Archive of Our Own

Nanami doesn’t know what he’s done to deserve these kinds of missions. He supposes it’s the apparent unassailability of his character, the dignity everyone seems to think he has. Maybe even Yaga can’t resist the chance to tear it apart, in his own within the limits of professionalism kind of way.

Under Ijichi’s curtain, he’s alone in what’s usually a nightclub, where there had been enough reports of disappearances originating here that its name made its way up to Jujutsu High. His interview with the owner had been ominous; as sleazy an impression as the man made, he’d also been spooked by it all, and anything bad enough to rattle that type isn’t something to mess around with. Maybe that’s why he’s been sent after all — he’s cautious, pragmatic, deliberate. A whole lot of other words that don’t make for a very glowing dating profile. Not that he’s looking; Nanami shifts his nata to his right hand, ready for hopefully anything. 

The place is still popular, despite the rumors currently swirling around it. The bar is miraculously clean but the dance floor is marked with the scuffs of a thousand feet, grinding against each other under the flashing lights, in the boom of the music. Now it’s silent, or nearly so. There’s a dripping coming from somewhere. 

The faucets and hoses behind the bar don’t immediately appear to be the source of the sound, all in place and handles pushed fully back. He’s not sure where the restrooms are, not sure how much he wants to be inside any of them if he doesn’t have to be, but if they’re out of sight then they’re out of range of anything that could be heard so clearly from his current position. He stills, trying to get a sense of direction at least; if he has to guess, which at this point he does, it might be coming from somewhere around the stage. 

It’s less a stage and more just a platform, somewhere for a DJ to ply their trade at a good vantage point, where they can easily take the crowd’s pulse with a bird’s eye and adjust if it feels like the energy is low. And now that he’s focused his attention, Nanami can see around the side of the table holding the equipment a small pool of some sort of liquid. 

Drip, drip. Madness, he can imagine, having to listen to it all the time. Small mercy, then, that this place is usually much livelier. A little sound like that, a little wetness in a space designed to house the humidity of human bodies likely isn’t unusual, wouldn’t be noticed. Might have the chance to grow stronger. He approaches the way he always does: with caution. No point rushing in and spending unnecessary energy. Nanami doesn’t have the boundless reserves of some of the other sorcerers. One, really. He shakes the distraction off. 

Closer, the liquid isn’t quite water, more viscous just by a little, less transparent. If he were to swipe a finger through it, he gets the sense it will cling to him. Nearer still he realizes there’s a smell to it. He’d assumed thus far that this had been a feature of the club as a whole but with it growing stronger as he approaches it’s clear it isn’t. The scent of sweat, the good kind you work up writhing with other beautiful people, is pouring from the puddle. The pieces fall into place. The feeling of energy is more concentrated here as well; he’s found the source, probably of all the club’s problems. Or most of them, anyway. This many people in one place will always have a few bad apples in the batch but at least the causes will be natural from now on, provided Nanami can get the job done. 

And he always does. Maybe that’s why he’s been sent here.

He expects the curse to change its form, maybe too used to working with Itadori lately on the startlingly humanoid patchwork-face mystery, but it never reshapes, not even when he’s standing level with it, staring down into it. The surface of it, slick and slightly coagulant, is dotted with eyes — all different colors, some even unnatural at least in human anatomy, jumbled together and swirling. Their focus moves constantly but in unison, aimed at the ceiling, to the left, to the right, behind them. When their gaze settles on Nanami he feels it immediately, the overwhelming power of the fear behind the curse, the feeling when you step on stage in a school play for the first time and feel — well. All eyes on you. He can’t say he likes it now more than he did then, which likely doesn’t bode well as far as this match-up goes. 

The curse’s movement is like the liquid it’s made of, smooth and slick along the surface of the stage. It leaves a residue in its wake, and Nanami doesn’t know whether it’s necessary or not but he dances out of the way, tries to keep his feet from it. Exorcism works the same way no matter what the enemy is, but the constant, fluid movement makes the ratios more difficult to apply and less effective when he does hit, the curse forming and reforming with each strike. It might be getting smaller, maybe; Nanami wonders if someone like Mei might have been more effective with her divide and conquer strategy, Kugisaki with her potent resonance. 

It doesn’t matter; he’s the one who’s been sent, he’s the one who will need to exorcise the curse.

If he can land a blow that splits the liquid clean in two, instead of slashing at the surface, that feels like it will turn the tide at the very least. Maybe win him the fight; the intelligence Ijichi had briefed him on, over his shoulder in the driver’s seat on the way to the club, had been that the curse was only first grade. Semi-special at the most. This should be a simple matchup, and so far aside from the absence of eradication it’s felt that way; Nanami hasn’t broken a sweat, not yet in the evaluation stage of what this fight really is. This isn’t like what he’s seen before, not with Haibara more than a decade ago where an incorrect evaluation had meant a loss of life. It is an unusual pairing, though, oddly matched; Nanami has never been one to seek the spotlight so he might be at a specific weakness. Gojo could handle it, he thinks, throwing down another elbow at the curse and only fracturing it, if anything. Gojo has always been under the gaze of others. Nanami had spent enough time with him in high school to know how to handle this, he thinks. The adulation, the expectation. He withdraws, rises.

Up in the rafters, the catwalk infrastructure above the stage, the curse seems more willing to pursue Nanami. It doesn’t seem to understand the subtleties of his movements, simple in its design. If there exists an object, it would like to observe. The curse’s movements simulate sentient liquid well enough from what Nanami remembers that he can develop a plan, a strategy. If its motivations are no more complicated than that, then there’s nothing to fear.

When it stretches, vertical, to reach Nanami it at first doesn’t seem like there will be any trouble. The sight of it rising, a wave full of eyes, might threaten another sorcerer but all Nanami sees is seven and three and a nice, clear shot. He takes it, always does. 

This works, as he’d expected. The curse dissipates, splattering out, coating him fairly thoroughly in what feels like tangible residuals: disgusting, but a necessary evil of the job. It fades quickly, the feeling of a humid day draining in a temperate room. Nanami shakes the dank blood, the only physical indication of the curse’s substance, from his nata and makes short work of the descent to the stage, down from there. 

He texts Ijichi that the curtain can come down, that he’s planning to meet the owner quickly where he’s been instructed to wait, near the building but not too near. To appraise him of the situation, indicate it’s been handled.

Nanami’s initial impression of the man had been somewhat sordid but he outdoes himself during this conversation, arm around Nanami’s shoulder in what he calls gratitude, payment — which should technically go to the school, and which Nanami doesn’t appreciate being made the middleman for — slipped into his breast pocket and patted with one large hand. 

“Is there anything else troubling your business?” Nanami asks, teeth gritted, because he must. 

“Hmm, not the business,” the owner replies, all his teeth showing. He’s at least not hanging off Nanami any longer but he’s certainly still far too close. “There is a personal matter I’d like you to look into.”

It’ll mean overtime, but this is so far the most interesting part of the discussion. “Oh?”

“Oh, indeed, young man.” This is not someone’s grandmother thanking him for walking her across the street at a busy intersection; the hairs on the back of Nanami’s neck, far too highly tuned to still fire in interactions like this, finally prick on end. “The matter of this problem you’ve left me with.”

He grabs his own crotch, which Nanami supposes thanks solely to him being a fairly tall and well-built man is probably the best possible way this situation could have panned out. It at least gives him the chance to give the owner a flat, disgusted look and bolt.

“Hey—” he hears the owner call, but he doesn’t pursue him. That’s good. Strange, he supposes, for a creep like that but he won’t look a gift horse in the mouth. 

“Ijichi-san,” says Nanami, when the man himself is in sight, “I am very glad to see you.”

Ijichi turns to him, blinks, and then does something odd — it may be the light, the still-bright day interfering with Nanami’s vision, but he thinks Ijichi flushes. Maybe he’s been out in the sun too long, waiting for Nanami. It’s guilt-inducing. “Ah, Nanami-san. Everything went well, I hope?”

“Mostly. I’m sorry for keeping you, that took longer than I expected.”

“It was no trouble. I don’t mind, Nanami-san. Do you want to go right back to the school?”

“I think so. I should get my report in sooner rather than later.”

Ijichi is quiet to start; the trip isn’t a particularly long one, and Nanami had offered to take the train and cast the curtain himself but Ijichi, self-sacrificing and kind, had insisted. Even now, from the front seat he’s looking back at Nanami, almost anxious with its frequency. 

“Is everything all right?” Nanami asks after maybe the eighth time they’ve accidentally locked eyes in the rear view mirror. 

“I… Nanami-san, are you sure you want to go right back to the school? I could… I could take you somewhere, if you wanted.”

“Ijichi-san…?”

“Only if you… if you wanted.” The stammering isn’t so unusual — Nanami gets the feeling he makes Ijichi nervous, not that he tries to be difficult — but he’s definitely still a little flushed, and now that they’re out of the sun Nanami isn’t sure how many excuses there are remaining for it. 

“Ijichi-san, is there somewhere you want to go?” he asks, probably a little too pointed but this exorcism had followed a morning spent with Itadori; while pleasant in a way, those tend to leave him tired and low on patience. “Otherwise I think I’d just like to go back to the school and file my report.”

“Yes… of course. Sorry, Nanami-san.”

It’s lucky they’re close; by the time they pull up to the school Ijichi looks like he’s about to burst with something. Nanami moves to get out of the car, hand to the door, but Ijichi seizes him by the wrist. 

“Nanami-san, I—”

“You’re warm.” He is; Ijichi’s fingers on his skin are almost feverish. Maybe his original theory, some sort of overexposure to the elements, had been right in the end. “Maybe you should see Ieiri-san.”

“No, I’m fine. I wanted to say—”

“I’ll go find her for you, Ijichi-san. You’ve been such a help for me today,” Nanami adds, because he has, “I’d like to do something for you in return. Wait here.”

“Nanami-san!”

But he’s already pulling away; something is off, definitely, and if his carelessness at the site had been the cause of it then he’ll be the solution as well. 

The halls are empty, as usual, on the way to the infirmary. He remembers the location better than the back of his hand, has been there more times than he can count, but there’s something disorienting about the interaction with Ijichi, the conversation with the club owner. He’s off-balance; making sure Ijichi gets the attention he needs will set him right. The owner he can write off as a creep without a lot of hand-wringing or lost sleep. 

The door is open, which means Ieiri probably isn’t working on anyone in an especially precarious condition. Nanami knocks anyway, because his mother had raised him to be polite and, specifically, not to bother people while they are otherwise occupied. 

