Chapter Text
“As you may be aware, we have been the victims of a great injustice,” Gojo said solemnly, with an aggressive stance and unwelcoming posture at the front of what was ostensibly Kento’s homeroom. Behind him, ‘GOODWILL SMACKDOWN STRATEGY MEETING’ was scrawled in hurried, chalk lettering. Sitting on the teacher’s desk to Gojo’s left, a large crate radiated a comical quantity of cursed energy.
“It’s not an injustice, you deserved to be banned from the event.” Shoko and even Ijichi had long given up on this point but Kento was relentless. He would not be bullied into agreeing with more of Gojo’s stupidity.
“Yeah?” Gojo asked. “Give me one good reason why.”
Kento sighed. For the fourth time, he reminded Gojo, “You completely destroyed the playing field last year.”
“That wasn’t my fault.”
“It wasn’t your fault you disintegrated three buildings and part of a mountain playing with your Reversed Cursed Technique?”
Gojo angled an irritated puff of breath upward by jutting out his bottom lip. “Those buildings were condemned and that mountain was ugly.”
Which—okay, that was technically true. The condemned buildings part, not the hideous mountain part. But the argument wasn’t in good faith so Kento was compelled to rip holes in it. “The point is that you’re way too destructive for a sparring match. It’s not even fair.”
“Who cares? It’s not my fault Kyoto is so weak. If they want a chance, they should get stronger.”
This time it was Kento blowing irritated raspberries at the ceiling as he sat in the middle desk in the front of the classroom—the one he’d claimed as a first-year back when the choice was meaningful, and had refused to give up even through hell, high water, and becoming a class of one. The second row of desks were entirely performative but Kento didn’t have much room to speak on dramatics. “It’s not just about winning. The rest of us didn’t get a chance to fight last year, either. Just sit it out like a normal teenager with outrageous superpowers. Can’t you just slack off a bit for once?”
“Slack off for once, Gojo. Work the whole mission roster yourself, Gojo,” Gojo mocked with a teeth-clenching vibrato. “Do I ever get to do what I want instead of chasing your contradictions around?”
As if he ever did anything he didn’t want to.
“Aren’t you blowing off a mission right now to crash our strategy meeting?” Shoko pointed out. She shifted in her seat to Kento’s right for a better view of the metaphorical ping pong ball bouncing around Kento and Gojo’s argument.
A sign to cut it out, soon. If Kento didn’t mind his tongue and draw the argument back, one of them would start taking it personally. Kento didn’t mind making Gojo blow up so long as he didn’t literally blow up, but they’d both been suffering short fuses all year.
Fine, a different approach, then. Gojo never listened to reason but he could never resist the opportunity to preen his upperclassman status. “How is anyone meant to prove themselves with you around?”
A mighty scowl was Gojo’s only comeback. Kento rather enjoyed the moment of quiet.
“I thought you said they weren’t as bad about this lately?” Ijichi whispered.
Shoko whispered back, “It comes and goes.”
“Well lucky for you,” Gojo said, chewing every word with delighted self-aggrandizing, “Your dear, dependable senpai has your back even if you have to defend the school’s honor on your own.” Gojo gestured to his doom-soaked crate. “Courtesy of the Gojo clan armory. Come and take your pick. We’ll wipe the floor with those Kyoto bastards yet.”
How ironic to call them bastards when students like Naoya never let Kento and Shoko forget how well they fit the definition.
“Who wants a sword?” Gojo asked, plucking a particularly vicious-looking one from the crate. Jagged cursed energy dripped from the obsidian blade. “I’ve got so many. This one drains the life force from your enemy with only a scratch. Impale them? Oh, man, it’s ugly.”
“Ooh, gimme.” Shoko’s chair creaked as she rocked so far back, her chair back hit the desk behind her.
“Fourth years can’t compete anymore,” Gojo reminded her with sing-song displeasure.
“Please, we both know this has nothing to do with the exchange event. All these weapons are banned and if you actually intended to help, you would have invited the rest of the second years or any of the first years to your”—air quotes—“’strategy meeting.’” You just want to show off all the sharp, pointy stuff you stole from your own armory, so hand it over. I wanna ooh and ahh and threaten to stab you.” Shoko put one hand out, fingers curling in demand.
Gojo conceded, setting the hilt in her hand. The blade was wider than Kento’s palm and flat as a bank card. “Just make sure to use my clan’s sacred treasures for good, not evil. Okay, you can use it for a little bit of evil but just a little, okay?”
