utterly obnoxious as to keep trying.
“But it takes forever and this is so boring.”
“Don’t be dramatic,” Kento said without much sincerity. “And please be silent, I require concentration.”
Gojo shook his head with slow disappointment.
Crash. The residuals trickled down, stronger and more alert than before. They’d been noticed.
“Ooh, never mind, sounds like a nasty one,” Gojo drawled. “Hey, have I ever told you about the time I had to take out a Special Grade swarm of tarantula curses in Kobe? Had all these big, hairy tentacles, too, and they resonated with this crazy low-pitched frequency—”
“Do you even breathe?” Kento wondered.
“It’s optional,” Gojo answered with such a flippant air, Kento wasn’t sure if he was making it up or if maybe his lungs were keeping an infinity, too.
“Then choose to be quiet.”
“After I’m done. As I was saying: there I was in Kobe with this slimy, hairy swarm of—”
Enough of this. Gojo wouldn’t shut up until he was made to, so Kento grabbed the front of Gojo’s jacket and yanked him close enough to swallow the rest of Gojo’s rant and enjoy a precious few moments of silence. And then a few more, when Gojo’s mouth accepted the demand and his arm curled over Kento’s shoulder to keep him close. Gojo was, as in all things, both infuriatingly competent and relatively patient with the performance gap between himself and others. He made it easy to forget more important points like his wretched personality or the building trembling all around them. For a few blissful seconds, Kento daydreamed about a shared life on a beach in the tropics. Sunshine all day. Not a damn curse in sight.
“You did that on purpose,” Kento realized. His breath shook. “You baited me.”
Gojo grinned. “But you feel better now, yeah?”
Another crash boomed overhead, saving Kento from the farcical dilemma of whether to lie or confess.
“Ready for Grade 1?” Gojo asked.
Kento quite thought he was.
Gojo was right; the curse might as well have been a fly head. Once Kento had it cornered there wasn’t much to it at all, just a quivering little mess of cursed energy seeking shadows to cower in. Kento cut it down with swift professionalism and then they were back in the car, suffering more left turns while Gojo stayed suspiciously quiet and glued to his phone.
The ride back was half as long as the ride out. Ijichi kept his eyes religiously on the road and maintained a faint pink flush every time Kento caught him in one of the mirrors after yet another superfluous turn. It wasn’t until Kento was trudging up the stairs to his second-floor apartment that he realized Gojo had tagged along like he intended to stay with or without an invitation.
Kento could and had argued this point successfully, but a lack of motivation festered in his spirit.
“Wanna do the honors?” Gojo asked, walking ahead only to turn around and take long, backwards steps as he talked, keeping to the center of the hallway rather than veering toward one side or the other out of general politeness. He was nearly ethereal, gliding through the muted creams and browns of Kento’s hallway like a wraith. “I know you don’t get enough opportunities to use your dick keys. I never see you with them.”
Kento did not feel comfortable admitting that he not only carried around the dick keys but also kept them secret because he knew that meant something. “I tossed them in the sewer.”
“Liar.” Gojo came to a stop outside Kento’s door and grinned.
And then Kento realized with a sour twisting in his belly that Gojo had done it, he’d gotten Kento to start thinking of him and the key to his apartment in terms of dick, and even worse—
“We’re at my apartment. Why would I use the dick keys?” The second key. Kento knew it looked familiar. “Oh my god, did you give me a key to my own apartment? For my birthday?!”
“I did,” Gojo said, unbothered by Kento’s outrage. “Figured I might as well have it made when I got a copy of mine. You can give it to me whenever, no rush. It’s entirely performative so you can take your time working up to it.”
“I don’t even know what to do with you sometimes.”
“Sure you do,” Gojo said, leaning against the wall to the right of Kento’s door, head tilted slightly to the right with a deliberate hint of a smile. Gojo considered this his best angle: interior lighting, with blindfold.
Kento hated that he knew that.
“You gonna invite me in?” Gojo asked. “You should—I turned in my report in the car, we have celebrating to do, Mister Grade 1 Sorcerer.”
And he probably embellished it to hell and back, until he was turning in crown jewels extolling the triumphs of Nanami Kento, undeniable Grade 1 sorcerer and don’t worry about the paperwork, Gojo would make sure Ijichi got it taken care of right away. No need for the higher-ups to concern themselves. Normally, Kento would object, but he wasn’t sure he could when this outcome had been undeniable from the moment Gojo climbed into the backseat of the car this afternoon, proclaiming himself Kento’s final semi-Grade 1 mission proctor.