“Stop knocking, Nanami,” Ieiri’s voice calls from out of sight. It doesn’t sound muffled; maybe she’s just doing paperwork. He smiles a little, the feeling of being known warm as a candle in him, then rounds the corner, serious again. 

“Ieiri-san, are you busy?” he asks. She is at her desk, like he’d guessed, forehead in her hand waterfalling her hair away from her face; she looks up at the sound of his voice closer than before. “Ijichi-san might have been in the sun too long, or something else might be wrong. He’s acting a little odd and he felt warm earlier. Could you take a look and make sure it’s nothing serious?”

Ieiri stares at him, unblinking, for what feels like an eternity and might actually be fifteen seconds. Nanami wonders whether he should say something else, explain further. Lay out the guilt that has him chasing her down and spending her valuable time on something that, hopefully, is nothing. “Wow,” she says. “I really thought I was past this.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Remember when we had sex after your graduation?”

Something in Nanami’s temple snaps, leaving a strange ringing in his ears. “What is wrong with everyone today?”

Ieiri frowns. “Everyone? What…”

“First the club owner tried to come onto me. Inappropriately, I might add.” Ieiri-san isn’t meeting his eyes; her gaze is somewhere around his mouth. “Then Ijichi-san was acting so strangely on the way over here.” Lower, now, dropping precipitously. “And now you! Ieiri-san,” he adds, realizing suddenly he’s being selfish about the whole thing, “are you all right?”

“I mean,” she says, then blinks with purpose and drags her eyes up to Nanami’s again. “Can you step outside for a minute? Also, has anyone told you that blue is really your color?”

He sighs, but he backs out of the infirmary just to have Ieiri shut the door in his face. “Ieiri-san! What about—”

“Ah,” she says, voice coming through the other side of the door well enough if he leans up against it, “that’s better.”

“What is happening?” Nanami mutters to himself, palm to forehead in exasperation, and then things get immeasurably worse.

“What is happening, Nanami?” Gojo Satoru, problem in human form, props himself up by his elbow on the shelf of Nanami’s shoulder and he nearly jumps out of his skin. 

“Hell,” he says, which is about as vulgar as he’d like to get inside the walls of a school, and he braces himself. 

“Satoru?” asks Ieiri from the inside of the infirmary, and Nanami watches his brows raise beneath his blindfold. It’s funny, he thinks, how much he can convey behind all that. It’s probably funny, too, how well Nanami has adapted to reading it all.

“The one and only! Anyone want to fill me in on why you’re talking through a door? Unless this is some kind of game in which case, let me join.”

“You’re being awfully normal,” Nanami says, slowly, with dawning alarm. Gojo should probably never be a barometer for business as usual.

“It’s about time someone noticed.” It’s amazing how a grown man can come up with such a dramatic pout on the spot. “Should I be acting strange?”

“I sure was,” says Ieiri, through the door. 

“Well, now I have to know.”

Nanami sighs. “Something… I don’t know.”

“Satoru, you don’t notice anything different about Nanami?”

Gojo frowns. “He’s covered in residuals,” he says, and Nanami blinks. Ijichi hadn’t said anything — neither had Ieiri, and it’s part of her job to know. “But other than that things seem fine. You’re not doing that thing again where you don’t tell anyone about some kind of life-threatening injury, are you, Nanami?”

“No.” He feels the strain of a prolonged fight just fine but there doesn’t seem to be any indication of lingering damage. The curse itself hadn’t been brutally violent, more evasive than anything else. Difficult to catch for someone whose style is a bit less diligent, but Nanami hadn’t struggled. “The curse did… burst, I suppose, when I exorcised it.”

“What was your mission today?” Ieiri asks, still firmly on the other side of the door. She sounds thoughtful, though. Gojo is performing his version of paying attention. 

“I was sent to a club where people had been vanishing. The curse was hiding up under where the DJ works. It’s a little difficult to describe but it had many eyes.”

“Like me!” Gojo chirps. He’s still leaning on Nanami’s shoulder. 

“Not like you.” The corners of Gojo’s mouth droop; Nanami does not feel bad about it. “These were visible on the curse’s surface.”

“Hmm. Fear of attention?” Ieiri asks. “Figuring out what the curse is might help with solving this.”

“Fame?” Gojo asks. “Recognition? Could explain why everyone’s crazy about you, Nanami.”

“Everyone but you, Gojo-san.”

“I’m special.” He punctuates this with a pinch to the end of Nanami’s nose.

“You might be onto something,” says Ieiri, which is lucky for the blood pressure spike Nanami can see in his near future. It doesn’t stop him from glaring at Gojo, which has its usual lack of effect. “Satoru, can’t you just dispel the residuals?”

Gojo examines him, which at least means he steps back and frees up Nanami’s personal space. “I don’t think so,” he says. “It’s like they’re clinging to him, sort of. But the good news is they’ve already faded a little while we’ve been talking!”

“How much is ‘a little’?”

Gojo winces. “Well… it’s enough that I can see it.”

“Should I look?” asks Ieiri. 

“Eh. Maybe not. It isn’t that much.”

“Based on what you do see,” Nanami interjects, “how long will it take to fully dissipate?”

Gojo shrugs. “A couple days? A few? It’s a curse, not a formula.”

Nanami grits his teeth. “I’m not… dealing with this for days. What if it affects everyone?”

“It probably does, based on what you told me about Ijichi.”

“Oh, no,” says Gojo. “Did he try something, Nanami?”

“You make it sound so disgusting.”

“I can check on him after this,” Ieiri says, “just to make sure that’s all it is. You make a good point though, Nanami, you should probably lay low until this is over. I know I don’t want to see you until then.”

“Hey!”

“Ooh, what did she do?” asks Gojo, gleefully. “I’ve always wondered about you two.”

“I’ll go see Yaga-san,” Nanami manages. The less Gojo knows, the better. “Maybe we can arrange something.”

“I’ll go too!” Gojo announces. “Since I’m the only normal one so far I should protect Nanami’s virtue.”

“My what?”

“It’s not a bad idea,” says Ieiri. “I don’t want someone with less restraint than me to see you right now, Nanami.”

This brings Nanami up a bit short; Ieiri sounds serious, makes him nervous. “I think I can handle myself,” he says. 

“I’ll be the judge of that!” Gojo slings an arm around his shoulders, steers him away from the infirmary door he’s been leant against to better hear Ieiri’s voice. He’s like this, always has been, closer than you want and happier about it than he has any right to be. “Bye, Shoko! Good luck with your boner!”

Ieiri doesn’t dignify that with a response, but Nanami suspects that if he’d stuck around to listen he might have been able to hear the sound of her eyes rolling. 

Gojo talks his ear off all the way to Yaga’s, trying to pry more of what he’s already calling the story out of him. What exactly happened with the curse. Where Nanami had been, exactly, when things had started to get strange. How Ijichi had acted, which feels far more like personal curiosity and less like anything even remotely professional. 

“Should I go in first?” Gojo asks when they reach the office door. “Announce you, like a town crier?”

“I don’t think that’s necessary.” 

Gojo tails him close, hands in his pockets, smug somehow behind his blindfold. Like he’s about to be proven right about something. Yaga is at his desk, focused on what looks like a line of careful stitching, but he looks up as they enter.

“Ah, Nanami-san. How was your mission?”

This alone is actually slightly more interest than Yaga typically shows in him, but it’s within a margin of error. Irresponsibly, Nanami lets the sliver of hope in him fester. “It was successful, Yaga-sensei. I exorcised the curse without significant trouble. However, there are… complications.”

“How are you feeling, Yaga-sensei?” Gojo asks. It’s not exactly an interruption but it feels like one; Yaga glares at him. “Anything inappropriate you want to say to Nanami here?”

“The adults are talking, Satoru,” says Yaga. His attention turns, fully and with enough intention to quash that short-lived optimism, to Nanami. “You weren’t hurt, were you?”

“No, sir, I’m uninjured. The fight wasn’t difficult. Gojo-san, however, said that there are a number of remaining residuals.” Credit where it’s due, Nanami supposes, and it isn’t like it’s Gojo’s fault that everyone is acting oddly. “It’s… they’re causing people to act strangely around me.”

“I take sorcerer well-being very seriously,” says Yaga, which is an out and out lie and probably another red flag but Nanami isn’t going to ask for time away from his work without demonstrating the need for it. He clenches his jaw, again. “Is there anything I can help you with, Nanami-san? Anything you need?”

“There is, actually. I don’t ask this lightly, but—”

“How about now?” Gojo has stepped a little closer to Nanami, hands still in his pockets, eyes just as noticeable behind that blindfold and fixed on Yaga. “Anything strange?”

“Satoru. Enough.”

“—I’d like to take a day or two off from missions. To prevent anything from happening.”

“You’re being too vague, Nanami,” interjects Gojo, apparently impervious to Yaga’s aggravation which is about par for the course. “He’s worried about people coming onto him. You want to, Yaga-sensei, don’t you?”

“Who wouldn’t?” Yaga doesn’t sound angry anymore even with another interruption, attention on Nanami and not wavering. “Nanami-san, take all the time you need. Is there anything I can help you with? Do you want to stay with me? I can look into the residuals… maybe some other things as well…”

“That’s it.” Gojo’s hand is in the crook of Nanami’s elbow before he knows what’s happening; Yaga doesn’t look happy about it, but Gojo gets him through the door and on the other side of it in a miserable sort of deja vu faster than he can reach them. Which, as it happens, he had been trying to do; Yaga’s body hits the wood with an alarming little thump. 

“Nanami-san… Nanami-san, are you out there?” Yaga’s voice is slowly growing back its normalcy, though he sounds a little dazed too. He tugs at the door from his side but Gojo has it held fast. 

“Yeah, you are not going anywhere by yourself like this,” says Gojo. “Yaga-sensei, I’m taking time off too. I’ll be back when Nanami-san is.”

“Why will you use honorifics to talk about me but not when you talk to me?”

“That’s what you’re worried about? You have leverage over our boss for the rest of our lives after what just happened in there and you’re worried about me calling you -san.”

“I’m looking for normalcy,” admits Nanami, and he thinks Gojo’s posture might soften a little, spine caving in toward him.

“Fair enough. Did you hear me, Yaga-sensei?” He raises his voice a little, making it through the door, and gets the sound of slumping in return. 

“Fine,” Yaga grumbles. He does not sound happy. “Fine, I just don’t want to see him until this is cleared up.”

“He doesn’t mean it,” Gojo says. 

“He does.”