“I don’t answer to you.”
“Hey,” Ijichi said, having gained the bravery to approach the front of the classroom and rifle through Gojo’s crate. He plucked a length of rope out. “What’s this one?”
Gojo snickered. “An especially dangerous cursed tool. It’s not much for combat but don’t get complacent. That rope right there can ruin your life if you let it.”
“Really?” Ijichi asked. “What’s it do?”
Gojo angled his head so the overhead lights reflected off his glasses and wiggled his fingers in spooky waves. “This, good sir, is Miyako’s Twist. It finds soulmates and binds them together through their cursed energy. Wanna give it a try?”
Saying that could ruin someone’s life was one of Gojo’s more offensive understatements.
Ijichi considered the rope like it might come to life and devour him. “No?”
Gojo tsked. “Coward.”
“How is something like that supposed to help us win the exchange event?” Kento was so bored with this meandering conversation. Gojo couldn’t stay on topic to save his life.
“It’s not, really.”
“Then why’d you bring it?” Shoko asked.
Gojo had no problems saying the quiet parts out loud these days. “That bozo playing clan head while I get educated keeps threatening to line up every sympathetic suitor he can find and run me through them, one by one, before I usurp the charlatan in April. Obviously, that wouldn’t fit in with my plans. So I stole it.”
A pause bulged through the room at large as if to emphasize that yes, they all should have guessed.
“How does it work?” Kento asked when it became apparent Gojo was waiting for someone to. The sooner they crashed through the motions, the sooner they could get to strategizing. And the sooner they got through that, the sooner Kento could go hide in his room.
“Thrilled you asked.” Gojo snatched the rope out of Ijichi’s hands and strutted forward to clap Kento on the back. He dangled the loose end of the rope a chunky few centimeters from Kento’s nose. To be honest, I’m not sure it works. At least I’ve never seen anything interesting come out of using it and I’ve got better eyes than most.” Gojo was outright bragging by the end of the sparse explanation.
“Please,” Shoko said. “You know it works. Isn’t your entire clan built on that rope? Aren’t your parents soulmates?”
Gojo waved her off. “That’s different, I’m talking about me.”
“When aren’t you?” Kento was considerate enough to mumble it but not enough to do it quietly.
“Not often.” A smile crept over Gojo’s face. “What about you? Feel like gambling, Nanamin? Who knows, maybe I’m full of shit and you’ll reel in a catch.”
Kento had endured no shortage of horrifying scenarios in his time as a jujutsu sorcerer. None compared to this alleged soulmate rope. If that soulmate were Gojo? Kento would just wade into the ocean and be done with it. “Absolutely not.”
A lopsided grin swallowed Gojo’s face. His eyebrows dropped; little, amused crows feet peeked out from behind his sunglasses.
Before Gojo could press his perceived advantage, the classroom door slipped open.
“Probably don’t even want to know what’s got you all voluntarily holed up in a classroom for this long without any fires or explosions,” Yaga said, evaluating the scene with a tired sort of resignation Kento carried too much sympathy for, these days. A massive, neon pink teddy bear sat on Yaga’s hip with one button-eye sewn on its face. He sat at his desk up front and considered Gojo’s ridiculous crate of bad decisions. “What are the cursed tools about, Satoru?”
“I’m just trying to help my dear kouhai who must so valiantly do battle against those Kyoto wretches in the exchange event.” Gojo turned his sights on Kento, grabbing him by both shoulders and yanking him out of his seat, into the foreground of the trainwreck conversation Kento had been hoping to stay in the background of. “They’ll suffer without me! How could you do this to them?”
Yaga sighed. “Satoru. You’re not giving your underclassmen cursed tools they’re not familiar with. Take them back.”
Gojo tsked. “We’re fielding like five students against Kyoto’s eight, and I have a reputation to uphold.”
“Agreed. But it’s not the sort you think.”
Kento managed not to offer Yaga a high-five. Barely.
Gojo, however, would not be dissuaded. He slung an arm over Kento’s shoulder, gripping Kento tight against his side with emergency-lock-seatbelt-enthusiasm. This behavior went along with the loose tongue: Gojo had been clingy lately, too.
“But what about Nanami? And Ijichi I guess? Since you’ve so cruelly banned me from the exchange event, what’ll happen to them? It’s my responsibility, nay, my destiny to make sure they’re properly outfitted to wipe those Kyoto losers up and down the arena. Like, we’ve gotta kill those guys or what are we even doing here?”