“What do you have to say on this auspicious occasion?” Gojo held out his fist like it was a microphone and dropped his voice into a seductively sweet twang. “What will you do now?”
Kento leaned in, playing along. “It’s rude and unprofessional of you to jump the line and give me informal results even if you are certain they’ll hold water.” A pause. “And I’m going to have dinner and go to bed early.”
The playful version of Gojo’s pout was terribly self-aware. An effortless half-smirk, half-tell me your deepest secrets and I’ll whisper sweet nothings in your ear for hours lounged on his lips, well aware of how irresistible ninety-eight or so of the population found him. Kento was mortified to be quite comfortably within the majority on this one.
“Come in,” Kento sighed, but he refused to use Gojo’s keys. Dignity was to be treasured after all.
“Thanks, dear!” Gojo called, amusement and sarcasm dancing through his tone in affectionate waves. “I’m going to hop in the shower and change—can you get the food when it comes? It’s already paid for, just tip the guy.” Gojo wrestled his wallet out of his pants pocket and tossed it to Kento.
“This is not what I had in mind,” Kento said, bemusedly, and then mortification crashed in like the surf with Gojo’s knowing look.
“You weren’t expecting us to quietly celebrate your promotion by relaxing with dinner and going to bed early? What, dare I ask, did you invite me in for?”
And Kento didn’t want to answer this question. He didn’t want to examine it. He didn’t want to think about how Gojo had clothes and toiletries in his apartment and felt welcome in his shower, and he didn’t want to think about the dick keys, and more than that he didn’t want to think, at all. Just for a minute.
The kiss was softer than earlier. Unhurried and quiet; a tenuous certainty stringing between them day by day. Kento felt the wires of it—that thing Utahime named situationship that Kento had been sitting with for months, plucking strings and watching melodious tendrils grow roots in every direction.
Gojo was going to get that key back. Kento already knew it and worse: Gojo had been certain ever since he’d visited the locksmith’s. It was only a matter of time so the question then became how did Kento want to spend these last lingering moments before all the wires snapped and they plummeted into the horrors of dating and possibly living together and oh, god, Gojo technically had kids, too—did that mean Kento had kids now?
“Stop overthinking it,” Gojo muttered and then he yanked Kento’s shirt out, untucking it in one greedy motion and made it impossible to keep thinking at all. He tugged Kento toward the bathroom by his shirt tails.
The mission was a far bigger pain than it had any right to be, from beginning to end.
Hours on the road only for Ino to almost get himself killed twice before Kento could do anything about it—first by charging a Grade 1 before he even had his mask properly on, and then again by turning around and bragging to Kento when he landed a clean hit that wasn’t nearly strong enough to exorcise the curse. The cleanup after had been a nightmare that took all night, Nitta had to go buy Ino a change of clothes twice, and after all that, Kento was stuck back in the car with the two of them for hours while they ranted about whatever Bakery-Tok was and plotted to grow some sort of brand they’d become ensconced in through it. Kento’s only breaks from the insanity were the brief moments Ino spent summarizing their mission into a framework emphasizing his self-proclaimed feats while blatantly ignoring all the parts where he almost died and lost his pants. Twice.
Teenagers were truly something awful. Though, being twenty and freshly licensed wasn’t doing Nitta many favors. At least she took her missions seriously.
“Back to your place?” Nitta asked, signaling to exit the expressway.
Kento was beyond exhausted. A swarm of annoyances buzzed in his marrow with no opportunity to vent, so he looped his forefinger through the little paper bag next to him on the seat and held it up to dangle in the rearview mirror. “I need to drop this off at Gojo’s first.”
A wry look reflected in the rearview mirror. It was worse, Kento thought, to be seen by twenty-year-olds with too much energy and no experience with subtlety.
Nitta offered Kento a thumbs up when she dropped him off, along with a sassy “You just call if you need a ride back” that made it clear she considered the rest of her day free.
Kento jingled the two key rings in his pocket and took the stairs to the third floor of Gojo’s apartment building for a couple of laps before giving up his reluctance and taking the elevator to the top floor. Gojo’s building was vacuous and pristine; in keeping with Gojo’s general, overwhelming aura and the illusion of space he liked to surround himself with. The burnt neutrals of Kento’s building were replaced by sharp whites and glinting, modern fixtures. Hardwood flooring announced every step down the hall to Gojo’s door. The echoing clacks of women in heels must be deafening in this place.
The first thing Gojo focused on after answering the door, was, of course, “You got keys, don’t you? Why are you knocking?”