“Well.” Gojo finally pulls his hand from the crook of his elbow, only to clap him sympathetically on the shoulder with it. “We should leave before we run into someone really bad, hmm? Do you need anything from home?”

“What?”

Gojo blinks. “You heard Yaga trying to come through the door.” He’s still holding it, Nanami notices. Knuckles white. “If I’m the only one that can be trusted with you right now I’m not letting you out of my sight. And I spend most of my time here at the school, in case something goes wrong and we need Shoko.”

When Gojo’s right, he’s right. And respect or no, Nanami’s always trusted him. It hasn’t ever hurt him as much as it’s hurt other people in similar positions. “You make a good point. Unfortunately.”

“I don’t ever make a point unless it’s a good one. Now, answer my question.”

“I’ll pack a bag.”

“Are you far?”

“Middling. Closer than I lived to the sales floor. Thirty minutes on the train.”

Gojo frowns. “You are not taking the train. I am not letting a bunch of strangers grope you before I get the chance to!”

“Haven’t you been taking every opportunity to do just that since we were in high school?”

“Haha. I’ll take you home. Think very hard about your address. Maybe your genkan so I don’t accidentally plant us halfway through your living room ceiling. It would be better to be inside, anyway,” Gojo adds. “I don’t want you to have any trouble with your landlady.”

“I do like living there.”

“It’s tough enough having this much trouble at work.” Gojo slides the hand still lingering on Nanami’s shoulder to his waist, holding him firmly. “Think how jealous Yaga would be right now.”

“Nanami-san?” It’s Ijichi’s voice, somewhere down the hallway, and Nanami can feel the penetrating start of a tension headache brewing between his eyes. “Gojo-san, what are you—”

“Nanami, are you concentrating?” Gojo asks, but it sounds like he already knows the answer with the way his arm loosens. It doesn’t leave him completely, though, which is strangely comforting. Though, Nanami supposes, there have been times where he’s appreciated Gojo’s attention before. 

“Ijichi-san, did you see Ieiri-san?” asks Nanami, knowing it’s a mistake but hoping, somehow, that the residual effects might at least be one and done. Desperate, Ieiri might call him, but right now she probably doesn’t want to call him anything. “Was she able to help you?”

“Gojo-san, let him go.” It’s forceful for Ijichi, which is to say just slightly shaky. Nanami, thoughtless, lifts a hand toward him. Palm out. Hold on. 

Gojo moves fast, almost too fast, clamps his hands over Nanami’s ears and turns his head, manually. “Focus on me,” he says, muffled by his own fingers. But Nanami can hear him, has always been able to hear him even when he’s saying something different than his words are. “Think about that genkan.”

If Ijichi says anything else, Nanami misses it. Gojo is so close he can trick himself into thinking he sees his eyes through his blindfold. It’s not an illusion that the depressions, the softness of them abreast his nose, is visible. There’s a breath, shared he thinks between them, and then the bottom drops out of his stomach. 

“Hey, I’m getting pretty good!”

He’d closed his eyes without realizing it; Nanami blinks and finds himself free of Gojo’s hands and settled just past his genkan. He really is good, if he’d just been working off whatever image the Six Eyes could read from the shape of his cursed energy. Nanami’s never asked how it works, though. 

“Pack your bags, Nanamin,” Gojo sing-songs, setting himself of all places on Nanami’s kitchen counter. He clenches his jaw but also isn’t totally sure what else he’d been expecting. “I’ll take us back when you’re ready.”

“You know,” says Nanami, “you had all that time to grope me and you didn’t even try.”

Gojo puts a palm to his chest, dramatic. “I thought you’d appreciate it.”

He does. Gojo doesn’t need to know it, though. 

In an effort to brace against a looming cloud of despair, Nanami doesn’t pack for more than two days out of his own home, everything into the leather duffel Ieiri had bought him for what she called their five year anniversary, which had really just been the half-decade mark since the time they’d had sex once after he graduated. She’d mostly seen women since then, he’d mostly been punishingly alone. All things on balance. It’s harder to explain what he does than what Ieiri does, he supposes. Toothbrush, glasses case. After a second’s consideration, his own towel. Who knows what Gojo is working with, even with all that money to afford the better things in life. 

“I’m hurt,” Gojo calls. He’s around the corner, but it’s long stopped being surprising how much he can see even with his eyes covered. Still eerie, though. “You don’t think I have guest towels?”

“Maybe not at the school.” Nanami peers around the doorway and finds Gojo already looking his way. “You bring guests there?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” White teeth, white hair, long pale expanse of neck. Maybe Gojo’s strange power is turning the residuals’ effects on Nanami, making him feel like this — but it’s not new, is it? “You ready?”

He nods, even if he isn’t, not for Gojo’s hand back on his waist, not for their hips pressed together. Not for that close-up on Gojo’s grin. 

xx

Gojo’s room at the school is as spartan as he could have expected. It doesn’t look like a place to live in, really, limned with the transient sheen of a hotel room in a foreign city. He’s doing Nanami a favor; he tries not to let his genuine opinion show on his face as he looks around, but it’s a losing battle.

“I know, not very glamorous.” Gojo had let Nanami go quickly on their arrival, not just because he thinks his face had been a little green at the second teleportation in less than an hour. Once his legs had steadied beneath him, Nanami had even had the strength to appreciate it. “I don’t even know the last time I spent two days here. Maybe last year’s sister school event.”

“Was that the one where Okkotsu-kun—”

“Don’t remind me.” Gojo unbuttons his uniform jacket, clearly lulled by the familiarity of his surroundings. Even at the end of the day, the t-shirt beneath is bright, looks soft, worn by the warmth of a body over long hours. “Between him and Hakari-kun that was one of the worst messes I’ve ever had to clean up at this school. I thought Utahime was going to kill me!”

She never could, Nanami doesn’t say. He also doesn’t remind Gojo of the way he’d been at their own last shared sister school event, when Nanami had been a second year and Geto had defected and no one had figured out yet how to reach Gojo on his own. He’d almost killed a Zen’in offshoot from Kyoto, had vanished on the subsequently generated clan business for two weeks after the fact.

“Leave your things wherever. You can take the bed, I’ll— hmm.”

A glance into the LDK reveals a standard school-issue sofa, which Nanami remembers as not especially comfortable even for sitting on, much less sleeping. He sizes Gojo up where he’s got his hand to his chin, thinking. He’s been normal, almost disappointingly normal, about this whole thing. That Special Grade unconscious strength, the shield he’s never lowered since he draped it over himself all those years ago, the way he’s had chance after chance and never taken them seriously with Nanami. “I don’t mind sleeping out here,” he offers. Gojo waves him off. 

“You’ve got enough going on as it is, I’m not adding enough back pain to kill a lesser man to the list.”

“Then why would I let you do the same? Show me your bedroom.”

“So forward,” Gojo chuckles, but he gestures Nanami toward an open door just around the corner of the entryway. The students don’t even have a separate room to sleep in; Nanami’s stayed overnight at the school before in a suite like this, but he’s never had to consider one a home. Less busy, less necessary to the infrastructure of their society, revolving around this haunted ground. 

Gojo’s mattress, on sight, is big enough. Nanami can be an adult about this. “We can both sleep here if it won’t bother you. I’m sure you don’t actually get enough rest as it is so it probably doesn’t matter much either way.”

“You know me pretty well, don’t you, Nanami?” Gojo’s face is deceptively expressive, smiling, pouting, frowning, whining, a maelstrom swirling above the dark depths. A chameleon in plain sight.

“It’s only been — what, twelve years we’ve known each other?”

“Minus the four you were off the map. Plenty of time to forget what I’m like.”

“You’re hard to forget.” Nanami doesn’t need the Six Eyes to see how smug Gojo is at that, blindfold and all. “Even after I left I could still feel the stress.”

“Sticks and stones.” Gojo waves an airy hand. His fingers are long; the muscles in his arm flex and pull at the sleeve of his shirt. Nanami blinks and wonders for another moment if he’s the one that’s been affected by the curse after all, if everyone he’s met so far has just been responding to something off about him. It isn’t that he’s never noticed these things about Gojo before, not blind in high school and somehow without a tolerance increase in adulthood, but he expects better from himself. Less reaction. It’s still not off the scale, though. Maybe it’s the relatively new, intimate setting. Even in Hokkaido, drinking in the dim light and being entrusted with something Gojo had taken responsibility for himself, they’d slept in separate hotel rooms. “I’ll take it if it brought you back.”

“Why would irritation bring me back?”

“Familiarity. They say it breeds contempt but if the contempt is already there then all that’s left is—”

South or north. Familiar or unfamiliar. Back or forward. “There’s still plenty of contempt.”

“You’d like me to think that. But you’re here, aren’t you? Sleeping in my bed.” Gojo, infuriating and charming all at once the way he’s been honed to be across the years, thumbs into his blindfold just to hike it up and wink. 

Nanami frowns; as usual, it has no effect. “Do you wear that?” he asks instead, gesturing to the black fabric. “Even at home?”

“Guess you’ll find out if you’re here long enough.” He drops his hand again, back to that waist, trim and eminently visible beneath his shirt the way it never is in the uniform. Not for just anyone’s eyes. “You can use the bath first, if you like.”

This is generous. Nanami might take him up on it, but before he can decide his cellphone rings. Gojo takes a step closer, like it might explode in Nanami’s hand, but it just keeps chirping. 

“It’s Yaga-sensei.”

“Ignore him,” Gojo says, but Nanami is already answering. 

“Hello, Yaga-sensei.”

“Nanami-san.” He sounds relieved to start, like he hadn’t been sure Nanami would answer. “I… are you with Gojo-san?”

“Yes.”

“Put him on, would you?”

Nanami offers his phone, which is patently irresponsible of him, sets his bag at the foot of Gojo’s bed and starts to gather his things for the bath. 

“Bet you’re feeling silly!” Gojo sing-songs it. He’s a pacer on the phone, apparently, starts wearing a path in the floor between the bed and the door. “Yeah, you did do that. No, you said days. Multiple. For both of us. No. No! We’re turning off our phones.” There’s a longer pause after this; before now, Nanami doesn’t think Yaga has been getting much of a word in edgewise. “No, it seems to require visual contact. I think you’ll be fine. I’ll tell him you said so.” Behind the blindfold, his eyes move to Nanami. It’s easy to tell, if you’re looking. “I don’t think you should speak for long, though. Not in close proximity. The phone is probably okay. Right, if you do anything stupid it’ll at least take time to get here. No! I feel fine. Same as always.” There’s another pause, then Gojo extends the phone back toward Nanami, still in suspended animation holding his night clothes. “He wants to talk to you. But don’t expect an apology, because he asked me to tell you that.”

