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Gojo hates being on cruise ships.
He hates the seasickness, the way his center of gravity never seems to settle inside himself, the nauseating smell of salt in the air for miles and hours. Mostly, however, he hates the way it completely messes with his hair. Contrary to popular belief, he actually doesn't just wake up looking like God's apology sent to mankind for making too much men. He does in fact put up some semblance of effort, because tapping his fingers to order same day delivery for a $5000 Dyson hairdryer and a $300 bottle of Tsubaki hair mask required some knowledge of industry secrets for hair upkeep.
He tells Getou as much, when apropos of nothing as soon as he set foot on the deck all he did was take one look at him and chide, exasperatedly, "Not this K-pop hair shit again."
"Yes this K-pop hair shit again," grins Gojo before flagging down a waiter for a strawberry spritzer, the tips of his hair already frizzing a little. “What can I say? The Koreans know their hair game.”
They were currently in one of Tokyo's luxury cruise ships for an evening gala of some sorts, raising funds for a cause of also some sorts. Sharp-dressed employees were loitering about, holding up plates of expensive drinks and tiny food. The quiet sounds of water lapping against the metal structure and seagulls flying overhead accompanied the jazz blues the evening entertainment was filtering through the open deck area. Music from the ship’s speakers was announcing the arrival of a few more guests, and urged everyone to take advantage of the open bar and hopes everyone enjoy the rest of their evening.
Gojo's not quite sure why this was penciled in as a must show on his schedule.
Ijichi, his personal assistant, had an annoying habit of filling up his calendar to the brim so that he doesn't have time to even think about being overworked. Such was the nature of being a booked and busy actor, he supposes.
"Remind me why we're doing this again?" Gojo grumbles, taking a sip of his drink as they people watch by the railings, the open sea bottoming out from below.
"Because," Getou eyes the area curiously, taking tabs on who was there and who wasn’t. "We both promised Shoko we would."
Fuck, Gojo curses internally. Curse him for having a heart. "What cause is she championing for this time?"
Getou shrugs, the folds of his three-piece suit dangling with the wind. He looked very Jack Dawson. Gojo himself was going for something more James Bond. "Non-visible disabilities," he explains. "One of her patients only has one working eye."
"The girl?" asks Gojo.
"Your protege, yes," admits Getou, before adding, more as an afterthought as his tone softened, "Shoko told me you paid all her hospital bills."
"Yes, well," Gojo stands up straighter, feeling the wind lapping into his skin as he clinked their drinks together. "They don't call me Japanese Oprah for no reason."
Getou arches a brow. "Literally no one calls you that.”
"Yuji does."
"You make him."
"Megumi does."
"Kicking and screaming and swearing your death on his grave. It doesn't count."
Gojo huffs, pouting. "You're just jealous."
Getou makes a face.
"Too much?" snickers Gojo.
"Try a million," Getou snorts. "And it still wouldn't be enough."
Gojo gestures around the wide open-air deck, peppered with fairy lights all over the overhead railings and strips of moonlight shining right into it. "Where is the lady of the hour and her guest of honor, anyway?"
But before Getou can reply, they feel the ship violently lurch sideways. Half of the crew and guests nearly topple over into the sea. Glasses are shattered all over the floor, food spilled, the sound of panicked footsteps running around, and people screaming left and right.
Somewhere in the liner, a bomb just went off.
Gojo doesn’t have time to react to Getou suddenly widening his eyes beside him, alarm so clearly visible in his face, because his world goes black no sooner than the second bomb drops.
Nanami has been tailing him for an hour and he hasn't closed his mouth since.
When he wasn't drinking his tenth strawberry spritzer of the night, he was blabbering nonstop to a dark-haired man next to him, standing over the rest of the party as they looked on its endless string of people. His target had a magnetic presence, almost electric, the way several eyes unconsciously flickered his way every other minute or so. But timid, too, if Nanami could take a gander at it: he seemed wholly unaware of the kind of attention he was bringing in. He laughed loud. He ate loud. He drank loud. He was practically spilling industry secrets to anyone who bothered to listen, but still got away with it scot-free by sheer charm alone.
He didn’t quite fit the bill of what he was supposed to appear like: withdrawn, brooding, silently assessing and always had game in his eyes for an exit plan. Nanami can't quite place whether all that was an act or he was just this enigmatic of a person, able to divide and split himself evenly between two abodes. He almost doesn’t want to go through with it, ending the life of a guy who is the very embodiment of a life of the party.
