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"You're hurt."
They're easy words. Simple. Plain. Quiet.
Nanami doesn't want to look up, doesn't want to admit to the truth of them. Yes, he's hurt. Blood still drips down his face, matting his bangs and sealing his eye shut. He's sure he's left a trail of it the whole way here, drops littered behind him like breadcrumbs on his trudge back to the dorms. His whole body feels disconnected and raw, each sensation confused and searing. Adrenaline still courses heady and thick in his veins, clotted, and the blood slipping past his nose and onto his lips tastes metallic and curdled.
Honestly, Nanami is amazed he's still upright.
Maybe he isn't. Maybe he collapsed on the stairs like he wanted to. Maybe this is all a dream.
Maybe he's already dead. Wouldn't that be a kindness?
Geto stands in the hallway, dressed in baggy sweats with his long dark hair loose and damp around his shoulders. The hour is late, the world outside draped in the deep navy blanket of deepest night where words go hushed and sounds go still, and here Geto is. He's always had a fraught relationship with sleep and tends to wander in the night, taking walks in the dark by himself and returning at sunrise. It's as if he haunts the dorms like a spirit, lonely and worn thin, searching for something even he can not name.
Nanami's exhale is a shudder, caught in his throat like a bone.
Of course it would be Geto.
"The mission did not go exactly according to plan," Nanami says, voice a rasp. He tries to clear his throat and the noise is broken and ill, disjointed like a glass maw left in a shattered window. It hurts. Everything hurts.
Nanami doesn't consider him a lucky man. Luck seems to be a trait inherent in other people, like blue eyes or being left handed. Tonight, though, he knows he had been lucky. There was no other word for it. Fate had dealt a hand in his favor and he walked away from an incorrectly graded curse that did everything in its power to kill him. A last ditch use of his ratio technique had earned him victory, several cracked ribs, and another day above ground.
For all the good that will do him.
"Do they ever?" Geto replies softly, dark eyes unreadable in the dim hallway light.
Nanami blinks with his one eye and Geto is closer now, almost looming before him. Nanami hasn't reached his full height yet, knows he will be taller, but some part of him feels as if Geto will always tower over him. The palm that takes his chin in hand is warm and rough from weapons training and Nanami feels a part of him go liquid at the touch, as if the marrow of his bones melts like butter on hot bread. He stumbles while standing still, hand flying out to try and grab the wall as his knees buckle.
Geto catches him, his arm coming up around his waist. His ribs protest the touch just as much as his skin burns for it. They might be broken, Nanami thinks distantly. He got smacked around by that curse pretty hard.
"It's okay. I've got you," Geto murmurs, holding him close enough to feel his body heat through his torn uniform. That vulpine face looks him over, carefully peeling his hair from his face to look more closely at the damage. His lip twists at the sight. "What happened?"
Nanami just shakes his head, feeling the inside of his skull dip and swim at the movement. He grabs at Geto's forearm, clings to the soft fabric of his hoodie. He says nothing but the sentiment is clear; do not let me go.
With a low hiss, Geto helps Nanami down the hall and into the communal bathroom. There's still steam on the mirrors from his shower, the space humid and wet, and Nanami shivers.
Things move slowly, as if Nanami is an insect on a branch being trapped in sap. He wonders vaguely if he will become amber.
He wonders if he will shatter.
Geto sets him down on a low stool and turns to rummage for supplies, checking over his shoulder to make sure Nanami is still upright and breathing. There is worry on his face, pulling his eyes tight and his lips thin. There is also fury there too, a growing rot taking root in him like black mold.
Nanami thinks he might be the most handsome man he's ever seen in his life.
"Thanks," Geto says with a small huff of a laugh, and Nanami realizes with sudden skin-crawling self awareness that he spoke those words out loud. A first aid kit is dropped on the floor next to him and Geto kneels before him, a wet face cloth in his hand. He eyes Nanami not unkindly, almost fondly. "I think you might have a concussion."
An apology leaves Nanami's mouth in fits and starts, the words unsure and out of order. Geto hushes him with a touch, gently tucking his bangs behind his ear before starting to clean the blood from his face.
He doesn't breathe. He simply forgets how. He sits still as stone as Geto takes care of him, as he watches with hazel eyes that have gone hazy and glassy as the adrenaline leeches from his bloodstream and pain morphs into a weariness so profound it almost feels like death.