Yaga had a not-so-well-hidden competitive streak that tended to shine in moments like this one. He settled his latest project on the desk and pulled a couple of cases out of his pockets—one with needles and another with a few different types and colors of thread. The lack of scolding was deafening.
“For the last time, it’s not fair to let you participate,” Kento said, feeling mildly throttled by Gojo’s too-enthusiastic grip. “Nobody else even has a chance, including us.”
“Fine,” Gojo said, sounding like it was anything but. “But if I’m sitting out, you gotta pick up the slack. I have money riding on this with Mei and if she wins—”
Finally, the truth of the matter. A wager with Mei Mei? Oh, Gojo wasn’t letting this one go until well after the score was tallied. Easier to go along with it and hope for damage control later. “Fine.”
“You’ll take the top spot.” Rolling off Gojo’s tongue, the demand sounded almost like a matter of will, not talent. He certainly didn’t consider the other participants a factor. “Do it and I’ll get you that”—Gojo threw a hand in front of Yaga’s face like that stopped his perfectly functional ears—“Filipino beer you like so much.”
Yaga sighed and swatted Gojo’s hand away so he could get back to sewing the last eye on his cursed corpse.
“Red Horse?”
“Literally don’t care. Whatever you want.”
“And if I don’t win?”
“I don’t know, you’ll give me something. We’ll figure it out later.”
A distant peal of alarm bells wasn’t quite enough to override two important factors.
One: Gojo might be feral over winning bets against Mei Mei, but he rarely wanted anything important or demanding from friendly wagers. He always said ‘surprise me’ or demanded little knick-knack-type snacks from a konbini down in Shibuya that Kento could never find on his own. Risk? Low.
Two: Red Horse was a really good beer.
“Fine.” And that, right there, was Kento’s first mistake.
“Top spot,” Gojo insisted. “I will show you the zeroes riding on this.”
“I get, I get it.” Kento wriggled out of Gojo’s hold and headed for the door.
“That beer comes on campus and you’re both working off the Grade 4 roster the rest of the year,” Yaga said, knotting his thread and biting the end off with his teeth. “At least pretend to have some respect for the rules.” He paused, thinking. “And the law.”
Kento did not take the top spot.
It wasn’t for lack of trying; one does not go up against Zen’in Naoya with anything less than full intent to beat him into the ground. But chasing after Naoya for greatness was a surefire way to find every standard and moral stripped from your body and left on the floor in tatters. In the end, Kento took second place and even though Tokyo still snatched victory from Kyoto’s palm, as far as Gojo’s bet was concerned—
“So many zeros,” Gojo whined from the common room floor while Mei Mei checked her bank balance for the third time with a mustache-twirling cackle.
Shoko was sprawled on the floor with Gojo, her head resting on his stomach while she, too, stayed more glued to her phone than involved in the conversation. Gojo wasn’t the only one who’d developed some clingy tendencies since— Everything. What clinginess do they see in me? Kento wondered whenever the shared behavior got too thick to ignore. Probably that he indulged these silly conversations and wagers without so much as a ‘Don’t you idiots have anything better to do’ or outright leaving before he could get roped into the shenanigans.
The first and second years were somewhere down the hall, flitting between the kitchen and television, watching replays and congratulating each other on an overall win. Next year, no Naoya and Kyoto would be in trouble again. Too bad next year would have no Kento, either, and not just because according to the new rules, he’d be aged out of the exchange event.
Gojo blew a raspberry at the ceiling. “Nanamin, I thought you had my back. Why didn’t you remind me to kill Naoya beforehand? I would have. We’d all be happier for it.”
“I’ll do it,” Mei Mei offered. “Even give you half off, that guy sucks.”
“Needs a decent woman to stand on his neck for a minute,” Gojo agreed. “Which is why we can’t send you.”
Mei Mei shrugged and checked her phone again with a wide smile.
Gojo’s head tilted back to stare at Nanami. “And you,” he said, voice thick with faux disappointment. “Whatever are we going to do with you?”
“Just tell me what nonsense pie or cookies or cake you want.”
“Pie? You think pie makes up for letting Mei be right?”
A less self-aware person would be insulted by all this but Mei Mei only shrugged as if to say Gojo was correct; pie was no match for her.
