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Gojo Satoru is hated by curse users, of course, the honorable one can lurk around every corner to spoil their plans. But they hate grade one sorcerers even more, especially Mei Mei and Nanami Kento. Special grade sorcerers, especially Gojo and the strongest grade one sorcerers are essentially designed to deal with curses, not curse users.
The big problems are Nanami Kento and Mei Mei. A site on the deep web, aimed only at curse users, has the heads of both of them at prices of several million yen. Mei Mei's crows are impossible to survive and if Nanami Kento is merciful, they will bleed to near-death.
A curse user, known to be a lunatic, has developed handcuffs to erase cursed energy, his cursed technique allows him to control metal objects with his mind. As long as the person is wearing the handcuffs, all their cursed energy will be neutralized. And he was proud of his creation. His companions rolled their eyes when he seemed confident that it would work.
"I'll only believe it if I see Gojo Satoru trapped in the handcuffs..." one of his companions, while smoking, mutters quietly, throwing a dart at the posters of Mei Mei and Nanami Kento, hitting the pale blue-haired woman in the shoulder.
The curse user pouts, it was obvious that he would never be able to catch Gojo Satoru, not even if he could successfully catch one of the grade one sorcerers.
However, luck seems to be on his side when, during one of his pickpocketing patrols in the market, he hears a voice that makes him shudder and feels the intense cursed energy of... Gojo Satoru?!
The famous honorable man was walking nonchalantly, his hands in the pockets of his purple uniform jacket, a lollipop between his lips decorated with a provocative smile. Next to him, with the calmest, most serene cursed energy the metal-controlling curse-user had ever felt, Nanami Kento. His eyes widened at the sight of the pair, his luck was in. He'll be rich when he's carrying a handcuffed Gojo Satoru without the ability to use his limitless powers and Nanami Kento's head. He rubbed his hands happily with the idea in his mind and slowly approached the pair.
"Nanamin..."
Without looking at the older man, the blond mutters a low 'hum', while his eyes try to analyze his surroundings, disguised behind his green glasses.
"I've been thinking... Do you think we should take Yuuji somewhere for dinner sometime? With Megumi and Nobara, too, of course... He still seems a bit depressed after what happened with that boy... Junpei? Was that his name?"
The blond slows down. It's been a few weeks since Junpei passed away, before the Goodwill event that ended in disaster but fortunately everyone was fine.
"Um...Maybe we should...take that weight off his back..." Kento frowns when he smells something metallic and looks over his shoulder, not noticing the small smile on Gojo's face.
"Yes, Nanamin, we're being followed..." he says casually, knitting the lollipop that was still in his mouth.
"Good to know you're only warning now..." the blond man takes his sword out of the holster on his back, ready to attack.
Hiding behind a trash can, the curse user uses the cursed technique to try to reach Satoru Gojo's wrist with the handcuffs, but is stopped by Infinity. The curse user snarled, slamming his fist against the garbage can and his eyes widened when he noticed that no one was standing next to Satoru Gojo.
Nanami Kento was out of sight and that was not good for him. Panicked, the lunatic man turns his head and stares wide-eyed at the corpulent figure of the blond sorcerer behind him. Since when was this sorcerer so tall?
The blunt-bladed sword, too close to his face. The blond sorcerer waits patiently for the lunatic to justify himself. The lunatic grunts, sweat dripping down his forehead as he thinks about what to do. An idea popped into his head: he could still be victorious.
He tried to get rid of Satoru Gojo first, but his victory was right there in front of him. He only needed to take the grade one sorcerer out of the game for Satoru Gojo to act against him. He raised his hands in surrender, his nervous smile hiding his true intentions. The handcuffs hovered behind the blond.
"KENTO!" The honorable one shouts, a high-pitched sound is heard, he deactivated Infinity to move the blond away from the reach of the handcuffs, but the lunatic's mental control over the metal was faster.
Each side of the handcuffs grasped a wrist, Nanami's left wrist and Gojo's right wrist. Startled by Gojo's abrupt interruption, the blunt-bladed sword slices through the lunatic's neck, before the blond's cursed energy goes completely numb from the handcuffs. The lunatic's neck dangling in a lump of flesh, the sword falls to the ground bloodied.
"Gojo-San..." The blond's wide-eyed gaze is between the handcuffs and the curse-user's dead body "What happened here?"
Gojo frowns and moves his free hand to lift the black blindfold.
"I don't know, but I can't use the six eyes or the ilimited..." the eyes, which were supposed to reflect the celestial sky, were baby blue eyes, exactly as Kento met Gojo Satoru in 2006.
"We've lost the cursed energy..." Kento concludes, trying to look for remnants of cursed energy around them.
"Shit..." Satoru growls and moves his trapped wrist closer to his face to assess the situation, Nanami's wrist forced to follow the movement. "And we killed the person responsible for this..."
"We have to solve this before anyone finds out about what happened to you, Gojo-San."
Gojo nodded.
"Maybe panda can break the handcuffs."
