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Yea, and if some god shall wreck me in the wine-dark deep,
even so I will endure…
For already have I suffered full much,
and much have I toiled in perils of waves and war.
Let this be added to the tale of those.
- The Odyssey
It takes Higuruma most of a beer, gulped down quickly enough that he doesn’t have to consider the taste, to muster up the courage to ask. He’s at least not self-conscious; Nanami is nursing his second now, slower, entirely unaffected and warm in the low light of the small izakaya they’ve crammed themselves into. The plate of yakitori between them is empty, though Nanami is still slowly picking away at the agedashi tofu that had appeared as if out of nowhere.
“What did you want to talk about?” he asks.
Nanami regards him over the rim of his glass, eye intent.
“Straight to business after dinner, I see. Is that a lawyer thing?”
“This is probably better than most dinners I had as a lawyer. Public defenders don’t get schmoozed,” Higuruma tells him. Nanami’s expression doesn’t change, but he radiates a sense of faint pleasure.
“The food here is good, and we’ve had a long day,” he explains. “Not that I frequented it that often at my previous job, I didn’t have the time.”
Previous job. Right. Nanami had only mentioned it in passing, though Ieiri and Gojo both had observed that it was probably why he and Higuruma got along so well – with varying degrees of politeness. Ieiri treats him simultaneously like a coworker and a particularly feral looking stray cat she hasn't yet decided if she wants to adopt; Higuruma is content with giving her time to decide, as both mean she treats him with a modicum of respect. On the other hand, nearly everything out of Gojo’s mouth seems to be mockery, but Higuruma learned quickly to tune it out.
“I’m glad it’s still here,” Higuruma says. Not many places are, after the chaos of the Games.
“The owners were on holiday, out in the countryside. Not really enough people to have justified its own game.” Nanami sounds relieved; Higuruma can empathize. It had taken Itadori, and an entire month after Sukuna’s defeat, the end of the games, and his own near death to process just how bad it had been at the beginning. In the middle, in the end too, but worst of all at the start. Not everyone had been awakened, after all. Not everyone had settled into the new world order with ease – born of apathy, in his case, or of glee in most others.
“It’s nice to know that it wasn’t everything. Everyone,” Higuruma admits. “I forget that sometimes.”
“We’re in Tokyo, in the worst of it. It’s easy to forget.” Nanami takes a long sip of his beer; Higuruma follows suit, draining his glass. It takes less than a minute for another one to be set in front of him; the izakaya is quiet, and Nanami is clearly a regular and beloved customer.
Murmured thanks from them both, muted by the faint buzz starting to work its way through Higuruma’s fingertips.
“You never answered the question,” Higuruma prompts after another moment. “About what you wanted to talk about.”
“You’re very direct.”
“I’m not in court, I don’t need to talk circles around anyone.” Higuruma props his chin up on his hand, frowning a little. “Most people dislike that, and it’s not useful for everyday conversation. I only do it out of spite these days.”
Nanami smiles, lopsided from the scars but no less charming in its rarity. It nearly reaches his eyes.
“But it’s not a bad skill to keep sharp, so maybe I should thank Gojo sometime,” Higuruma continues.
Nanami gratifies him with an answer, saying, “It’ll be useful if you ever have to deal with any of the clans. The higher ups are all gone now and the Zen’in will be relatively reasonable, but there’s still plenty of traditionalists around.”
“I wasn’t under the impression that they were all that involved. They’re never at the school, anyway.”
“You aren’t wrong. I’ve had to attend meetings with them only a handful of times, but I’m not a special grade.”
Higuruma grimaces despite himself.
He’s seen enough corruption; he wasn’t naive enough to assume it was absent from the jujutsu world, but he’s lost his stomach for tolerating it. Dramatically so.
“Gojo will deal with the worst of it,” Nanami says with a strange, unshakeable confidence. The same that everyone has when talking about the Strongest – or, the man who once was –, a feeling that Higuruma can understand, conceptually, if not empathize with.