“The problem is you don’t want anything,” Shoko muttered, thumbs rapidly typing. “All you ever ask for is sweets.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Mei Mei said.
Gojo shook his head, waving a dismissing hand towards Mei Mei, then Shoko. “Not a chance. Sweets just won’t do for this one. What, you think you get to just buy me a fistful of Kit-Kats and it all goes away? No. No, I know what I want.”
A sudden chill descended upon the common room.
Gojo’s attention slid to Kento, one eyebrow arched in terrifying proposition. “In reparations for this great and unforgivable crime, you, Nanami Kento, must attend my clan’s holiday party with me this year.”
“No.”
“You owe me,” Gojo said evenly. “Can’t just ignore that.”
It was true that silly wagers tended to weigh more in the jujutsu world but they hadn’t—technically—agreed on stakes. Only that stakes were coming. “I said no.”
“It’s your turn. Everyone else has gone to one,” Gojo said as if this were indisputable. He sat up enough to stare at Shoko, long and unblinking, until she picked up on whatever complementary argument he was trying to beam into her head.
“I didn’t mind. It’s just a bunch of fancy-shmancy nonsense,” Shoko said. “They nag you for a day wondering why you won’t just take one for humanity and marry Gojo and then they mostly leave you alone.”
“I had a good time. Plus I met some men with hefty wallets and surveillance needs,” Mei Mei agreed, trailing off as she watched Gojo and Kento with her head tilted in interest.
“See? Even Mei had fun,” Gojo said.
“But Mei didn’t care and Nanami doesn’t want to go.” Shoko snapped her phone closed and wiggled it back into her pocket. She tilted her head back to shoot Gojo a significant look. “And you shouldn’t make him.”
“This is a wager,” Gojo argued. “Resolving it is a matter of dignity, not preference.” A fearful glint shot across the mesmerizing sea trapped in Gojo’s eyes as he stared at Kento with the full heft of his genetic lottery win. “Keep me company at this bullshit party, that’s what I want.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Absolutely not.” Kento would sooner gnaw off his leg.
“Come to the party, or do the soulmate rope with me,” Gojo said. “Those are your options to settle this bet.”
How Gojo considered these things equal was beyond Kento. The only thing they had in common was that Kento didn’t want to do either of them. Gojo didn’t even like that stupid rope, he was obviously intending to destroy it the first chance he got and was just getting entertainment out of it, first. He’d spent days running all over campus, demanding everyone hold the other end of the stupid thing after Ijichi had refused to. Maybe he found it comforting in some strange way— Kento didn’t want to dig into the nuance of it.
Gojo sat forward, elbows planted on his knees. “You’re not going to welch on me, are you?”
Not that it mattered, but one of the tenets of jujutsu was that vows were sacred. From the grand, binding ones, down to the mundane wagers with irritating classmates who didn’t know when to shut their mouths. It was important for a sorcerer to know when they could rely on someone’s word; they were all conmen, after all. Kento and Gojo had made a deal and despite Kento’s best efforts, he’d be a sorcerer for at least a few more months.
“Fine.”
Gojo grinned like he’d single-handedly won the Goodwill Exchange Event—again. He unfolded from the floor and jaunted down the hall towards his room then meandered back, equally arrogant in his casual stride, twirling the dreaded Miyako’s Twist in hand.
With hesitation, Kento took the loose end of the rope.
“No, no, that won’t work at all,” Gojo said, choking up on his end, winding the rope until it was taut around his palm and the end coiled loosely around his wrist and forearm.
“What are you doing?”
“Just trying to get it right,” Gojo said, gesturing for Kento to imitate his grip. The moment Kento had the middle of the rope across his palm, Gojo grabbed his hand, fingers wiggling into the gaps between Kento’s with deft flirtation. “Oh my,” he said. “Can’t believe we’re holding hands, Nanamin.”
“Good luck.” Gojo threw a careless wink over top their interlaced fingers.
Kento wondered how many people ran screaming when faced with the horrifying question: ‘Are you ready to find out if Gojo Satoru is your soulmate?’ He judged himself a little, for not being one of them. “Awfully confident for someone who doesn’t even want a positive result.”
“Well, if I don’t believe in you, who will?” Gojo flashed a sarcastic grin. “Go on, then. All we have to do is offer it a little of our cursed energy and—allegedly—it’ll do the rest. Think there’ll be fireworks?”
Kento didn’t need the explanation; it was obvious just from the arid texture. The rope was coarse and thirsty. “Let’s just get this over with.”