Nanami’s frown just makes him smile wider but he tries it anyway. Then the phone is back to his ear and Gojo leaves the bedroom, seemingly at peace leaving Nanami to finish the call on his own. “Anything I can clarify, Yaga-sensei? Or changes of plan?”

“I know that curse is strong,” Yaga says, voice down in his throat as an ominous sort of mutter, “because there’s no way in hell I would have given both of you time off otherwise.”

“Well, I’m the one who dispatched it. So it couldn’t have been more than semi-Special, if that.”

“I don’t want to hear it.” Yaga sighs. He has a way of rubbing the top of his head when he’s stressed about something; Nanami pictures him doing it now, finally grinding it down bald, shining skin peering through. “Well. I’m sorry the most time off you’ve had in a row since you came back is with Satoru.”

“I’ll consider it consequences of my actions.”

Gojo’s bath is fairly school-standard, nothing special about the showerhead or the mirror still steamed up as Nanami brushes his teeth. He hasn’t eaten dinner but he also doesn’t picture Gojo being the type to have a spread laid out for him by the time he finishes up. If he chalks this up as a wash he can buy an extra pastry next time he’s at a bakery, the kind of extraneous indulgence his body won’t be able to afford much longer, at his age. 

He finds himself glaring at his own reflection. Gojo’s older, eats worse, whines about every vegetable he’s compelled to eat in mixed company and still is slim, stomach curving under that t-shirt, tall and handsome and deeply unfair. Maybe he has Infinity running along the lining of his stomach somehow, letting the good things through and keeping the threats out. 

It almost makes him laugh; Gojo is waiting for him when he leaves the bathroom. 

“I knew it!” he crows. Nanami has apparently been here long enough — the blindfold is off, squirreled away somewhere or maybe just darkening Gojo’s nightstand. He’s not even wearing glasses, and Nanami thinks of the ache that grows in his temples on a day of bearing his own; his eyes are so blue, so pale, telling his secrets and keeping them all at once. “You look different with your hair down.”

Nanami scrubs through his undercut with the hand towel around his neck. He’s a little embarrassed, for reasons that probably won’t bear closer examination. “You’ve seen me like this before,” he says. 

“Yeah, in high school.” Like the Nanami attending Jujutsu High had been a completely different entity altogether. “You couldn’t even see your face if your hair was down back then.”

“Let’s not revisit this conversation.”

“But it amuses me!” Gojo doesn’t push it, though, just grins that impossible grin and disappears into the bath.

xx

Sleeping with Gojo is easier than Nanami expects it to be; the hard part is convincing him into bed. Once they’re both under the spread, which does not appear to be school-issued, thank goodness, it’s warmer than alone in his own apartment. Gojo’s mattress is firmer than Nanami’s, his window lets in less light being on the relatively isolated school grounds, his breathing doesn’t slow nearly enough to fool Nanami into anything. 

“Is this typical for you?” he asks after a while. 

“Hmm?” If Gojo’s trying to convince him he’s anywhere in the neighborhood of sleep he’s not doing a very cogent job. 

“Lying awake in the dark.”

“Hmm.” Still not credible. “Usually I have the TV on. I’m also not usually just lying there. I’m a busy guy, you know.”

This Nanami has no doubt about. Gojo is always being pulled in a number of directions he shudders to consider: students, missions, the administrative grind of existence under the jujutsu hierarchy, and at his elevated position with its corresponding intensified scrutiny. They may not get along all the time — though Nanami knows that’s half the fun of it by now — but he feels the sympathy so deeply when he’s this close to Gojo that it becomes his own exhaustion settling into his bones, his own headache digging out from between his eyes. “You are busy,” he says. His voice is soft with the molding of the feeling. “It feels like we don’t see each other all that often even though we work together now.”

“Not for lack of trying.” The sentence wears a veil of his usual lightness but, and maybe it’s the darkness they both share now like a curtain over anything too raw, it sounds a little vulnerable too. “I had to orchestrate the whole Hokkaido trip, you know.”

The mission that had brought him to Itadori; in that same privacy, Nanami smiles. “What a waste of your talents,” he says; his tone doesn’t hide a thing. Next to him, Gojo shifts. If he looked over, he’d be staring him right in the face, as much of it as he could make out in the darkness. 

“I don’t think so. Those buttered potatoes were good. It’s hard to find them anywhere else. And I carried your bag.”

“Which I remember you complaining about. Quite a bit.”

“But I did it, in the end.”

He had. That smile is lingering longer than Nanami had expected it to. “You did.”

Gojo lets the silence lie for a minute or two. Nanami’s own breath is slowing from the associations of the scene, the warmth of the duvet, the pillow under his head. But then he speaks again. “I don’t mind it.”

“Hmm?”

“Lying here. It’s not so bad when I’m not just by myself in the dark.”

“You don’t usually ask people to stay over?”

Gojo snorts. “Who am I bringing here?”

“I didn’t think you had the kind of decorum that meant you’d care about that sort of thing. And you can teleport, can’t you? So no hallway run-ins necessary.”

“I will never understand why everyone respects you so much.”

Nanami performs his outrage, because he has to, but it’s late and he’s in a warm bed and respect hasn’t been what’s between them for a long time now.

In the morning, Nanami wakes alone. There’s a second where he doesn’t remember where he is, but the smell is wrong for his own apartment; this is Gojo Satoru’s bed, minus Gojo Satoru. 

He rises, expecting him in the kitchenette eating something sweet out of a paper bag, but here too is empty. There’s, surprisingly, a coffee machine sitting haphazard and deeply unused on the counter, and a measured rummage through some of the more likely-seeming cabinets actually produces some grounds. Maybe not what Nanami himself would have chosen, but considering Gojo has never shown any interest in anything remotely approaching bitter he’s not planning to complain. 

He’s just thinking it’s strange he has it at all, just starting to wake a little at the smell of the brewing process, when there’s a quiet pop and the room is suddenly full of energy. Usually Nanami gets a more gradual approach; it occurs to him never to end up on Gojo’s bad side. 

“Ah,” he says. He sounds embarrassed but Nanami can’t see it on his face over the rim of his mug — undecorated stoneware, school-owned standard issue. “I thought you might still be asleep.”

“You’re up early.”

“I don’t usually sleep much. Shoko thinks it’s something to do with the Six Eyes. Energy efficiency or whatever.” The workings of his oh-so-special body seem far below the interest of Gojo; he pulls a hand from his pocket and waves away the topic. “Want some breakfast?”

Nanami blinks. “The coffee was enough of a surprise,” he says. “I didn’t expect food as well.”

That embarrassment is back again, more visible this time behind his sunglasses, as if anything could make him look remotely normal, force him to blend in. “I’m glad you found it,” he says, sets a paper bag down on the counter somewhere between them. There’s not much space in the student-sized room; it looks for a second like he’s reaching for Nanami, like finally the residuals might have worked their terrible magic on him. Would that be good? Would it be worth the knowledge of its cause to have Gojo’s attention, his hunger, directed at him? “I made sure to buy something boring for you.”

“I appreciate it.” Boring covers a significant amount of ground for Gojo; the bread he’d brought is perfectly satisfactory. 

He almost forgets he’s not in his own kitchen for a minute, lost in thought weighing his options for determining the status of the curse when he feels the weight of the Six Eyes. Gojo is leant on the counter, staring at him where he’s eating standing up. “What?”

Gojo blinks behind the sunglasses. He seems surprised. “You're just… so normal.”

It’s Nanami’s turn to be surprised, though he disguises it a bit better. “Not all of us are at the top of the pyramid.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know.”

“I thought your food standards would be impossible to meet!”

“I’m sure you did.”

“But you’re just… here, in my kitchen. Eating my bread, drinking my coffee.”

It’s easier to smile like this, still not dressed for the day, hiding from the world, so Nanami does. “Are you sure that’s not the part that doesn’t feel normal?”

“I said you did feel normal. Too normal, if you ask me.”

“Why don’t you eat too?” Nanami gestures to the paper bag, where there had been something like a plethora of options. Gojo must have truly been concerned about his requirements. “Maybe you’ll settle down.”

He does eat, though he doesn’t seem to lose his jitter. They dress separately and without too much shuffling; Nanami brushes his teeth first, pictures Gojo next to him in the mirror and spits. 

“So,” Gojo starts. Watching him wind his blindfold over his eyes as he steps from the bedroom is almost more intimate than seeing him take it off; Nanami can’t help but stare a little. Whatever this is, it’s growing too fast, too intense in this hothouse environment, close to the lamp, under the magnified sun. “Should we see how the world is feeling about Nanami today?”

“How are you feeling about me today?”

Gojo shrugs. “Same as always, but that’s not a good indicator, is it?”

It hasn’t been so far. Nanami tries not to think about what they look like leaving the living space. It’s not situated the way the students’ are, in its own outbuilding set slightly apart from the main dormitory, the building where most of the schooling takes place now that the student body has dwindled so low. Gojo takes his time locking up.

“Who takes over your class while you’re doing… this?” Nanami waves; it catches the situation, the environment. The ridiculousness of it all. 

“Probably Kusakabe. Good.” There’s some bitterness there that Nanami feels half-sure should, by all rights, be extended his own way to some extent. After all, he hadn’t wanted initially to support Itadori, to work with him, which seems to be Gojo’s chiefest complaint about the second-year teacher. Nanami isn’t close to him, had missed most of his first four years here at the school and without the deeper roots he’d had with Gojo and Ieiri they haven’t become more than coworkers, but he can see clearly what Gojo thinks of him. And maybe it’s just that keeping them from bridging the gap, the opinion of someone Nanami isn’t too proud to admit he trusts. Gojo shoves his hands in his pockets as soon as the door is locked behind him, slouches against it with an artless grace that Nanami can’t stop noticing this close to him, this aware of him. “Maybe our little experiment should be at the market. You probably noticed I don’t keep a lot here that’s edible.”

“Do you have one you like to go to?” Nanami does, every other Saturday an easy thirty minutes’ walk from his apartment that keeps him from over-buying. Sometimes he brings Ieiri, sometimes the owners of the stalls he frequents most often ask when she’ll be back, if they’ll ever get married though he’s never given any intentional indication that that’s their relationship. It isn’t; any time he’s not coated in these particular residuals she’d laugh the idea right out of the room.

“There aren’t many during the week.” This seems like somewhat abashed code for no, though Nanami hadn’t had expectations either way. “Itadori has a grocery store a few stops away he likes.”