Gojo is Gojo is Gojo; a man, not an institution. Higuruma has seen the worst of both. Blind faith is a dangerous thing, but then, it’s deserved to everyone who’s known him for years.
It’s strange to hear it from Nanami, though, who seems annoyed by the man more often than not.
“He likes that sort of game,” Nanami adds. “He’ll like it more now that they know there’s teeth behind his threats.”
“You don’t like them much, do you.”
“Is it that obvious?”
Higuruma merely raises an eyebrow.
“No, I don’t.” Nanami’s gaze flicks down to his beer. “They disgust me. They did when I was sixteen, and they do now. They always will.”
As an afterthought, he adds, “Technically speaking, they’re gone now, but they’ll be replaced. I made my peace with having to wait when I came back, though. I always knew it would take a long, long time for jujutsu society to change.”
Higuruma reads between the lines easily, despite the slow drag to his thoughts: Nanami hadn’t thought this was a change that he’d live to see.
“You’re still here, though. Despite all that.”
“You say that like it's a problem.”
“It's – no, I get it. You want to help people, or you think you can change the system. One out of two isn't bad. My last job, I did neither.”
“I was never going to be the one to change things,” Nanami says quietly. “Leave that to the kids. Itadori already has.”
“But you left and came back,” Higuruma presses. This is what he can’t understand – the horrors of the mundane world, the endless futility of perfect attendance and hours devoted to a job that gave nothing in return, all that he can see why someone would leave. He’s almost envious of Nanami for leaving without bloodshed, given how much worse work as a salaryman was than his own previous employment. But to Nanami, jujutsu is equally bad, worse, even given what it takes. To come back to that – Higuruma can’t fathom it.
“Itadori wasn't here then. You didn't know what the students would be like.”
“The difference between your last job and mine, Higuruma-san, was that at least you tried to help. Mine just hurt, over and over. Me and everyone involved got stuck in that web of misery. I – you gave me plenty to think about earlier, but when I try and picture retiring, leaving, I think about going back to that. And I can't. I won't.”
Nanami draws a gloved finger through the condensation on the table.
“So here I am for the time being.”
That's not a real argument, and Higuruma is briefly stumped trying to counter it.
He can’t picture going back either. The repetition, the misery, the stagnation. Good in the abstract rather than the tangible, results that he could aspire to but never reach.
What else is there“Another round,” he says decisively, and bravely, for a man who rolled off the wrong side of thirty and has the hangovers to match. But it feels like the right thing to do, and so he gestures for more, asks for sake this time though he can't hold it any better than he can whisky, or vodka.
It comes, burns smoothly on the way down and blossoms warmth into his stomach, the kind that feels a lot like courage.
He knows it’s a mistake, of course, but he’s at peace with that. The worst things that have happened to him have been due to his own deliberate choices. Nanami drinks slower, his mood pensive but not poor. He looks like he has something to say. Higuruma’s head buzzes – not unpleasantly, more like the gentle crinkle of wrapping paper than a swarm of bees.
Nanami looks nice like this, he thinks into the silence, unwilling to break it and happy to observe. His scars are still noticeable in the low lighting though hardly as startling as they were the first time Higuruma had seen them.
He’d never seen someone that hurt before; all his own battles had been barely that, ended with executions and him comfortable in the courtroom, violence prohibited. Now, they’re as much Nanami as the careful part of his hair, the green-tinted lenses and the gold frames that he sometimes swaps them out for which feel like a privilege to see.
There’s a flush on his cheeks now, though faint, nothing like the heat Higuruma feels rushing to his own. The alcohol is an easy culprit; Higuruma’s almost envious of how Nanami seems unaffected. The only people with lower tolerances than Higuruma at the school are Ijichi and, apparently, Gojo, but Higuruma is willing to bet that neither of them get hangovers as badly as he does.
“You’re a bit of a lightweight,” Nanami observes. He sounds amused now, and Higuruma feels a thrill at having done something right, though he’s not done anything at all.