Nanami thinks someone who opts for non-alcoholic drinks and apparently donated a hefty amount to this year’s fundraiser gladly—even encouraging others to do the same—couldn't possibly be responsible for the demise of an entire political dynasty.
But it doesn't matter. The details never do.
Nanami had a kill list, and he never was someone who took to losing kindly.
The first thing Gojo hears when his blindfold and gag are removed is an ominous and impeccably timed, "Oh."
That's never good, he thinks. Blinking up the disorientation from his eyes and trying to get out of the harsh flashlight currently harassing him, mumbles, "What the hell is going on?"
He can't see his captor, half their face hidden behind a black cloth mask; the only slip of anything identifying were the yellow-tinted glasses he wore that covered what he thinks are hazel eyes, the colour of coffee before cream. And the blonde hair that, annoyingly, looked as if not a single strand was out of place. Gojo decides then and there he hates him already.
His captor, on the other hand, seems to be taking in every inch of his exposed face, from the tips of his hair all the way to the crispness of his dress shoes that were still bound and restrained. He does this for a full minute or so, eyes going over every available service, perusing and double-checking and matching something up on his phone.
Then he straightens and looks him square in the eye.
"My apologies," Nanami says, with all the cadence of a forgotten prince from a forgotten faraway land. "It turns out you’re not the person I was hired to kill tonight."
Gojo blinks. What the fuck, he thinks, and blurts out as much, "What the fuck."
Kill? Did he just say kill? Surely this was just a hidden camera prank—
But before he can say anything else, Nanami sharply gets to his feet and sets to taking apart a Beretta silencer right in then and there. Right in front of him. Right in front of his traumatized eyes that don't know where to look first, the slender fingers adeptly disfiguring the many moving parts of a literal gun or that the same gun he was apparently going to be gunned down with is just within an inch of his face.
"I apologize for the inconvenience," Nanami repeats, testing the safety hatch. "I can assure you, this kind of thing never happens."
Gojo can’t believe what he’s hearing and the almost casual tone this man was speaking with.
He finds himself half-scoffing, half-laughing. "Yes," he nods vehemently along, gulping at the weapon and trying to move as far back as possible from it as the chair would go. "Yes, I bet it's not everyday you mistake an Academy Award-winning actor for some.. some.." he stammers, searching for the words. "Some common man, I'm sure!"
"Kakashi Hatake is responsible for the annihilation of an entire yakuza clan. He’s killed over 50 people in 7 days," offers Nanami drily. "He is anything but common I can assure you that."
"Do I fucking look like the kind of person who wants blood on their clothes," Gojo tries as best as he can to gesture to his expensive suit and expensive shoes and expensive hair. "I’m wearing Valentino, for crying out loud."
Nanami looks over him again, thinking the aggression was familiar and maybe he didn't get anything wrong and jeopardized an entire mission. He brings up a finger to silence him, fetching something on his phone as he examines the brief all over again as he looked back and forth between him and the man in the pictue. White hair and blue eyes. Obscenely rich. Has friends in high places. He thought he had everything lined up perfectly. He always did.
What was it, then, he thinks that threw him off this time?
"There appears to have been a mix-up of sorts," Nanami offers, putting away the phone and finding himself unsettled at the grave misstep. "All we had to go on was a grainy picture. You appear to have roughly the same height and hair."
Gojo is just annoyed now. "I'm not Kakashi Hatake or whoever the fuck that is," he nearly yells, struggling against his binds. "My name is Gojo Satoru. Gojo Satoru, you know? I literally just had a movie premiere this week! I'm on the cover of Japan Vogue!"
Nanami blinks, unsure how he was supposed to take in that information, before settling with, “Congratulations.”
"Oh god," Gojo moans, nearly heaving. "If you're not going to kill me, then can you please just untie me?"
If he wasn’t looking at him so closely, Gojo’s sure he almost would have missed the minuscule flinch Nanami couldn’t balm over in time.
“Oh my god,” wails Gojo now, definitely panicking. “You are going to kill me. You’re going to kill me and chop me up and feed me to the sharks. Oh god, the fucking fish are going to eat Valentino—Valentino, do you understand, Captor-kun—Like I always knew my good looks would be the end of me but I just—Oh god, I just never imagined—”
Nanami arches a brow. “Gojo-san.”