The train feels risky in his current situation, but Nanami supposes it’s worth a try. He can look after himself, though he’d rather not cause a stir, and though he’s not ready to say it out loud and suffer the consequences it does feel a little more doable with Gojo beside him.

It’s good that he’s there after all. The car is crowded, as should be expected, and eyes follow Nanami from the platform — where he swears he’d felt at least one or two hands brush against him in inappropriate places — all the way along their route. Gojo, in a move that would normally be almost outrageously inappropriate, settles himself squarely between Nanami and the door at his back, putting all that height to good use. People still gaze at him, and one or two especially brave or interested individuals press against the parts of him that Gojo can’t entirely enshroud, but by the time they reach the store Itadori has apparently been patronizing Nanami’s so-called virtue is still intact.

The streets, though, are harder to navigate. People are bolder, approach him; in the end, in another large step across the friendly coworker line Nanami has been tightrope-walking with as much balance as he can muster, Gojo throws an arm around his shoulders and walks them together through the standard morning crowds. Men in suits and doe-eyed mothers with their children in tow watch them not with the fear or disgust Nanami has come to expect, but with jealousy. It’s strange to think it’s not him they envy, not even when he’s standing next to an earthbound god.

“I still don’t think I can dispel the residuals,” Gojo says, bundled close enough to Nanami that their jackets brush for a moment into a relatively isolated alleyway just shy of their destination, “but I’m going to see if I can separate a sample. Shoko is going to kill me if she can’t figure out why this is making everyone act like this. Also,” he adds, reaching forward and pinching just shy of the skin above the neckline of Nanami’s turtleneck, “I’m going to kill you if you don’t give me all the details of what her reaction was. She was way too vague when we texted about it.”

“I don’t think that’s my place,” explains Nanami, watching as Gojo squeezes what looks like an opaque sort of nothingness between his thumb and forefinger and reaches into his pocket, stuffing it into what looks like a wooden box. There’s a seal half-slapped onto it that he presses back down over it, closing it completely. It’s not strong, especially not now that the curse is exorcised; Nanami doesn’t even really understand why it’s having any affect at all.

“You’re no fun.” Gojo’s arm goes back around his shoulder, that easy movement into his personal space stinging just a little with his continued shrugging off of the curse’s effect. “You’d better pick the menu, Nanami. I have a sweet tooth.”

Nanami doesn’t need to be told. On any other occasion, grocery shopping with Gojo would be a mildly aggravating experience — he argues with almost every choice, though it’s just for banter with how easily he lets himself lose each time, he’s thoughtlessly unconscious of price tags and total — but on this day it’s exhausting. Gojo is starting to look like the port in the storm by the time the cashier hands Nanami her number on the receipt, brushing her fingers more than deliberately against his in the exchange, which is a foreign position to say the least. It doesn’t matter much how touchy Gojo is with him, except to the people he can physically intimidate; Nanami is no better than a human charcuterie board. 

Outside the store, the ink of the cashier’s contact information smearing on Nanami’s palm, Gojo makes a decision. His hand is in the crook of Nanami’s elbow, his voice in his ear, hold on, Nanamin. The nickname is almost distraction enough to cover the turning of his stomach in the grip of Gojo’s teleportation. They’re back in the living space of that school-issued apartment before Nanami can close his mouth around the sentence he’d started in the street. It’s useful, if disorienting; his skin is crawling, and Gojo releases him accordingly without words needing to be exchanged.

“That answers that,” he says, seemingly for want of something to say, hands planting firmly back in his pockets. “Sorry we had to try it.”

Nanami blinks; while not unwelcome it’s more than he’d expected. And really, it had probably been necessary. He tells Gojo so but doesn’t get more than a scoff in response.

“Why don’t you put this up in whatever way will make sense to you for the next few days?” Gojo asks, gesturing with a loose and lanky elbow toward the groceries. “I’m going to take the residual to Shoko, see what she thinks. Maybe if I have it with me she’ll…” He pauses, makes a face. “Actually, gross.”

Still a little shaken from his morning thus far, Nanami does as Gojo’s suggested, stocking his fridge and rearranging his cabinets with their meager, impersonal dishware. He might as well make whatever small incursion he can in the attritious war of annoyance they’re silently locked in while he has a chance.

Gojo returns before Nanami has the opportunity to miss him, slightly more cheerful than he’d left which can easily be attributed to Ieiri’s company. She tends to have that affect, at least in Nanami’s experience.

“I’m home,” Gojo sing-songs from the front door. Knowing that at times he has to walk places like everyone else makes him feel strangely human for a minute. 

“Welcome back.” He can’t even remember the last time he’s said that, but Gojo pokes his charming face around the corner of the entryway and smiles bright as starlight at Nanami anyway. “Did Ieiri-san have any ideas?”

Gojo shrugs. “Nothing concrete yet. She’s optimistic, though. You don’t even want to know the adjectives she used to describe what I brought her.”

“I likely don’t,” agrees Nanami. There’s a second of silence; he’s just finished washing out the cup he’d had his coffee from this morning and the accoutrement he’d used to brew it.

“What do you usually do?” Gojo asks suddenly. Behind the blindfold he looks curious, that same easy expressiveness masking something Nanami might not even know to look for. “On your days off.”

It’s been a while since he’s had one, what with the extra work — though it rarely feels that way — looking after Itadori. He casts his mind back. “Cook,” he acknowledges. “Read.” There are other things, records on turntables and drinks in anonymous bars, that Nanami doesn’t admit to, not now and not ever if he doesn’t need to.

“What do you read?” Gojo sounds genuinely curious. He’s settled himself against his own counter, close to Nanami but not too close. There’s easy, reassuring space between them, left purposefully and without grudge. “The dictionary?”

“Ha ha.”

“I do want to know, though.”

“It depends. Right now I’m reading an old detective story.”

“Sounds boring.”

“I suppose you’ll never know.”

Gojo watches him while he reaches with too much confidence for a glass, now in a spot that makes sense in his own kitchen organization paradigm, and fills it with water. “I could know,” he says while Nanami is mid-sip. “Do you have it with you?” He had packed it in his slightly dazed hurry, perhaps indulgently; he doesn’t reply but Gojo reads him anyway just as easily as if his thoughts had been the ones printed on a page, waiting to be flipped through. “Read it to me.” He still has that slightly silly lilt threaded through his tone but Nanami gets the feeling he’s being more serious than he’d like to let on. This might be a wholly unique experience Gojo is requesting, at least in the course of his adult life. “Without work I don’t have much else to do.”

“You don’t want to prep lesson plans for Kusakabe-san?” asks Nanami, knowing he doesn’t. It works — Gojo laughs, full throat, the way he does when he thinks no one is paying enough attention to care.

“What’s the detective story about?” Gojo asks when they’re settled at opposite ends of the standard-issue couch, one of Gojo’s legs propped careless and distracting beneath him. He always looks so casual, an obfuscation of that thrumming power moving through his veins at every moment. Nanami feels at once out of his depth and at peace with it; such is being in the presence of Gojo Satoru. 

“I don’t know yet,” he says. “I’ve just started it.”

“Well, what did I miss?”

It goes like this for several chapters, Gojo interjecting with silly questions, Nanami steamrolling him just for the novelty of it. So often in their society he defers to Gojo — not necessarily because he needs to but because it usually makes sense to — that to have the upper hand on him in the privacy of his own home is heady. By the time they’ve met the entire cast of characters, though, Nanami’s throat is tiring and Gojo’s interruptions have dwindled to nothing. When Nanami looks up, intending to propose a break to do something that involves less speaking on his part, Gojo’s head is slumped to the couch, mouth open just slightly, breathing even. Sleeping. A little unbelievable. 

Well. Nanami slides the index card serving as his bookmark between the pages and sets the book down on the low table. It’s been a long time since he’s had the chance to catch some extra rest during the day. 

xx

Dinner is more of an ordeal; the rest recharges Gojo, all that energy going toward annoying Nanami while he tries to assemble something edible. He’s not in the habit of sharing his own kitchen, not even when he has others over to eat in it. Cooking is a solitary activity, or with minimal preparation assistance and then supportive chatter while he does the rest. Preferably over a glass of wine, which Gojo unsurprisingly does not have.

He does have chatter to spare, though, both during the actual cooking process and throughout the meal itself. The surprising thing is that once he’s done with the preparation work it isn’t so bad. He’s used to eating lonely dinners, in silence or with music as a backdrop if he’s feeling especially — well, whatever he’s especially feeling — but the company isn’t bad. He and Gojo understand each other and their relationship better now than they did in high school, than when Nanami first came back and had to dig up the earth. It feels easy, wraps around them like the sun rising, warming the air and growing the shadows. 

Then Gojo, generous after what had apparently been a good meal, bends over Nanami to collect his dishes. It’s shocking enough on its own, this sudden selflessness, but what really picks up pace the pace of Nanami’s pulse is the way Gojo rests his hand on Nanami’s shoulder, for leverage or for closeness. Their jaws might brush, or close to it; Nanami gets a slow-moving smear of white hair against his cheek. 

Gojo touches him all the time, too frequently really, but it’s generally for effect. Scaring off the subway passengers earlier, or making him look like a fool in front of Itadori, who at least generally seems to take it in stride. This, alone and without an accompanying joke or bit Nanami is expected to engage in without any advance notice, doesn’t feel for anyone but them. 

Because it’s not just Gojo getting something — assuming he is — out of this. Gojo’s warmth is comforting the way no human contact has been since Nanami was covered in the curse, his hand is reassurance on his shoulder. Maybe it’s that, the contrast of the previous twenty-four hours with this moment, all the moments he’s spent with Gojo looking out for him; it shocks him out of his sense. Without conscious thought about it, without more than a second passing and with Gojo still saying something almost directly into his ear, Nanami rests his fingers over Gojo’s where they’re still wrapped around the curve of his shoulder. 

Both of them still, equally stunned though it had been Nanami’s decision by all indicators. Gojo has his own plate and Nanami’s stacked, pinched under his thumb like he’s in a freeze frame signaling an imminent commercial break on the kind of television show Nanami’s mother had enjoyed. Nanami finds himself either cowardly or shy, neither moving his eyes from in front of him nor shifting his hand again. Waiting for Gojo, always for Gojo, to set the tone. To take the lead. Older, more powerful, as wise if no wiser. 

“Easy, Nanami,” Gojo says a few breaths in. “How do you feel?”