“Yes,” he admits. He’s long lost the shame that goes with it.
“That’s a surprise.”
Higuruma shrugs. “Everyone finds out eventually. Shimizu – ah, she was my paralegal – ran interference a lot on the rare occasion we had enough morale and time for a work party. I thought she had the highest tolerance of anyone I’d met, until it turned out she’d just empty her drinks in the nearest plant.”
Nanami snorts, then looks a little startled at himself. Maybe he’s more affected than he’d like to let on, but Higuruma is grateful for the mood lightening, for the effort Nanami seems to be putting into it.
“I can empathise, though I didn’t have to resort to that too often. It’d be a waste of good liquor, and it was on the company’s dime, not mine.” Even years later, his voice carries the echo of vindictive pleasure that can come only from a dissatisfied office worker. It’s more endearing on Nanami than he anticipated; Higuruma is used to barely swallowing his bitter distaste.
“The school is generous, though. More than I expected.” Generous is a strong word, but there’s more camaraderie than Higuruma expected, and he’s certainly well-compensated for his efforts. First grade, just like Nanami. It comes with more money than he even knows what to do with. He has no idea how Mei Mei can even conceive of asking for more – let alone getting it.
“Even weighed up against what it asks of you?”
Those words are heavy coming from Nanami.
Higuruma’s eyes are drawn to his scars for a moment, and he knows from the minute shift of Nanami’s expression that it’s an obvious change.
“I’m not trying to turn myself into a cautionary tale.”
“People look up to you too much for that to happen,”
Higuruma answers immediately.
“People look up to Gojo-san, too.”
Silence weighs heavily. Higuruma’s never been burdened with such regard, and is grateful for it.
“Not in the same way. You’re –,” he has to break off here, unsure of how to categorize the admiration that Nanami kindles in almost everyone who looks at him. Higuruma, after all, is aware that he feels the draw of attraction more than perhaps anything else. But there’s still something to be said for the purer adoration Itadori holds for this man, the way his careful hands have shaped people like Yuuji and Ino and reminded them of the small things that matter. And even more to be said for what his coworkers think: Even Kusakabe respects Nanami through the faint tinge of their mutual contempt; Ijichi favors working with him above almost anyone else; Mei Mei acknowledges his reliability; Ieiri counts him as her second-closest friend, behind Gojo and far less grudgingly.
“You make people want to be better,” he finishes, lame. “That’s rare to find in any profession, don’t you think?”
“Trust me, I wasn’t particularly inspiring in my old job,” Nanami answers, apparently content to let this go, a wry smile pulling at one corner of his mouth. “But nothing good could have survived there for long.”
You obviously did, Higuruma thinks but doesn’t say, though it’s a near thing. But he didn’t know Nanami then, couldn’t say whether he was good or not. Perhaps wants to avoid making that kind of pronouncement for the foreseeable future.
“Nothing in mine either,” he admits instead. “There – well, lawyers don’t have a good reputation anyway. But I don’t mean the guys who’d have been out for nice drinks and food every week to meet clients.”
“The finance ones, I’m familiar with them,” Nanami agrees. His eyebrow conveys disdain eloquently.
“Ha! Yes. They’re the worst. And – almost everyone, everyone I went to law school with wanted to be like them. With the fancy cars and the penthouse apartments and the shiny watches. They were in it for the money, I guess it made sense that they’d want to go for clients who were also in it for the money.” He’s getting distracted now, he knows, but the bile of it still stings, its crawl up his throat familiar and acidic. “But a couple of us were in it to do something good, y’know? To change the world. Or to just make a difference in people’s lives. We were close in school, closer during internships and when we were junior associates. But one by one, Nanami, I think I saw them start to falter. We’d meet for dinner and it would be just all complaints, and they weren’t even light-hearted. And then people started to quit. And they’d be happier. Ogata-san stuck it out the longest, but last I heard, he moved to Sapporo to help with the family business. Dairy farming, I think.”