Kento’s cursed energy welled in his hand to be devoured by Miyako’s Twist. For a glorious handful of seconds, nothing happened. Gojo let out an obnoxious hah in vindication.
And then, an ember formed between their clasped hands: a golden bead swelling with light until it was the size of a walnut; an apricot; an apple. Heat erupted in Kento’s palm but there was no pain to accompany the burn and Kento couldn’t get the signal through to his cramped fingers to just let go. Gojo stared dumbfounded at the light engulfing their hands with the same morbid wonder Kento felt clawing through his shoulders, gathering at the base of his neck. The light encircled their wrists and wound over their forearms with perfect synchronicity, imprinting angry, red braids on their skin everywhere the rope touched. When the light faded, the entire length of rope had blackened and died.
Gojo stood perfectly still, the smoldering rope still in hand. He stared at their laced fingers, eyes wide and lips parted with shaky breath. If it were any other situation, the dumbfounded horror slathered straight down Gojo’s face from hairline to dropped chin would be comical. “Uh…” Gojo stammered. “Do over?”
The shock tensioning Kento’s jaw shut snapped.
“Do over?” Kento asked, his voice swelling across the two syllables so extremely that even Mei Mei took a step back. “What do you mean, do over? What have you done, Gojo?”
Gojo slipped his fingers from between Kento’s. Kento let go, too, and watched the rope flop on the floor, useless.
“What did I do?” Gojo squawked. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything this was all your stupid idea!”
“Christ, here we go again,” Shoko groaned.
“This is a joke, right?” It was the only sliver of hope Kento had left and he clung to it with manic desperation. “It’s not even funny. Gojo cut the shit, now.”
Only Gojo didn’t seem to have any more idea what was happening than Kento did. He kept staring at Kento like he was waiting for a punch line and it did nothing but ratchet Kento’s confusion and anger higher. Quickly, Kento’s tumultuous emotions reduced to embarrassment.
He stormed off without another word, down the hall toward his dorm, savagely pleased no one dared follow.
Kento didn’t sleep that night. He sat awake, alternating between seething at the internet, pacing his room, and glaring at the thick, rope burn pattern snaking over and around his hand and wrist.
It had started pink like a careless stove accident but hour by hour it darkened. By three in the morning, a bloody red tattoo was vibrant against Kento’s skin. The location was inconvenient, too; people would see it. How would Kento explain it away? A rebellious phase? A mistake? Was Gojo already ruining his chances at a normal life before he even got off campus? Every question led to another but Kento couldn’t find the right order to ask them in. There was no good place to start.
By four, Kento knew he wasn’t imagining the sensation that the mark was inked from Gojo’s cursed energy.
By five, he had mostly talked himself out of amputation but if it walked like the end of the world, if it talked like every one of his plans, decimated, was Kento so wrong to marinate in his anger? The whole situation was patently unfair: Kento had already faced the end, stacked on the end, stacked on the end, and had decided to tap out. This soulmates nonsense was a kick in the ass on the way out a well-deserved door.
Soulmates, how ridiculous. Gojo had said that rope did nothing and Kento had been so stupid to believe him. Suddenly the Gojo Clan holiday party didn’t seem so bad but hindsight was a bitch and Kento was forever its fool.
What now?
That was the question that mattered most. Kento came back to it again and again, spinning circles all night, well into the sunrise.
They should talk about it. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as Kento kept thinking, he had a tendency to doomsay. How seriously could an ill-thought bet and heirloom cursed tool upend his life? Maybe the entire thing was some archaic, irrelevant ritual and they’d all chalk it up to a great story for how Kento and Gojo wound up with their first tattoos.
It didn’t have to be terrible, Kento always did this: assumed the worst without knowing his surroundings. Just because he could justify it didn’t make it right, and hadn’t he and Gojo buried this hatchet after nearly a year of gravedigging?
Kento emerged from his room too late for breakfast but too early for lunch, ready to wrestle down his dread long enough to let Gojo smooth-talk some sense into him. But Gojo was gone—left on a last-minute mission from the Grade 3 roster that Kento knew he’d outright refused the day before.