Nanami blinks. He hadn’t considered even for a second that it might be the curse finally working its way under his skin. He’s thought about it in a little more depth now, what with all this free time to do it. He’s sure the curse had been born from experiences, stories at least, had or told by the DJs performing at that club. Rabid fans, high expectations, wide eyes and dilated pupils. Parasocial, Kugisaki calls it when she’s on a tear about Todo from the Kyoto school. The kind of celebrity that’s close enough to touch and too far away to connect. A modern thing, to some extent; probably an infant curse without a lot of power built up, but with the sort of linger that only a new phenomenon can count on. 

All that to say it makes no sense for him to be affected by the residuals, especially not now. It’s more logical that Gojo’s proximity has worn down his resistance to the feeling — but that’s been impossible for anything lower impact than a catastrophe for more than a decade. 

So how does he feel?

And just as importantly, and eminently more pressing, how does Gojo feel?

“Maybe we should wait,” he’s saying, while Nanami blinks and feels the earth move beneath his feet, “until this is all cleared up.” It’s slow but intolerable somehow as Gojo slides his hand out from between the parts of Nanami touching him, light fading at the end of the day. 

He’s out of Nanami’s space with their dishes before Nanami’s mind catches up with things, so it’s to Gojo’s back that he addresses his question when he finally feels capable of speech. “Why?”

Gojo doesn’t turn from the sink Nanami’s having trouble believing he’s ever used before. “Why what, Nanami? Use your words!”

“Why aren’t you affected by the curse’s residuals?”

This isn’t the question Gojo had expected. It’s simple enough to read surprise in the tension in his shoulders, in the way the wrist Nanami can see from his vantage point stiffens. “It… Limitless recognizes threats and—”

“It’s not a threat. If anything is threatening, it’s touching me.” Not an attack, not a projectile. Nothing approaching Gojo, not yet, just pulling him in, dragging him down, dragging them both down. There’s no way Gojo wouldn’t be affected, not with the vector the residuals have taken to spread their effects. This isn’t something he can block, something to glance off him because it’s all on Nanami, clinging to him, coating him and yet Gojo’s fingers, the lazy crook of his elbow have all made contact just as well as usual.

And Gojo — it’s damning. Gojo is nervous. Nanami can read it clear in the length of his spine, in the way his head is tipped and held still as a stone in the rarified air where he floats through life, untouched and undamaged. There’s something he doesn’t want Nanami to ask, points he doesn’t want Nanami to connect, and Nanami thinks he’s already there with the closing of every other door but it can’t be. It can’t be. 

“The only reason,” he says, slowly, one hand still resting on his own shoulder, “you wouldn’t feel differently because of the curse is…”

“Nanami,” Gojo sing-songs, silly, threatening, “this is a big door you’re knocking on.”

He blinks. “What sort of metaphor is that?”

This spins Gojo around; he laughs, one loud and genuine exhale, shaken from his pose. That much is good, at least. “That’s what you’re worried about?” he asks. 

“You don’t feel any different.” Gojo’s door, not just knocked on but smashed open, blown off its hinges. His face, now in full view — Nanami can’t look anywhere else — goes pale. Nanami wouldn’t have thought it possible with how fairly he’s already colored, light hair and light eyes and skin that looks like it glows sometimes in the right lighting. “The curse intensifies normal feelings into something much stronger. Ijichi-san and I are friendly, so it convinced him there might have been something more. The club owner…” All this means nothing, and Nanami knows it, doesn’t relish in the wasting time but also doesn’t know where to find the wherewithal, the ego, to voice his conclusion.

“Not too late to drop this,” Gojo pipes up. In another life it might be insulting, how in a rush his words are to back away from the ledge they’re on, but his tone around them is almost shy, the kind of sound Nanami would have paid some money to hear as a teenager. The unflappable Gojo Satoru firmly shaken. 

And he should be, should be rattled down to his infallible bones, because Gojo Satoru is wrong. Nanami would rather rip his own tongue out than admit it any way where it could be perceived that he thinks it, but it doesn’t happen often. Some side effect of the Six Eyes, Nanami has to guess, the way he has a preternatural sense for what he should say and when, for good or ill. But now he’s stepped in it, because it is too late, has been since he put his hand on Nanami’s shoulder or since he stood between Nanami and the world or since he stuck up for him against Yaga or since he insinuated himself into Nanami’s conversation with Ieiri or since Nanami had called him when he’d wanted to be welcomed back into sorcery. Since even before that, maybe, but it isn’t worth looking. All Nanami knows now is that he doesn’t want to drop this, doesn’t want to walk away from it.

Can’t, maybe. Won’t. Any number of negative contractions. It’s unbelievable, unacceptable, but this is the only possible answer.

“But it isn’t that you feel nothing. Yaga-san’s known me since I was a child and even he was affected.”

“That’s an awfully innocent way of looking at things.” Gojo is deflecting, he knows, but it’s still disgusting; Nanami levels a glare his way, and he actually looks slightly, properly, cowed about it. “Maybe he’s carrying a torch.”

“He isn’t,” says Nanami. Gojo shouldn’t have pushed it; he’s standing now, on almost equal footing, level with Gojo’s refrigerator. It’s too small for a grown man’s home. It makes Nanami bold. “You are.”

He can see the tipping point, the moment where Gojo decides the shallow obfuscation is no longer worth whatever it’s been costing him. Nanami doesn’t know, doesn’t want to know except in that dark, selfish part of him that’s been wondering what this all is for since he returned to this life. “Can you blame me?” Gojo asks. He holds himself, maybe deliberately, clear of Nanami’s space. “You called me when you decided to come back, Nanami. Do you know how it felt to have my bratty little kouhai need me?”

The audacity of Gojo calling anyone bratty isn’t lost on Nanami, but he moves past it. “Everyone needs you, Gojo-san.”

“That’s what makes it so hard.” Gojo’s hands, busy before with the washing of their dishes, slide into the pockets of his pants. They’re fitted, well; Nanami had put a shameful amount of effort into not noticing before. “Filtering it all out for when it matters. Twice ever for you, by the way. I count.”

A half a boy, an impulsive but well-considered phone call. Nanami had thought about Ieiri, had gotten in contact with her for altogether other reasons about the whole thing. But he’s right: he had needed Gojo, like he’d needed him in high school the day Haibara had been cut down. A shame, the higher-ups had called it with the air of looking down the barrel of work left undone. “What do you need, Gojo-san?” Once he says it he can’t believe he hasn’t thought to before in the swirling warmth of Gojo looking after him, in their sudden role reversal — as much as they’ve had roles to play before. Nanami has been, at minimum, the responsible one, getting him to eat vegetables in Hokkaido, holding him down as much as Gojo would allow after Geto defected, a more objective third party outside of their interdependent triad. He doesn’t approach further. With things as they stand, it might be best that neither of them make the first move but Nanami has already sent his volley over the net. Sent a few, really. The feeling makes him bold. 

Gojo runs a hand through that snow cap hair, setting him apart in a world that doesn’t know what really makes him special. But it isn’t like sorcery understands that any better, Nanami thinks. That kind of thing isn’t graded on a scale. “I need… I need to…”

“And you’re usually so articulate,” says Nanami, out of reflex more than anything conscious, but it works — whatever works means. Gojo looks at him, right in the eyes, and then he laughs. A good sound, rolling and reedy all at once, the same way Gojo is strong and slender, deceptively stooped in a way that will keep his chiropractor busy for decades if he’s lucky. 

“I usually am,” he agrees. The smile fades quicker from his face than Nanami’s, where he finds it mirrored without thinking. “I think what I need is for this curse to clear up.”

Of course; it’s too much, maybe too soon. Nanami wouldn’t have any idea. Maybe Gojo had intended to hold this all to himself until the lights burnt out, until one or both of them crossed the finish line of the marathon of sorcery and collapsed onto the mountain of their predecessors waiting, lifeless, for them. And he’s been here, in Gojo’s space, fucking up his plans and his privacy. But Nanami doesn’t think he’s wrong either, that they’ve both been wondering how much, if any, of this can be attributed to the slick skin of residuals he’s wearing as a second, invisible epidermis. This is the rational part of him; the part that hasn’t managed to maintain a romantic relationship for longer than three months in the entirety of his life (looking in the wrong places, the rational part might say before fading away) hardens. Tells him whose fault it is, that the best thing for it is to pull away before his own fingers tear in the trap of Gojo’s hand. 

“Right,” he says. Gojo reads him quickly, Nanami can tell, but maybe because he’s just as dysfunctional he doesn’t stop him from ripping off the bandage, the clotted blood beneath like a flimsy shield. “It should be soon enough, I can spend the night in my own apartment.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I’ll never know whether I’m clear of the curse if I stay here.” With you goes unspoken — and, really, untrue. Gojo wouldn’t lie to him about a change in the residuals or their intensity, but right now, knowing that any feeling Gojo has for him could be influenced, no matter how unlikely, by their presence has Nanami wanting to cut and run, run like he hasn’t since he graduated. Worse than death, this feeling carving out whatever is warm between the halves of his ribcage. 

“I know I asked for it, sort of,” Gojo begins, “but I’ll worry about you. No,” he adds, cutting Nanami’s protest off at the root, “not you. I’m worried about the other inmates when they take you in for beating up some handsy loser on the train.”

Nanami doesn’t smile, but it’s a close thing. “You could bring me home one more time. If it’ll save you the worry.”

He knows it as he says it, doesn’t want it to be just one more time. Wants, instead, something impossible, something vignetted and limned in the soft lighting so present in the kinds of dramas Ieiri makes him watch with her while he writes his post-mission reports. 

“I could,” says Gojo, “but then how will we know?”

He’s smiling. It’s not the right one, not the one Nanami likes. Could even be persuaded to admit he likes it. This one is teeth, no dimple dug into Gojo’s cheek — but only on the right side — and nothing warm about it. It’s a rejection, even if it’s an incomplete one. It’s the way Gojo is; nothing can be simple, nothing but violence and exorcisms and loneliness at the end of the day in the dark of a set of rooms that are barely even his. Geto had been easy, in his own way, and when he’d left it had changed something, changed everything. 

“You’re right.” He’s not, though he is on another level. If they separate they risk breaking this, this barely-born and infinitely incubated thing they’ve both had a hand on without realizing that the curve of it hid the other side. But Nanami is stubborn, and Gojo is what he is, and he’s packed his things within ten minutes. 

When he’s back in the living room, Gojo has both their plates in the sink and himself facing away. He raises a hand without looking back, and Nanami knows at least for now that they’ve both lost. “Thank you,” he says, in lieu of anything else, and finds he means it. 