He swallows.
“And then it was just me, and I cared, but I was angry more than I cared, if that makes sense. I wasn’t going to quit, someone still had to stay and fight and I always thought, okay, I didn’t save the last person, but I can do something for this person. And there wasn’t much left of me at the end,” he finishes softly. “I, uh. That was more than I wanted to say. But it’s how I got here.”
His breathing is ragged, and he downs the rest of his drink to soothe it. The alcohol only sets the knot in his chest on fire, but it is at least a distraction.
“I understand what you mean,” Nanami answers, equally quiet. “I left the jujutsu world to find out that the mundane one was just as bad, only in a different way. Everywhere, people get chewed up and spit out. Like I said. This is just the place where I, personally, can do the most good. Make people better, maybe, like you said, though I never thought much of becoming a teacher.”
He’d be good at it, based on Yuuji and Ino, but Higuruma thinks that maybe Nanami is best when focusing on one person. He’d sacrifice himself for his students in a way that Gojo can’t, and Kusakabe won’t.
“Teaching might not be the best solution,” is all he says. “I’m lucky that they won’t ask me to.”
“It’s good to have another special grade around,” Nanami answers, a non-sequitur.
“Hm? How’s that?”
“Tskumo was – unreliable, although we got along. She didn’t want to do anything that didn’t interest her. A lot of us are like that.”
“Mei Mei won’t even get out of bed for less than five hundred thousand.” Higuruma echoes a common refrain from Ieiri, and elicits a smile from Nanami.
“Exactly. Gojo is unpredictable, and Okkotsu-kun is still young, although things are better for him than they were for other special grades his age.” Higuruma struggles to find the context for that, though he knows the bare bones of Gojo’s past and Geto Suguru’s presence, the ghost of the man he could’ve been and the boy he was haunting the halls of Jujutsu Tech.
“You’re saying it’s a good thing I’m here, then,” Higuruma decides. The flush of pleasure at that is entirely out of his control; the swing of emotions unfamiliar to him, and not something he can wholly blame on the liquor. But it eases the guilt, the flayed-open, raw feeling of remembering.
“It is.” Nanami has this way of saying things like they’re irrefutable truths. Higuruma, always used to subjectivity disguised by clever wordplay, should find this grating. He doesn’t. “And despite what I say, and what I think, there are some people who jujutsu suits well.”
“Like Gojo?”
“Gojo doesn’t count; he was born to it.” Nanami stares at his drink for a moment. “Hakari Kinji is a good example. His technique is strange, but uniquely his, and I don’t think that he’d excel as much at anything else. Even his fight club was sorcery-based, though it catered to non-sorcerers.”
Higuruma tries to remember Hakari, comes up with a smile, a video game console, brightly-dyed hair, and the vague concept that this was someone who’d have beaten him up in high school.
“Huh,” he says. “By that logic, then there’s people completely unsuited to jujutsu.”
“Ieiri-senpai’s technique is unbelievably valuable, but it’s not all she is. She’d have been a great doctor otherwise,” Nanami murmurs. “She enjoyed herself in medical school, although she cheated her way through to finish it quickly. They couldn’t be without her technique for that long, you see, but she wanted to do it properly. Argued, actually, that learning as much as she could about the body, what could be wrong with it, how to fix it, would enhance her technique. I – wasn’t there for that. But she got three years in the end, graduated with her degree, and now she’s here. She says it’s worth it.”
“Do you think it is?” Higuruma wonders whether Ieiri would’ve told him this herself; it feels almost intrusively personal, though perhaps that’s more the insight into her relationship with Nanami than her history.
“I think that she picked her battle carefully,” Nanami answers, which is neither here nor there. “I can’t say that I’ve ever been one to do that. And I think that you’re suited to jujutsu, too, for the same reason I came back. You get to help one person, one at a time. That’s not such a bad thing, is it? Even if you aren’t changing the world.”