"He's in Kyoto with Inumki-Kun, Maki-San and Kusakabe-San..."
"Hmm... That's the best we've got... I'll talk to Yaga about sending Panda here, it'll be hard for us to get on any transport back to Tokyo." Gojo seems really serious about the situation, turning round as much as possible to talk to Yaga, Kento tries to give him space, failing miserably.
After minutes of talking, Gojo sighs and his long fingers touch Nanami's hand. Nanami looks at him.
"Yaga will send Panda here as soon as he gets back, until then we'll stay in a hotel and Yaga will cover our whereabouts. Our advantage at the moment is that we have no cursed energy, so no one will detect us here..."
Kento nods.
"We'd better be careful anyway, there could be accomplices nearby..."
Satoru puts the dark blindfold away in his pocket, now he can't see anything with the blindfold over his eyes, and smiles sideways, gallantly.
"Kento-chan, my dear, we're going to have to pretend we're lovers and walk hand in hand..." Kento opens his mouth ready to protest but Satoru grabs his hand, the two of them holding hands, disguising the handcuffs and the blond sighs, understanding the situation.
Before looking for a hotel to stay in while Panda didn't arrive, they stopped by the public lockers at the train station to pick up the backpacks they had left there that morning. They thought they'd be done with the mission in a few hours, but they took their usual backpacks just in case. And it's a good thing they did.
Gojo was too scandalous about the fake relationship, leaving both the hotel receptionist flushed with embarrassment and Nanami, who apologized to the receptionist. In the room, Gojo throws himself onto the double bed, almost pulling Nanami with him, off guard.
The blond kneels beside the bed near the older man's knee and tries to unzip his backpack with his free hand and his teeth, taking a little longer than usual to open it.
"What are you looking for?" Gojo asks as he sits on the edge of the bed, watching Nanami busily searching for something in a bag containing various bottles and products that Gojo can't identify.
"A hairpin..." He informs her and finds a metal hairpin just like the ones in American movies.
Gojo snorts out a chuckle.
"Are you going to try to open the handcuffs with that? We're not in a movie..."
Kento frowns and looks angrily at the older man.
"Do you have any better ideas?"
"Uh-huh! Your sword!" Gojo replies as if it were obvious.
"It's a blunt blade! It doesn't work without my cursed energy!" The blond replies, returning his focus to the hairpin and handcuffs.
"What's the point of that? Having a blind blade?" Gojo asks, trying to cross his arms, but Nanami's resistance reminds him that he can't do that without taking his colleague's arm with him.
"It's a precaution... If someone tries to steal my sword to use for whatever, they won't do anything, it's just an old cleaver, it's not a cursed weapon." The blond clarifies, biting his tongue as he concentrates on trying to open the handcuffs with the hairpin.
"Huh..." Gojo makes an impressed sound "That's clever..."
Kento throws the hairpin away, now crooked from trying to force the slot, and sighs.
"Actually, it'll work... But if I'm dead..."
Gojo looks at him, the blond man sitting on the floor, and raises an eyebrow.
"Do you have plans for death?"
Nanami nods and says nothing more on the subject, trying to close his backpack again. Gojo doesn't insist, if Nanami isn't going to talk about it, he won't press him either.
"Why do you have a hairpin? To pick locks?" Satoru mocks, giving the younger man a light nudge on the shoulder.
"Of course not, you idiot!" The serious narrow eyes turn away slowly, clearly embarrassed. "It's because of the skincare, the hair gets in the way."
Satoru's breathing hitches, imitating an exaggerated gasping sound.
"I've never seen your natural hair with that haircut! You're constantly combed and gel-coated like the serious gentleman you are..." Satoru's hand, immune to any cursed energy barrier, wanted to mess up the blond's perfectly well-groomed hair, which gripped the older man's wrist.
"Don't press it..."
Gojo whimpers 'oh Nana-chan' and the younger man ignores it, getting up from the floor to sit next to the platinum man on the edge of the bed, their knees millimeters apart and their fingers touching. Neither of them said anything else for a good while, the rumble of the cars outside being the only sound in the room.
"Nanami?" Gojo calls after him, interrupting the silence between them.
"Huh?" Kento frowns as he opens his eyes, he hadn't even noticed that he was so sleepy and had already closed his eyes sleepily.
"What happened to us?"
There is melancholy in Satoru's voice, but the sleepy Kento doesn't notice.
" We've been hit by a curse user?"
Satoru frowns, his crystalline eyes brimming with anger.
"No, dumbass..." The anger is replaced by amusement as he hears the noise of indignation coming from deep in the blond's throat, his thin dark golden eyebrows making him look like a puppy. "To us...the five of us..."
"Oh..."
Silence falls on them again, Kento's eyes fall to his knees almost together, Satoru's eyes linger on the blond's face, both clouded with nostalgia. The blond looks up again into Gojo's very blue eyes and they both laugh. They both let themselves fall onto the mattress, their light hair decorating both their heads like angel haloes, golden and silver. Gojo finished laughing and the blond's laughter continued, a low, warm sound, warming the cold, untouchable heart of the great and powerful Satoru.