Back in Kento’s first year, before everything went to shit, Kento and his classmates developed a habit of hanging out on a rocky outcropping in the woods to watch as Gojo used the surrounding forest as practice fodder. They all got in on it—the unmitigated destruction of the local flora—but Gojo and Geto were the relentless ones. Kento studied, Haibara cheered, Shoko smoked. But Gojo? Gojo might not have cared about academics or honing any sort of real-life skills, but he considered his jujutsu aptitude on par with destiny. At the time, that had meant achieving reverse curse technique. Then mastering teleportation. His domain. The list was endless and Gojo hadn’t stopped—not once—until Geto’s abrupt departure meant the woods were no longer his favorite arena.
So, in the dead of winter near the end of Kento’s second year, he and Shoko developed a new habit of hanging out on the roof of the gym while she smoked cigarettes and Kento brooded on the general unfairness of the universe. And Gojo? Gojo took to decimating mountains, wholesale.
The roof had its pros. The view was nice. There was a good amount of privacy and the lack of emotional baggage kept Kento from listing side-to-side navigating the various facets of his grief. Kento felt both peaceful and free up on the roof—luxuries he’d come to treasure while weighing his future and massaging his transcripts.
Finally, the end was in sight. And then everything went to shit yet again.
“It’s bullshit,” Kento spat at the picturesque mountain scenery. The idyllic clouds floating overhead were crushing him. “He’s avoiding me and it’s bullshit.”
“He’s not avoiding you,” Shoko lied.
“That why he’s spending all his time on low-level missions that should be going to the first years? What is this? The sixth in four days?” Four days of staring at the marks on his hand and feeling the subtle churn of Gojo’s cursed energy caught under his skin like a tattoo. “No. He is avoiding me.”
“Fine. But you’re avoiding him, too, so I don’t see the problem.” A perfect ring of smoke wafted from Shoko’s lips.
Kento fiddled with her cigarettes resting between them and drew one out of the pack, biting it between his teeth to light it. The problem was Kento had tired of marinating in his complicated feelings yesterday. Four days of sulking had been enough. He was fed up and the mark on his hand was too loud to think around. And Gojo was off being so very not Gojo about everything—how dare he.
“Is he pissed?” Kento wondered.
“You know he’s not. You gonna talk to him before he goes home for his birthday?”
Yes. But Kento didn’t want to admit it so soon. The urge to corner Gojo was mild at the moment, but it would keep growing. By the time Gojo was back from his trip, Kento would be in tatters. Better to get it out of the way and let them both seethe in peace. Or mourn. Who knew what’d happen, these might be the last few days Kento had before being tossed in the Gojo clan meat grinder and why— Why was it that every time Kento managed to carve some security out of this horrible world, some new, unfathomable jujutsu came along and ruined everything.
“It’s just bullshit.” Kento caught himself dragging his thumb over the lines again. Not even makeup would cover it—Kento tried. “Complete fucking bullshit.” And then all his wayward dread tumbled into place. Kento scowled at the mark on his hand, at the scenery, at his stolen cigarette snug between his fingers. “What am I supposed to do? Everyone’s going to know. Even if I figure out how to hide this”—he raised his hand—“it won’t matter. Even if no one realizes about me, Gojo can’t hide behind long sleeves and gloves for the rest of his life.”
“I doubt he’ll say anything about who it is when he goes home this time,” Shoko said. “But eventually? Yeah, I think Gojo’s going to have to tell them. And when he does, you’re both going to have to stop being weird.”
“I’m not being weird.”
“You’re being so weird.” Another cloud of smoke billowed out of her mouth. “At least stop picking at it like it’s sunburn you can peel off.”
Kento’s thumb froze mid-scrape. “What would you do?”
Shoko blew a long stream of smoke towards the mountains. “You want to know what I’d really do? What I think you should do? Or should I say what I think you should hear?”
What a complicated question. “Tell me what you want to tell me, but don’t tell me which of the three it is.”
Shoko laughed in a handful of little bursts. “I think you should go for it. You two get along, and Gojo’s pretty uncomplicated, romantically speaking. You’ve never really dated anyone, so why not have a fling and see what happens? Gojo would be into it. Would get the clan off your backs a bit, too and they’ll get bored with this whole thing eventually. Even Gojo’s parents aren’t together like that anymore and no one cares. All that stupid rope does is measure your cursed energy and compare it to someone else’s. So you’re compatible. Whatever, we all knew that.”
Kento could not possibly think about something like a fling with Gojo for about eight hundred excellent reasons and more than a few that were spiteful and petty to boot. “I’m leaving in February.”
“All the more reason to have some fun while you can,” Shoko said.