“I told you I threw them in the sewer.” It wasn’t even a good lie, Gojo had seen his godawful keychain in Kento’s apartment enough times that he’d developed a Pavlovian tendency to pout in its direction like a sunflower chasing the sun.
Kento would give him the key. Eventually. Once this part lost the sheen of novelty.
Today, was not that day. Kento gave Gojo the paper bag he’d carted down from Sendai and stepped inside, exchanging his shoes for a pair of slippers bought just for him that Kento tried not to think about too hard in broad daylight. There was a place for him to put his keys—dick and otherwise—and an empty hook for his jacket next to Gojo’s. Despite the severe, modern lines of Gojo’s apartment, Kento felt warm and welcomed, and despite Gojo never wanting anyone unattended in his home, there were spaces carved for Kento.
“You got me kikufuku from Kikusuian’s?” Gojo’s voice sounded odd and abbreviated as he stared down into the bag like he didn’t understand its contents on a molecular level.
“Yeah, zunda and cream. My mission was in Sendai, we just got back. God, the job was such shit, too. It took forever, I’ve been on the clock for thirty hours and did you know Nitta and Ino are starting up a side gig as ‘duetting micro-influencers?’ What the hell does that even mean? I have no idea and I had to hear about it for hours.” And oh, now that he’d started, he couldn’t stop. “That mission was hardly researched, by the way. If they’d sent Ino alone like they wanted, he’d be in pieces now. Since when is it acceptable to half-ass the legwork when students are involved? We should at least know what we’re walking into, how can we expect them to learn to take things seriously when we don’t even know—”
One minute Kento was unbuttoning his jacket and plotting to overhaul the mission system entirely—to hell with it, burn it all down, this was even worse than inept corporate bureaucracy—and the next he had Gojo’s hands in his hair, Gojo’s mouth parting over his lips, and tension bleeding from every limb. Kento’s fist curled in Gojo’s shirt before he realized he’d reached out.
There were no words for how this, too, made Kento feel soft, and gooey, and— “Explain.”
“Just wanted to say thanks for the kikufuku. And welcome home.” Gojo’s declaration was earnest and warm—a sentiment Kento preferred to keep in the corner of his vision at all times for fear if he lost track, it’d sneak up on him.
It snuck up on him anyway, Kento thought. He’d been idly watching that stringy something creep out of the corners for months. Gojo had been surprisingly patient with him, though that wasn’t the fairest take to have. Gojo was always patient with his investments, and he certainly always considered personal relationships as such. Kento did, too, in a way.
Most would not put up with it from either of them.
“I don’t live here.” Kento had to keep saying it or it’d stop being true.
Gojo rolled his eyes, “Yes, yes, I know. You don’t wanna live with me, you won’t date me, you’ll never marry me. I don’t care anymore.”
“You don’t?” Kento did not expect this reaction.
“Nah. You’re here, aren’t you? I got what I want.” Gojo smiled and held up the dangling bag from Kikusuian’s for emphasis before setting it down and looping both forefingers in Kento’s belt loops, gently tugging Kento further and further into his apartment. “You and me?” Gojo punctuated the question with an unhurried kiss. "We have a thing going on. I don’t give a shit what it is, as long as it keeps going.”
“Apparently it’s called a situationship,” Kento said, but it didn’t feel as satisfying to have that answer locked and loaded as he thought it would. “If you don’t care about the specifics, why make such a fuss over it? Why bother with the keys and that horrible cake and all this bullshit about getting married?”
That slight, omnipresent tension in Gojo’s smile softened. “I just want us to feel free to use our dick keys as we see fit. Both of us, both places.”
'You’re welcome to be at home, here,' went unsaid but not unnoticed.
Honestly, Kento was getting away kind of easy. He should take the deal. “Only if you promise to never call them ‘dick keys’ again.”
“No.”
Yeah, that was pushing it. “Fine. I free you from the confines of our situationship. You can have the key to my apartment, but I’m going to need us to sit down and talk about a few things because there is no way I’m willing to—”
Kissing Gojo had been wonderful, drunk at sixteen, and it was somewhat of a marvel that was still the case all these years later. They’d changed every day along with the world around them—for better and for worse, those kids by the lake were nearly unrecognizable—but this point, their thing, had only ever grown.
“And what was that one for,” Kento asked, dreading the answer nearly as much as he felt thrilled by it.
A sly grin curled Gojo’s lip. In flawless passive-aggressive imitation of Kento, he answered, “I just needed you to shut up for a second.”