"Those were good times..." Kento says looking up at the beige ceiling of the hotel room, his left eye tearing up, Satoru doesn't know if it's from laughing or nostalgia but he doesn't say anything about it.
"Kento, remember when you and Suguru dressed up as women to defeat a curse in a girls' locker room?" Gojo smiles, the dimple in his cheek appearing, smiling honestly and Kento nods at the memory.
The five students went on a mission together, because the goal was for the three senpai to teach the two kouhais about mission strategies. They pretended to be exchange students at a school where there were strange disappearances of female students. They ended up discovering that the curse was hidden in the girls' locker room. Satoru and Suguru pushed Shoko, since she was the only one who could enter the girls' locker room because she was a woman. Kento, however, stubbornly fought back, not wanting to expose Shoko to such danger. He said he would dress up as a woman if he had to, and Shoko grinned, agreeing that he could easily pass for a woman, and Suguru ended up agreeing to go with him.
Satoru and Yu couldn't control their laughter when they saw Geto and Nanami wearing women's uniforms. Shoko took a picture of the two of them dressed as women. Geto with his hair down and Nanami with pink hairpins. Whatever happened during the hours the two were inside the locker room, Shoko decided they were taking too long. As soon as she entered, followed by Haibara and Gojo, only to realize that the curse had clung to the two boys dressed as girls, kissing their extremely upset and ashamed faces for having been used as lovers by the curse that had already kidnapped several girls. Gojo also remembers ignoring Geto for two seconds to wipe a kiss mark on the blond's cheek.
"You were stunning that day, protecting Shoko and the missing girls..." Satoru praised, looking at the blond's flushed, mature face.
This was no longer the small, frightened teenage Nanami, even if he and Shoko agreed that Kento was the person who had changed the least, personality-wise, since...since 2007... Again, a silence falls between them, Satoru's long fingers slowly squeezing Kento's wrist, even to the point of making the blond uncomfortable and trying to pull his wrist away.
"You've always been the martyr, out of all of us, Shoko spent more time healing you than me or Geto or Haibara.... What was the point? To die? Die or run away, that was always the plan..."
"Gojo..." the blond was interrupted by Satoru's shout, eyes wide with rage.
"The most cowardly martyr I've ever met, the one who ran away and abandoned us!"
Gojo is looking at Nanami, he's talking about Nanami, but Nanami reads between the lines similarities with Geto Suguru.
" I've come back, Gojo-San!"
" Big Shit! Just now you were talking about dying!"
"We're all going to die, you idiot! Even gods die! You're not the exception just because you're more special than any of us who can be replaced after we die! Even if you're not going to be replaced, you're going to die!"
"So that's it? That's the mindset of the great Nanami Kento, savior of the innocent?"
A vein pulses on the blond man's forehead, his blond hair, under the warm light of the room's lamp, makes it look as if his anger has set his hair on fire.
"Don't talk as if you ever cared about me!" Gojo opens his mouth to speak but Nanami has only brought their faces closer, his eyes wide, pupil dilated, Gojo moves two millimeters away with a sudden fear of being hit on the forehead, now that there was no infinity to protect him. "You never looked for me when Haibara died! You only looked for me when someone else ran away! DAMN IT! I ran away because I was a scared teenager who saw his best friend killed in front of him, not because I was a murderer!"
"I KILLED MY BEST FRIEND!"
"ADMIT IT! ADMIT THAT YOU WISH IT WAS HIM HERE INSTEAD OF ME!"
Silence falls between them again, in sharp contrast to the previous shouting, the blue eyes automatically watering at the accusation.
"Don't say that..." the calm in the older man's voice forces the younger man to close his eyes tightly "look at me..."
Stubbornly, looking like the teenage Kento again, he shakes his head negatively, there are tears in the corner of his right eye, Satoru wonders why Nanami only cries from one eye at a time, as if they were two different souls. Satoru's brow furrows, a hurt expression filling his face.
"Look at me..." is a pleading "Please..." there is a pause to hear the blond's breathing quicken, trying to control himself "Kento, I'm sorry for everything that happened to us, I'm sorry I wasn't there to comfort you, I'm sorry I never ran after you to help you but don't say I'd rather you were someone else."
He used his free arm to hug the younger man, the older man's long fingers combing through the blond strands, trying to get the gel out of his hair, leaving it soft to the touch, the younger man's breathing calming down and Satoru not even caring if he was asleep.
"I love you too much and I loved you too much not to feel angry when you left..."
There is no response from Kento and Satoru allows himself to fall asleep cuddled up to the younger man, who has used his free hand to caress the hand tied to him.
The two of them are startled awake by the sudden entrance of Maki, Panda and Inumaki, who have broken the lock on the door instead of knocking like normal people, only to see a very sleepy Nanami Kento and a tearful Gojo Satoru cuddled up, the older one using his body to protect the younger one from the sudden invasion.