“It’s not a reason to stay if you’re going to put yourself in danger,” Higuruma points out. “Gojo says that if my technique was any different, I wouldn’t have survived the Games. I learned how to throw a punch last month.”
Nanami laughs at that, not entirely a happy sound. “Special grades have different rules.”
A world of history behind that sentence, and Higuruma too tipsy to fumble his way through asking about it.
“They shouldn’t. I’m not like Gojo, I just started doing this,” Higuruma mutters, more petulant than he usually is. “I’d never been in a fight in my life before all this. If Sukuna’d punched me, that would be it.”
That had nearly been it without the punch, Higuruma doesn’t say, as they both already know.
“If he punched most people, that would be it for them,” Nanami says reasonably. “You can leave too, if you like. If you’re worried about the danger. I wouldn’t think less of you for it.”
Higuruma thinks about it for a moment: A courtroom, spattered in blood. The world going fuzzy around him, coming to with rust and gore crusted under his fingernails and soaked deep into his shoes. The endless guilty verdicts and despair and rage that’d pushed him over the brink, until he’d taken justice into his own hands and then done it all over again, each time a choice, each time finding enjoyment.
“No,” he says. “I’m not worried about the danger. I’ve survived everything up to this point, I doubt anything after is going to be able to kill me. Uh. Not that something couldn’t, but my diet wasn’t great, and I worked too much, so maybe it’ll be a heart attack or something in a decade. Probably.”
Nanami just makes a noise, noncommittal.
“Special grades have different rules,” he repeats with a shrug.
“Stop saying that! I told you, I barely count.”
“You count enough. Alright. Think about it this way, then. You stepped into this world not knowing anything, and then decided to stay after having seen some of the worst of it. You barely knew how to fight before the Games, but you learn quickly, Higuruma-san, and have a strong sense of justice. You want to do good, both because it’s the right thing to do, and because you want to atone. It’s all very noble,” Nanami tells him frankly. Higuruma flushes with the compliment before its barb catches him, drawing blood.
“But?”
“But I’ve always been aware of my own mortality. Every fight I get into, it’s been a delicate balance of how many hits I can take before I land the final blow. I came back knowing that it’d be the end of me eventually. The end merely didn’t come when I thought it would,” Nanami confesses. “That’s the gap between me and someone like Gojo, and even you. What us normal people struggle with comes naturally. I wouldn’t trade places with him for anything, though.”
“All of this, and you still want to stay?” It comes out more incredulous than he intends, when Nanami has bared wounds in return for Higuruma’s own vulnerability.
“You still haven’t given me a good reason why I shouldn’t. Or a better alternative. What will I do, Higuruma-san? Go back to the life we both left? I would rather stay here and teach, or make myself useful in some small way. There’s no other option for me.”
The arguments he was rehearsing earlier come back, a flurry of paperwork and statements and practiced opening remarks. Unfortunately, Higuruma’s not sure what happens between the percolation in his mind, and the delivery of his mouth, because what he says is quite possibly the worst possible thing for the occasion.
“I can’t stand to see you keep giving when there’s almost nothing left of you,” he blurts out, tongue loosened by alcohol. The courtroom in his head goes deadly silent; the opposing counsel slowly sinks into his chair and puts his head in his hands. This is, of course, Hiromi himself.
“You think there’s almost nothing left of me?” Nanami asks, brow furrowed.
“No. No. I meant –,” he breaks off. “God. That came out wrong. Sorry. I’m – not sober, I can’t hold my liquor. One of the things that was meant to improve with age, but.”
“Practice helps more,” Nanami says dryly. “Go on.”
“You look like Abashiri-san,” Higuruma mutters. The same faintly amused look worn by his least favorite prosecutor now graces Nanami’s face; the kind that meant Abashiri was sitting there, waiting for her opponent to trip right over their own words. Dig their own grave.
“I don’t know who that is.”
