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Maybe Yaga should start giving out punch cards. Take on ten missions, skip your eleventh. Geto wouldn’t be surprised if the cards wound up being made of cursed paper that only withstood nine punches before bursting into flames. No matter the stick, Geto is pretty sure he’d wind up on the short end of it every time. He’s lucky like that.
Geto would kill to skip a mission right about now. He could’ve handled the one he’s just getting back from on a full night’s rest, but this was his third in forty-eight hours, and he hasn’t slept aside from a ten-minute nap on the train between missions one and two. He’s been running on fumes from square one; at this point, there’s hardly anything left in the tank to carry him back to his room.
The Jujutsu High courtyard is drained of all its color as he slogs across it. The air feels thick, too humid to breathe, like trying to walk through hot soup. Geto struggles to keep his eyes open wide enough to watch where he’s going. Still-drying blood is crusted on his temple, but he can’t be bothered to scrub it away.
By the time he notices that his path is about to intersect with Gojo’s, it’s too late to duck out of it. Some writhing thing in his chest has steered him out of Gojo’s line (lines?) of sight these past few months, and it squirms with urgency now. Maybe it’s how greasy his hair’s been getting, or the way he can’t quite keep his spine straight when he’s out of combat. Maybe he just doesn’t have the energy to force a conversation. But their conversations are never forced, and Gojo is the one person on this campus — maybe in the whole world — who doesn’t make Geto feel exhaustion pump through his veins in real time when they speak. It must be something else that floods Geto with the urge to hide behind a shrub and hold his breath until Gojo is gone.
That something-else goes quiet when Gojo takes his next step. He’s been walking in a straight line toward the dorms, his glasses pushed high on the bridge of his nose, taking familiarly lanky strides on familiarly lanky legs. The way he moves on a day-to-day basis could be described as confident at the best of times and swaggering at the worst. In this moment, Geto isn’t quite sure what to call it, but it’s confusing. This is a byproduct of watching as Gojo Satoru, bearer of the Six Eyes, strongest sorcerer this side of the Pacific, trips on a wayward stone.
Gojo rights himself in an instant, strutting along the path as if nothing had happened at all, but Geto saw. Of course he saw. When he speaks, it is without so much as a second of forethought.
“Satoru.”
Gojo turns. His grin is all teeth. “Suguru! It’s been a minute, hasn’t it? You heading out on a mission?”
“No,” Geto says, allowing himself a few steps closer. “I just got back.”
“Same here. Fourth in two days.” Gojo’s nose wrinkles as he says, “One of the curses I just took out reeked like sewage and locker room sweat at the same time, and I swear I can still smell it. Do you think Infinity keeps scents off me? Sound and air can make it through, so probably not, come to think of it. Ugh. I really don’t feel like washing my uniform.”
Geto only stands there as Gojo rambles. He gets the feeling he should have tried to get a word in by now. There’s a joke to be made about Gojo smelling bad. (He never smells bad, but that’d be part of the bit. He smells great, actually. Infuriatingly so.)
If Gojo notices the silence, he doesn’t show it. All he says as he folds his arms is, “So. Catch me up. Kill anything cool lately?”
“Nothing that would thrill you,” Geto says. His head is cocked in consideration; the exhaustion corrals itself into a corner to make space for a theory. Quietly, experimentally, he summons three Fly Heads — one to Gojo’s left, one to his right, and one directly behind him. As expected, Gojo reacts with impossible speed. In the breath before, though, he winces.
It’s barely perceptible; the slightest curl of the shoulders that switches seamlessly into the sweep of a hand that dispatches the curses in half a second flat, a little mote of Red slicing through each of them in quick succession. The curses’ severed bodies drift toward him on a soft breeze, then scatter around him without making contact.
“If you’re testing my reflexes, I promise they’re sharp as ever,” Gojo says. He scratches absently over his chest before sliding his hands into his pockets. “But it’s kinda rude to sneak up on a guy when —”
“Your eyes are bothering you.” It’s a statement, not a question, said in low and unobtrusive tones.
The lazy grin doesn’t waver as Gojo asks, “That obvious, huh?”
To Geto? Absolutely. “How bad is it?”
“Worst it’s been in a while, if I’m being honest.” There are faint traces of weariness woven into Gojo’s words, even as he shrugs in a thoroughly nonchalant manner. “That mission was long as hell, and there were two curses on the roster that those old windbags classified wrong, plus a few packs of low-grade one-offs that ganged up on me all at once. Feels like my brain got chucked into a vat of acid and all my rods and cones got replaced with fire ants.”
Leave it to Gojo to jump headfirst into a fight he had next to no information on. Back in that other lifetime when they’d gone on missions together, reading the briefs had always been Geto’s job.
“Come with me,” Geto says before he can think better of it. He heads for the dorms without checking to see if Gojo is following, because he knows that he is. “Let’s take care of it.”
They fall into step beside each other like it’s been hours since they last saw each other and not weeks. They’re close enough that their knuckles might brush if it weren’t for Infinity. Geto bumps the back of his hand against it once, twice. On the third attempt, he makes contact, but only for a moment before Gojo’s hand is swept away.