Gojo doesn’t turn. Nanami goes. 

The train ride is miserable; enclosed, the eyes feel physical, and there a few overconfident people that brush up against him too firmly. Gojo had been right though, damn him, about the sheer unapproachability of Nanami’s hazel glare when he puts his mind to it, leaving him without anything he can’t handle when he finally reaches his stop. There’s only one person who dismounts purposefully at the same station, and Nanami manages to shake her relatively quickly. It seems like the less of a pre-existing connection they have, the easier it is to sever the pull of the curse; this alone makes Nanami’s head spin, more, further. The curse makes people act differently — but Gojo had acted normally, no deviation from his usual, terrible par for the course. The curse intensifies preexisting feelings — but Gojo had wanted him to go, wanted space while the curse resolved itself.

He’s nearly to his front door, locked in his own head, when he hears someone calling his name.

“Nanami-san!” He turns, not liking that something in him had been hoping to hear Gojo’s voice. He already knows it isn’t him; he’d never be so formal, never include the relevant honorific. It’s worse, though, the familiar face that greets him from a few paved squares away. Kusakabe, the second year teacher. Nanami knows, now that he thinks about it, that they live in the same neighborhood. They’ve been doing each other the professional courtesy of not acknowledging it, willfully ignoring each other on happenstance shared commutes. Nanami’s not thought too fondly of him, hypocrite that he is, knowing what he’d said about Itadori’s execution — what he still says. He can’t dodge him now, though, doesn’t think at the very least the residuals still drenching him will have much to go on. This, he thinks, should be an unfraught interaction.

“Hello, Kusakabe-san,” he says, about all the greeting he can muster up. He still has his duffel bag, feeling like a ton, hefted over his shoulder. “I haven’t seen you around here lately.”

“I usually don’t speak up.” Kusakabe’s hands are in the pockets of his ever-present trench coat, unthreatening and unassuming. Nanami relaxes, just a little, that drawn line of tension through the entirety of his body slacking slightly. “Must be your lucky day, getting home so early.”

“Yours too.”

Kusakabe shrugs. “I have better work-life balance.” Less charitable voices, Gojo’s included once in a while shoved into booths with Ieiri, might call it laziness; Nanami can respect the setting of boundaries in theory. The entire flow of his own power revolves around them and their crumbling around him; Kusakabe’s Simple Domain mastery could be called its inverse. His grasping fingers suddenly understand the shape of what he doesn’t like about this interaction: that Kusakabe has a neighborhood to come home to, while Gojo has an empty room on an estate somewhere and an always-temporary place to stay where he works. “Have you eaten yet?”

Nanami’s hackles, so recently dropped, rise to full attention again like a wire tripped. “Yes.” Warm, safe, out of the reach of the world in Gojo Satoru’s kitchen. This couldn’t be more the opposite. “I was on my way home.”

“On your own?” Kusakabe is a little closer now. Nanami’s noticed it as it happened but it hasn’t been worth commenting on or counteracting, or maybe he’s just looking to hold his own because he knows he can, dreads the morning after in the cold light of the workplace even if this is entirely the result of a curse. “Waste of a night off, don’t you think?”

How the hell would Kusakabe know what Nanami’s evening might consist of, whether he’d have company — or whether he’d need it? It’s not rational, Nanami knows it and knows Kusakabe isn’t acting it either, but somehow it irritates him. “I’m not in the habit of looking gift horses in the mouth,” he says. His shoulders square almost without him willing it.

“Then maybe you’d like to get a drink?” They’re impossibly close, now. A passerby wouldn’t look twice, not without the residuals pulling their attention Nanami’s way preternaturally, but the hair at the back of Nanami’s neck is stiff with their proximity. They don’t know each other, not really, but he’s near in the way Ieiri can be, in the way Gojo doesn’t allow himself to be.

Gojo. The strength of the thought of him, so recently separated, washes over Nanami so potently that it almost feels like the tide of his cursed energy, pushing everything else away to make room for itself. If he closes his eyes, it could almost be that he’s there in the street with them, blocks away from Nanami’s apartment.

Nanami blinks, the close of eyes required. An arm slides around his shoulders, familiar — too familiar. Just familiar enough.

“Sorry,” says Gojo’s voice, and Kusakabe looks almost as surprised as Nanami feels, turning in the crook of an arm that’s gone up against gods and monsters. Gojo’s face, just slightly above his at his frustratingly greater height, is only relaxed if you’re not paying attention, and Nanami is. He has been, probably more than anyone else besides Ieiri and she does it for entirely altruistic reasons. “He’s busy tonight.”

“Gojo-san.” He still in the shockwave of Gojo even being here, doesn’t step back from the miasma of energy swirling around them, around Nanami. Pushing back. “You’re far from home.”

Gojo laughs. “It only seems like I live at the school. Because I work so hard, right, Kusakabe-san?”

“So you’ll use honorifics with him,” Nanami grumbles. It’s become ritual enough between them that not to do it would be the stranger option. 

“It’s not about him, Nanami.” Gojo’s close enough to murmur it in his ear, to drop his head and keep it a secret from Kusakabe. He looks ready to start a fight — it might be that, the anticipation of physical violence, raising gooseflesh along the short hairs at the base of Nanami’s neck. But he doubts it. 

“He just told me he was on his way home,” Kusakabe argues, back to his conversation with Nanami. Fool. He lost the second Gojo had decided he wanted whatever this is, the tide rising slow and inexorable within Nanami, within the crook of Gojo’s bony elbow. All of the power, none of the musculature. “That doesn’t sound busy.”

Gojo snickers, a gorgeous sound when it’s turned on someone else. Nanami almost joins him, but — maybe because of the residuals, maybe because of how tall and otherworldly Gojo is even with his perpetually slouching spine — people are starting to stare after all, even in the relatively quiet corner of the neighborhood he’s managed to carve as his own. “You’re telling on yourself, Kusakabe-san.”

That really does make Nanami bite down on the inside of his mouth; Kusakabe stares, blinks. But he recovers. “Maybe I should be the one taking him there.” 

This is remarkably bold. Only the knowledge of the residuals keeps Nanami from a physical reaction, but he lets himself be comforted instead of bothered by the way Gojo’s arm tightens in its bend around him. “I think I can find my way there without your help,” he says instead, and Gojo nods. 

“Come see him about it tomorrow. Or maybe the day after, I’m not sure yet,” adds Gojo. 

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Goodbye, Kusakabe-san,” Nanami says, firm as a closing door. 

He turns and Gojo goes with him. Kusakabe may follow him or he may not, once they make a turn that puts the corner of a building between them. It’s only then that Gojo relaxes, though he doesn’t separate them entirely. 

“I just realized I have no idea where you live,” he says, and it all comes spilling out, laughter only stifled in Nanami’s palm for the sake of the passerby surrounding them, shaking his shoulders under the loose yoke of Gojo’s elbow. 

When he finally recovers, glances at Gojo to confirm he’s still following, still coming home with Nanami, he’s watching him like the moon is caught in his hair. 

The rest of the walk isn’t long; Nanami locks the door behind them with a little more care than usual, still strummed to a thrilling chord by that look.

“Sorry about that,” he says, for no reason whatsoever, putting his keys into their designated bowl on the side table. This is the life he thinks he’s giving up if he lets Gojo say his piece, the path through existence where things have a place. “Kusakabe-san and I don’t—”

“Nice place,” interrupts Gojo, and when Nanami turns Gojo looks like those keys in their bowl: in his place, standing in Nanami’s apartment, shoes already kicked haphazardly from his feet. It doesn’t take his breath away, nothing so dramatic, but something long-held in Nanami’s chest feels like it uncurls. “And you should know I never pass up a chance to annoy Kusakabe-san.”

That much is certainly true. “Should I bother asking what brings you here, Gojo-san?”

Gojo shrugs, sticks his hands in his pockets. The blindfold isn’t making this easy, nor is the darkness of the apartment. Without any lights on, Gojo is backlit by the streaming glow of the city through the window. “When you left, earlier,” he explains, and though his tone drips with a studied nonchalance Nanami can hear a decidedly weak point in his voice, “I felt exactly the same. I waited the length of your train ride.”

“How do you know how long—”

“You need to just start assuming that if something is in your file with Yaga, I know it. Most of us aren’t innocent little rule-followers like you, Nanami.”

“Most of us also aren’t as obsessed with breaking and—”

“Let me finish.” Nanami knows, but he also wants to hear Gojo say it. “I knew it wouldn’t but still. It didn’t change.”

“What didn’t change?” This is mean, a little. Maybe greedy is a better word, but in a career like this Nanami will take what he can get, and with both hands. 

Gojo knows it, and glares. He’s old enough and expressive enough to get a little wrinkle between his brows when he does it. It’s endearing. “You already know.”

“Maybe I don’t.”

“Even you aren’t that stupid.”

“Now I definitely don’t.”

“How I feel,” says Gojo, like it’s been forced from him. Nanami thinks that might be all he’ll get but then he continues, quieter, “About you.”

It isn’t like it hasn’t been unexpected, not with the curse and its impact, not with the warmth and rightness being in Gojo’s space the last thirty-six hours — damn him — but it still knocks the breath from Nanami’s lungs, leaches the strength from his knees until he almost thinks they’ll buckle beneath him. They don’t, thankfully, standing in his own entryway like a statue, stunned. 

Gojo’s impatience is easy to stir. He frowns again, that same fold returning to his forehead, the ridge pointing up to that scar buried in his hairline. “Say something,” he demands, for he is demanding. “This isn’t easy for me, you know.”

“I know.” The stirring of Gojo’s heart does not come lightly, Nanami understands, but it is predictable, to an extent. Nanami hadn’t settled on what he could offer a man who has everything and can take anything he doesn’t have but in this moment it crystallizes. Because Nanami does know, he’s known Gojo an interminable stretch of years, seen him at his lowest and watched him bounce back, even from the distance imposed by the sales floor. “Satoru.”

The wrinkle disappears, an entirely different kind of expression sweeping over Gojo’s face, wind across the icy surface of a lake. “That’s just not fair,” he says. “You haven’t called me that since high school.”

“I wasn’t as polite back then.”

“Thank goodness.” Gojo takes a step closer, just the one. He’s farther away than anyone on the train had been, than the club owner, than Kusakabe, and it suddenly doesn’t make sense. Nanami mirrors him; the opening to the apartment is small enough that between the two of them it’s significant. “Now say it back.”

“You haven’t said anything.”