“No one important.” It occurs to Higuruma that she’s likely dead now. He slumps lower in his chair. “No, I shouldn’t have said that. No one I liked, then. There. At least that’s honest.”
Higuruma scrubs a hand over his face.
“Sorry. Again. I didn’t mean it like that. Take it from someone who was stuck in that same place, Nanami. You shouldn’t do things just because there’s no other option.”
“I can't look away from this and do nothing,” Nanami counters, almost frightening in how it mirrors the things Higuruma had been agonizing over for years as the hazy benefits of righteous youth gave way under the strain of reality.
“Not nothing. But maybe enough?” He hazards. His tongue is clumsy in his mouth, his words too earnest, unpolished.
“Higuruma-san, I think you're the last person in the world to be telling me about having done enough.” Nanami's words are calculated to cut, and they do, because these are fresh wounds that Higuruma's only been pretending to stitch up by thinking about how improbable his survival is.
“You don't pull any punches, do you,” is what he says. He sounds tired. He feels it hit him like a sledgehammer. He's tired and drunk and had hoped, perhaps, for a different kind of conversation.
“I'm sorry.” Nanami sounds it, too. “I shouldn't have said that.”
“But you did. Lucky it's not that relevant to the facts of the case. Uh. Such as it were.”
“Still.”
“Mm. Well. You don’t have to teach, but – this doesn’t have to be your whole life either, does it?” Higuruma knows, more than most, what it means to put everything to the side for an all-consuming ideal. Nanami isn’t nearly as naive as he was, though maybe half as stubborn, but it’s the same principle.
“It’s unfair to subject someone else to dealing with this,” Nanami replies immediately. He’s answering a question Higuruma hasn’t actually asked; it takes him a moment to cotton on.
“Maybe they wouldn't mind. If you found the right person. If they already understood,” he says, his mouth moving before he can stop it. “Anyway. Whatever. I can't tell you to stay or not to stay, at the end.”
“I think you've made your opinion plenty clear,” is Nanami's dry answer, relatively free of emotion.
“I'm a lawyer. I'm meant to,” Higuruma argues. This gets another faint smile, a balm after the blow. “I just mean….if you stay, it should be on your terms.”
“It already was.”
“No! No. Stop making this hard for me. It shouldn't be at the expense of everything else, or you – putting things off because you think it's not worth it. You said you wanted to go to Malaysia, right? You can still do that. Two weeks! There's planes!” Higuruma gestures as he speaks, aware that it's more luck than coordination that prevents him from knocking over any of the empty glasses littering the tables. “I think. There's still planes, right?”
“We have planes, yes, but booking a flight would be –,” Nanami pauses, then says, “complicated.” Higuruma suspects that what he means is 'irresponsible.'
“Narita is mostly fine, but Haneda…,” Nanami trails off, shaking his head. “Sorry. That isn't the point either, is it.”
“When you can, then. Malaysia, two weeks,” Higuruma says and points right at him. “Promise me, no matter what you decide.”
The trip might not change Nanami's life, and Higuruma thinks he'll reach a decision long before that, but – it sounds like it would make him happy. That's important too.
“Two weeks in Malaysia,” Nanami echoes. Then tips his head back and smiles. “That wasn't where I thought our conversation would end up, you know.”
“No?”
“I thought it'd be more serious.” Unfair, but not necessarily incorrect.
“I'm plenty serious. And I'm serious about this! But I just want you to make sure you're happy, no matter what you do. If you stay, then balance it out with other things. If you go, uh. I don't know. Keep in touch, but do everything you want to do. Like that, you know?”
“I think I get it now. More hedonistic than I'd have expected from you, Higuruma-san.”
“If anyone deserves it, it's you, don't you think?”
Nanami's cheeks flush pinker, and he ducks his head to hide it.
“You're too kind. And the other thing you said? About finding someone? I'll think about that too, Higuruma-san,” Nanami says. There's enough warmth in his voice to seep right down to Higuruma's toes.
“But for now, let's see about getting you home.”