“Shoko is going to mutilate my corpse if she finds out I upstaged another one of her events again, good lord, and Nobara—” Gojo cringes, shutting his eyes. “I don’t even want to know what Nobara’s going to do to my body after—”
“Gojo-san,” Nanami repeats, more firmly. “I’m not going to kill you.”
Gojo cracks one eye open. “You’re not?”
“Like I said,” Nanami states, sensing his disorientation and pitching his voice to calm. “You are not the person I was hired to kill.”
Gojo deflates a little, but not enough. “Then why aren’t you untying me?”
“I need assurance you’re not going to spill,” Nanami clarifies.
Gojo shoots up straighter in his seat, eyes pleading. “I’m not!” he starts babbling. “I’m sooo not gonna say anything! Even if I will, you’ll know! I have paparazzi following me around everywhere anyway! Your secret is safe with me! Fuck Hatake Kakashi or whoever he is! I’ll even kill him myself!”
Nanami thinks he was saying too much and putting his own foot in his mouth. But at the clear confusion on his face as he started rattling off the inconveniences of his day-to-day living, realization dawns on Gojo.
"Wait," Gojo breathes out. "You seriously don’t know who I am? Don't tell me you're one of those people who don't watch TV?"
Nanami blinks again, before half-gesturing and half-looking around at the general predicament they found themselves in.
Gojo feels winded. "Right, shit," he swears. "The assassin thing."
Nanami stifles a laugh, not realizing the corners of his mouth had gone up without his control. "Yes," he concedes, stepping closer to untie his binds. "Being an assassin has left me little in the way of downtimes."
"You've seriously never heard of Jujutsu Kaisen?" Gojo implores, searching his face. "The guy next to me on the deck. He plays my best friend who turns evil after murdering a bunch of innocent people. Getou Suguru? None of this is ringing a bell?"
“No,” Nanami admits, standing up straighter once all his binds were loose enough he could get out of them himself. He didn’t seem like the type to intentionally endanger himself by spilling state secrets. "Now if you don’t mind, I have to get going,” he bows. “I apologize for my involvement once again."
Before he can turn around, he feels Gojo calling him back again, nearly tripping on his feet in the process. "W-Wait!" he yells. "I can teach you!"
Nanami turns halfway. "Teach me what?"
"I don't know," Gojo huffs out a breath, sputtering. "How to live a life outside your job?"
"I have a life outside killing," Nanami deadpans.
"We're totally going to ignore what you just said and instead substitute the k word for cooking," Gojo rushes out to say, waving him off as he steps closer. This close he notices the white flecks in his eyes, swimming around like the koi fish in a pond. "You just said being a—uh—cooker, leaves you bored."
“I never said any of that,” Nanami eyes him warily. “And why would you even offer? You don’t know even know my name.”
“I know you’re probably meant to kill any collateral,” Gojo offers, twisting his wrists back and forth. “But you spared me. And,” he gestures at his shoes, a satisfied glint in his eye. “You’re wearing Prada. I happen to be their brand ambassador. Enough of a reason to return a favor in my book.”
“You’re saying,” Nanami surmises. “That you’re letting a near-death experience at the hands of a trained assassin go because I happen to wear standard-issue jackboots given to us before any mission.”
Gojo gasps, dramatic. “Missions,” he gushes. “You said missions. Those are, like, real.”
Nanami fights to roll his eyes. “What do you think I’m doing right now?”
“Honestly my frontal lobe is having a hard time processing I was recently the target of a high-profile assassination that just so happens to be on the fucking sea, of all places,” Gojo huffs. “In fact, I’m not sure I’m even processing this conversation right now. You don’t look real. I’m not even here.”
Nanami is unsure how to take in what is obviously the precipice a mental breakdown, but this was already leagues and leagues above his paygrade. "Then," he turns again. "Let's leave it at that, Gojo-san."
He makes it a few steps back up the stairs when he hears the telltale lilt of Gojo's voice carry over, like waves to a shore. The moon has dawned the lower deck of the room, illuminating everything sort of ethereal and moody. Gojo's eyes were practically glowing, and Nanami has to be very, very careful not to miss a step.
“Captor-kun,” Gojo calls out after him.
"Yes?" Nanami says, carefully, like spun silk on a web. He's not sure he's even breathing.
“Now that you know I exist and everything,” Gojo continues, craning his neck and flexing his now unbound arms, as wide as the sea and the wind and the moon. “If you ever feel like living it up when you’re off the clock, you know where to find me.”