“You know what I mean.” Another movement, closing the distance one sentence at a time, and the corner of Gojo’s mouth twitches in a way that’s hard to read. “Come on, Nanami, don’t keep me in suspense.”

It’s so surprising, the thought that that’s where Gojo is — in suspense, like there could be any doubt, like anyone could resist his inexorable pull — that it brings Nanami right into his space, pulled like the red thread of fate. They don’t touch, not quite, not yet, but this is the only person since the exorcism in the club that Nanami doesn’t dread the hands of. In his apartment, Gojo shines. “Only you could be this oblivious.”

“You think I’m—” But Nanami is on him before he can finish his sentence.

xx

Gojo is persuasive, insists on staying over at Nanami’s apartment two full nights before he agrees to let him back out in public, coaxing him with the unfurling talents of his mouth and hands, the way his hips move when he doesn’t think he’s performing for anyone, the way his vertebrae rise like fins breaching water against the skin of his back. And Nanami is weak to him, all the blockage of the years swept away in the deluge of Gojo finally, childishly, admitting to wanting him back. It’s absurd, it’s unthinkable, it’s a situation Nanami wouldn’t have had the courage to imagine himself in without the thorough and conscientious encouragement of Gojo himself before all this mess began. 

But, he realizes on the dawn of the second morning he wakes to Gojo in his bed, watching him with dreamy eyes, he should have. He’s known longer and better than anyone — better even maybe than Ieiri for all she doesn’t see him in the infirmary — that he’s just a man, not above the pitfalls of their species. Emotion, pheromones. 

Gojo tells him, with a kind of put-upon honesty that speaks of a well-fought desire to lie and keep Nanami to himself longer, that he can’t see the residuals anymore. They’ve dissipated, maybe in part helped along by the absence of anyone else’s attention, just one dedicated fan left to linger in his presence, motivated by something deeper than celebrity. 

They take the train, Nanami’s usual route and dressed back in his usual suit which Gojo does not complain about, as a litmus test which he passes with flying colors. Gojo gets the stares, the attention, wields his height without thinking and doesn’t acknowledge any of the eyes on him, talking to Nanami and using his free hand to gesture carelessly and all is right with the world. 

Gojo’s excitement grows, palpably, the closer they get to the infirmary on the expectedly empty grounds, glee in his stretching grin, hands somehow jaunty where they’re pushed into his pockets.

“You’re cruel,” says Nanami, reproachful now that he’s had a few days to sand the rosy tint from his eyes. It feels good, the way things are completely different and somehow also totally unchanged. Natural, in a life defined so often by the paranormal.

“Who, me? Never.” Somewhere in a visual dictionary, the smile Gojo wears is resting beneath the word schadenfreude. “I just don’t get to see Shoko in her working environment these days. What with being invulnerable and all. You know.”

“You didn’t look especially invulnerable last night,” Nanami argues. And he hadn’t this morning either before his uniform had covered up the bruises Nanami had smeared him with.

“You’re lippy,” says Gojo. He doesn’t look unhappy about it, cocking his head Nanami’s way. 

Zen’in Maki waves to them from across the hall — friendlier to Nanami than to Gojo, which is relatively par for the course — as she passes and, thankfully, doesn’t do anything else, continuing along toward class or a mission or whatever waits for her. Nanami hadn’t realized he’d been tense, but he feels some of it leave the line of his shoulders as she disappears around a corner behind them.

“You’d never have let anything happen,” Gojo pipes up, reassuring. This is all so new that it’s easy to forget they’ve known each other for over a decade, drifting closer and further apart and circling back around all over again. “No matter how much I’m sure half the students here might want it to.”

“You’re disgusting,” says Nanami, but then Gojo is lifting a hand from his pocket to tap on the door of the infirmary. Unlike him not to just barge in; he must really want the full effect.

“Come in!” Ieiri’s voice sounds slightly muffled, like she’s searching for something in a drawer, which is exactly what she’s doing when Nanami, reluctantly, follows Gojo into the room. Her expression is a journey as she looks up at them, aggravation not quite concealing her fondness when she sets eyes on Gojo followed immediately and jarring by a sweep of red over her cheeks when she sees Nanami.

“Oh, shit,” she says, and goes back to her drawer with a little more vigor than might strictly be necessary for the task. 

“Don’t be shy, Shoko.” Gojo couldn’t look more pleased if he tried, the cat with the cream, the canary free of the coal mine. “You two get along so famously!”

“I’m sorry, Nanami-san,” she mutters, which is about as incriminating as it gets. Gojo grins like he can read her thoughts, her memory of the last time they’d seen each other. Though, Nanami supposes, being there in the aftermath had probably presented a wealth of context clues. “I was inappropriate.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” he protests, but Gojo’s already got his elbows planted on her desk, leaning over and — Nanami’s sure purposefully — giving him quite the view of his ass. Nothing to write home about, and yet somehow Nanami does catch himself looking a bit too long. 

“I’m serious,” she argues, but Gojo cuts in before she can finish her thought.

“I’d like to know what’s so important that Shoko has to apologize over it.”

She’s back out of the filing cabinet, glaring now, eyes solely on Gojo. “As usual, it’s none of your business.”

“All your business is my business.”

“That has never been true, as much as you might have wanted it to be. And, as it happens, Nanami’s business is especially none of your business.”

“Hmm,” says Gojo, thoughtfully, and though he’s in his usual blindfold Nanami thinks he feels his eyes on him. Asking for something, maybe, and Nanami isn’t inured enough yet to being the one to give the most powerful man on earth permission to turn him down. “It may be, these days.”

Ieiri’s head shoots up, forgetting her embarrassment, locking gazes with Nanami just for a second before his mind catches up again and realizes what he’s admitting to by allowing this to happen, suddenly finding something out the window fascinating. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Nanami and I have been bonding a little during his break from work,” Gojo says, lilting. “We’re probably almost as close as you two now.”

“I cannot believe you.”

“Is he serious?” Ieiri asks, disbelieving. “You’ve been gone for two days.”

“And three nights,” adds Gojo, salaciously.

“I really cannot believe you.”

“And I thought I should be embarrassed,” says Ieiri. 

“Why is that?” asks Gojo, and within seconds they’re arguing back and forth intensely enough that Nanami manages to back out of the infirmary without either of them noticing.

His trip to Yaga’s office is thankfully uneventful, and when he knocks on the door he’s actually met with the principal present and available.

“Ah, Nanami-san,” Yaga says, with a nonchalance that’s only slightly unbelievable, “welcome back. I trust the situation from the nightclub has been resolved.”

And with only the smallest amount of fantasizing about going back to the owner and addressing his behavior under the influence of the residuals. “So it would seem. I’m ready to return to work.”

“And not a moment too soon.” Though his sunglasses aren’t as obscuring as Gojo’s, Nanami has more trouble interpreting what’s going on behind them — or less interest in trying to, whichever — but he suspects it’s an eye roll that ought to be included in history books. “Don’t get me started on Satoru taking off too. I’ve been paying Mei an astronomical rate for the last two days.”

Nanami doesn’t want to think about it. “Happy to help.”

“Happy to close my checkbook,” agrees Yaga. “We haven’t had news on the patch-face curse lately, but there’s something odd happening in Kitakoiwa. Something about a Tenso shrine with more activity than usual.”

“I can look into it.” The day is still young; depending on the difficulty of the mission, the cleverness of the curse, he may not even need to work any overtime. “Any other information?”

“Not as of yet. But the reports have been fairly minor so I don’t anticipate it will be difficult. Consider it a welcome back to the field.”

“I haven’t been gone that long.”

“But it feels like it.” Yaga’s eye contact turns meaningful, in what feels like the denouement of the conversation. “You’re a good sorcerer, Nanami-san. There are a number of things you’ll do that others won’t.”

Nanami tries not to roll his eyes, and with the memory of Yaga’s behavior from under the shadow of the residuals it’s not entirely clear how successful at it he is. The respect will rebuild, he’s sure. “I hope this doesn’t mean I’m going out to another problematic site.”

“Come on,” Yaga says, “it’s a shrine. You’ve seen dozens of those.”

“Let’s both hope it’s one of the simple ones.” His leave-taking is routine, a file changing hands with Nitta in the hallway where she’s cheerful and, above all, normal. She’s going to bring the car around, giving Nanami a few minutes to read at least the cover page before he’s off to a life that’s not his own again.

“I’m off to my tongue-lashing.” Nanami doesn’t need to look up; even without the immersion in it the last few days, Gojo’s voice is familiar. Comforting, at times, when it’s not irritating. “How was he?”

“Magnanimous.” Gojo bends to put his face in Nanami’s line of sight where it’s focused on the casefile. It’s more fun not to give into him, so Nanami doesn’t. “That said, you weren’t affected by the curse in the club. He may not offer you the same generosity.”

“He owes me,” Gojo dismisses, vaguely, waving a hand. “I’ll be fine. And,” he adds, “you’d better be too. I don’t want to see everyone looking at you again like that. Maybe you could let yourself be hit with a curse that makes people treat you like a nun.”

“And,” says Nanami, satisfied and shutting the file, “what would happen to you in such a tragic situation?”

Gojo grins. This is a new one between them, one that shows his canine sharp and shining against the sheen of his lip, and Nanami isn’t tired of it yet. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” he says. “You in that outfit… easiest curse to exorcise in history.”

“I will,” Nanami says, and Gojo blinks behind that blindfold. It is easier to tell than he’d thought, now that he’s allowed to look as much as he can get away with. “Be fine. As always.”

“As always.” His tone is layered, but both of them know to drop it, for now, a can kicked perennially down a never-ending road. Almost its own promise. “See you tonight?”

Nanami feels his eyes widen. This had been the part he’d been unsure about, somehow, the now what. Ieiri would be laughing at him if she were here to see it, a grown man with his pulse thrumming, that this would be the stumbling block. “If you’d like?”

It’s more of a question than he’d intended; for a moment, that part of him that responded so profoundly to Gojo touching him at his kitchen table worries that he’s hurt him, offered some sort of rejection he’d never meant. But that tooth is still glinting in Gojo’s mouth when he speaks. “I don’t know if you know how creative those residuals made me,” he says. They’re probably far enough apart still for plausible deniability but it’s going to be a near thing if anyone rounds the corner, if Nitta comes looking for him instead of sending a text. “We’ll need at least a month or two to get through all the ideas that curse gave me, and by then you’ll be crazy enough about me to stick around. Trust me, Nanami, my plans never fail.”

“Never,” Nanami repeats. He thinks he might be smiling.