"Shoko?" he asks, as Geto tips his head to the side to look more closely at the large laceration below his hairline. Geto's eyebrows draw together, tongue between his teeth as he watches blood well up from the wound and streak down Nanami's graying face.
"The idiot wonder twins snuck out about two hours ago. Shoko wanted to see Utahime. Gojo just wanted to cause trouble, I think." The face cloth is red now and Nanami stares at it with something that might be horror if he could dredge up the energy for it. "Fuck, this is going to need stitches."
Something sick and ugly rears up in Nanami, an unfairness at the situation making tears prick at his eyes. "I'm sorry," he whispers.
And he is. Nanami is sorry the mission went sideways, sorry he wasn't strong enough to come out of the fight unscathed. He's sorry the grade three curse in that temple was more like a grade one, that he exorcised it by the skin of his teeth after half destroying the place. After half being destroyed himself.
He's sorry some quirk of his brain chemistry lets him see curses, that the childhood psychologists were wrong that it was all just in his head, that something profoundly wrong in his bloodstream lets him tap into an energy that feels foreign and bright and acidic. He's sorry his life is strange now, that he's only barely a teenager but he's been spirited away into a world in which he has no control, in which his proficiency with numbers has turned into both super power and liability.
Nanami is sorry that he lived.
Geto regards him and sighs, chin back in his palm as he holds the face cloth against his head to stem the bleeding. "Don't," he says, as if reading every thought. "Look behind me. Over my shoulder. Count the tiles on the wall. Tell me how many there are."
Counting is calming. It always has been. He counted every step back to the dorms tonight, counted every breath in the fight with the curse, counted the seconds of his one life draining away with every drop of blood like sand through an upended hourglass. Part of Nanami wishes he had a poet's soul, that something fanciful and beautiful would bloom in him and fill him with something other than crushing dread for once, but he can't escape what he is no matter how much he desperately wants to.
Nanami does as he is told and he counts out loud, the spiraling halted as he tries to get his eye to focus. Geto listens to him, hears the way his words are muddled and pained. He keeps a hand on Nanami's chin, if only to keep him upright, and digs his phone out of his pocket to text Shoko to hurry back.
"It's going to be okay," Geto says, voice still soft, even though the lie is sharp like a knife between Nanami's aching ribs. They both know eventually it won't be.
Eventually their luck will run out. Tonight was simply not the night that tab came due.
He wants to argue with him, feels the words heavy on his tongue, but he's too hollowed out and hurting to let them loose. It's not going to be okay, he wants to say, wants to scream. One of them will die, one of these days. A mission will go wrong, far too wrong, and one of them will be brought back in pieces to be thrown into the incinerator. Nothing has been okay since he put on this damned school uniform and picked up a blunt blade with so much cursed energy imbued into it that it made his entire arm go numb the first time he wielded it.
They are all dead, Nanami thinks. His counting falters and Geto holds him, wisteria eyes sad.
Ah, maybe another thought that made it past the drawbridge of his teeth.
Nanami is a reasonable man, sensible to a fault. He knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this will be the death of him.
A kiss is placed against his temple, as if Geto could brand a shield against harm into his skin. It's the only thing that has felt good, that has felt clean and pure, all day and something inside of Nanami breaks. The kiss is like morphine. It wicks away his pain, if only for a moment, and lays him flayed and bared at Geto's feet like an exposed, severed nerve made flesh.
Geto doesn't comment on the tears. He doesn't tell Shoko when she arrives later, doesn't tell Gojo when they lay in bed and discuss the ordeal their lower classman had been through.
The next day will dawn and they will all be alive. Gloriously, bewilderingly alive. The night in the bathroom under Geto's care will be a black hole in Nanami's memory, like a film strip bubbled away and burned to ash. It won't be until he is feverishly hot in the chill of the morgue, collapsed in a chair with blood on his hands and part of a body before him that he will even remember a shred of that evening.
Geto will remember everything. He is a sin-eater, a secret keeper, and Nanami's blood spilled so casually will fester inside of him, one cut among many that will become inflamed and infected on his conscious. It will take root in him, it will grow around his bones like ivy on a house, and it will blot out the sun.
It is bitter and consumptive, and it will consume him.
It will consume them all, if they let it.
They hurtle together towards disaster, drenched in blood, tongues bitten and eyes wide, and he feels powerless to stop it.