She wasn’t wrong, but Kento didn’t want it like this.
Kento stubbed out his cigarette and dropped it in a mason jar wedged in the rain gutter. “I have to go talk to Yaga. Thanks for the chat.”
Shoko only smiled and waved him off.
“You’re late,” Yaga said without looking up from his sewing. He had an office somewhere in the west wing but preferred to meet students in one of the large sparring rooms overlooking the lake. Small baskets of fabric and stuffing sat beside his mat—permanent fixtures ever since Kento had known him. “That’s not like you.”
In the subtext: does Kento want to talk about it?
“I’m fine.”
Yaga gave him a disbelieving look but didn’t push it, instead looking down to examine the stuffed hippo in his lap. He turned it this way and that, and after checking the bottom, he seemed satisfied.
“Well, then,” Yaga said, setting the cursed corpse aside and letting his hands settle on his knees. “Sit.”
Kento chose the obvious cushion, directly across from Yaga, and sat.
They had several things to discuss, from giving Kento enough semblance of a graduation so the admissions office at Waseda wouldn’t question it, to making sure things like housing and scholarships were all squared away so the break could be a clean one.
Kento was lucky to have Yaga. He never would have thought about things like what his transcripts should say or how much remedial science he had to cram in his head to make up for his flawed education. Not to mention things like where would he get health insurance and who to put down as his emergency contact and medical proxy.
“What else is on your mind?” Yaga asked once the planned conversations were out of the way and Kento was firmly engaged in more unusual behavior by sticking around instead of scurrying out the door. A new project sat in Yaga’s lap: a small, black and green, cat-shaped toy the size of Kento’s fist.
“I assume you know what happened with Gojo.” Either Gojo had told him or Yaga heard elsewhere. One option was about as likely as the other but if Kento had to wager, he’d bet Gojo confided far more details in Yaga than he’d ever give anyone else.
“Satoru told me, yes.”
Kento was dying to know: “What’d he say?”
Yaga gave him a wry look, like he wasn’t sure he should indulge such obvious fishing. “This and that. He told me the facts of the matter and we discussed what it might mean for his ascension with his clan.”
“Is he pissed?” Yaga was more likely than Shoko to tell Kento the truth.
“No.” Yaga offered no elaboration. “But you seem to be.”
A little, yes. Kento knew he shouldn’t be—it wasn’t productive—but he couldn’t help feeling like his theoretical mundane future was in jeopardy over a nonsensical bet posed by a nonsensical lunatic. Gojo should have known better. Every step of the way, Gojo should have known better.
And me, too, a bitter voice in the back of Kento’s head whispered whenever he got too deep into slinging blame. Outside, the wind rattled more leaves to the ground. Soon half the trees would be bare.
“I feel trapped.” Dirty phrasing but the nuance was impossible to put into words.
Yaga set his doll in his lap and rested both hands on his knees, lips pressed into a thin line. “By what?”
The existential concept of loving and losing. Too bad Kento couldn’t muster the nerve to say it. “His clan, mostly.”
“You have to know they have no inclination or motivation to bodily drag you into a relationship with Satoru. They don’t even want him in charge, much less for a lineage to begin. This whole thing? It’s only ever going to mean what you want it to.”
It was soothing in the way facts always were, but still, Kento’s anxiety screamed that any reaction beyond an immediate and thorough shutout would destroy his life, forever.
Yaga glanced up and shook his head. ”I’ll tell him to talk to you about it but don’t hold it against me if he doesn’t listen. Satoru still hasn’t quite figured out he can’t brute force everything. You know, I’ll be sad to see you go—he listens to you more than most.”
“He really doesn’t.”
Yaga’s smile carried an indulgent twang. “If you say so.”
Kento took the dismissal and left for what was—once upon a time—the second years’ wing. Nowadays everyone but the first years were packed in. Gojo had moved first, when he couldn’t stand being alone in the hall he’d shared with Geto anymore. Kento had moved a bit after: different classmate, same reason. How disgustingly in character for Kento to drag his feet accepting that what his grief needed was noise and company.
A shower was on his mind so Kento passed his room by and took the longest, hottest shower of his life. At the end he blasted the cold tap for a minute to slough away the last of his moping.
He laid on his bed after, dressed only in his jeans, and closed his eyes. But sleep wouldn’t come for hours and when it did, Kento was plagued with dreams of inky coils of rope sketched from nothing in midair.