“I’m a big kid, you know. Tied my own shoes today and everything.” Gojo swings his arm up and around to prop it on Geto’s shoulder in a way that would be casual to anyone else. “I don’t need a babysitter.”
“Sure you don’t,” Geto says, shifting his weight to let Gojo lean on him a little more heavily.
The tension in Gojo’s body and mind have him wound tight. He gets like this whenever he’s forced to ease the chokehold he keeps on his technique. He never used to, but since Toji — well. Geto’s seen the scars. He can’t fault Gojo for wanting to stay on his guard.
“I guess I can grant you the honor of being my chauffeur,” Gojo says. He points down the hall with grandiosity. “Last door on the left, if you please, and then you can slouch off to wherever you were headed.”
As if Geto is about to leave him alone like this. Laughable, honestly. “Second to last. We’re going to my room.”
Gojo swivels to face him, then sways from the sudden movement. “Why?” he asks once he finds his balance.
“It’s closer.”
“By seven steps.”
“Seven steps you’ll be glad not to take.”
“I could take a thousand steps right now.” Gojo says this with a degree of confidence that would befit a man preparing to climb a mountain. “Wanna race the rest of the way?”
It’s all Geto can do to keep his sigh from turning into an audible groan. He’s so damn tired. He sends a tiny curse scuttling ahead of them down the hall to unlock the door; he can’t be bothered to take out his key. They’re nearly at the threshold when Geto remembers that he was meant to say something back, to make some clever little quip. He breathes in like he’s going to speak, but no words come to mind, so he settles for sliding off his shoes, waiting for Gojo to step out of his, and guiding them both inside.
Gojo slumps against him the instant the door is shut, all the swagger going out of him like blood from a wound. There’s a non-zero chance he’ll drop straight to the floor, either for theatrics or because he’s really that bad off. Not being interested in seeing Gojo crumple into a tangle of limbs, Geto catches him around the middle. He’s moderately successful in masking the way he staggers as surprise rather than difficulty bearing Gojo’s full weight.
“I can’t help but think that this would warrant being babysat,” he says, shifting his own weight to keep his knees from buckling. Geto used to sneak up on Gojo and sweep him off his feet, throwing him over his shoulder or holding him bridal style and spinning till they both got dizzy. It never took any effort at all.
Now, Geto is weak. Now, Infinity stays up. This is the first time Geto has seen it down since… he’s not even sure how long it’s been.
Gojo’s nose must be smushed, the way it’s pressed against Geto’s uniform. He mumbles something into Geto’s shoulder.
“Hm?” Geto asks, trying to look at him and getting a faceful of white hair instead.
Gojo tries again. “You have lost weight.”
It’s only then that he registers Gojo’s hand against his ribcage, long fingers brushing over the jut of the bones through his skin. He shrugs it off. “It’s been busy,” he says lamely. “I’m sure we’ve both been getting a few more steps and a few less meals in than usual.”
“Fewer meals,” Gojo corrects as Geto hefts him onto the bed. He scoots back against the pillows in his designated corner but doesn’t settle into them. “I thought I was the one between the two of us who slacked off with grammar.”
Geto rolls his eyes with his back turned and knows Gojo can sense it. “I wasn’t going to say ‘a few fewer.’ Get yourself situated.” It feels like it’s been years since they’ve done this, but Geto still knows the routine. He grabs an ice pack, fills a glass with water, digs up a bottle of painkillers that help a little on a good day and are useless on a bad one. He perches on the edge of the bed and spends too long organizing everything on the bedside table, like maybe stretching this out will make things feel like they used to when he finally turns around.
“Suguru,” Gojo says. When Geto turns his head, the glasses are gone.
Geto never tires of those eyes. Not just because they’re mystical and otherworldly and whatever the hell else people say, but because they make it infinitely easier to see Gojo in his entirety. Behind a pair of pitch-black glasses, there’s only so much they can express. Raised brows, a twist to the mouth, the set of the jaw, those are all well and good for getting a mood across; uncovered, though, you can see every mischievous glint, every flash of inspiration. Geto can read Gojo perfectly well without looking at him at all, but getting to look into his eyes is something he never takes for granted.
The way they stare him down now, though, sends Geto lurching to his feet.
“You’re not doing yourself any favors, taking those off before I’ve got the curtains drawn.” He takes a single step toward the window; he’s stopped by Gojo’s hand around his wrist. Skin on skin, no barrier between them, grip too tight and hand just barely trembling.
“Suguru,” Gojo says again. His fingers and thumb reach each other with unsettling ease. “Look at me.”
Geto holds still for a count of three, then pries his arm loose. “I will,” he says. “In a minute.” He’s not doing a damned thing Gojo says until the room is dark, for both of their sakes. He tugs the curtains shut, tweaking them at the edges until he’s certain no light is able to slip through the gaps. Then he tweaks them a little more, stealing a few seconds by the window to help him brace for whatever comes next. He returns to the bed with the air of a cat who can tell you’re trying to trap it, ready to launch himself upright again at a momentum’s notice. True to his word, he looks at Gojo, unblinking —
And goes stiff as a board, because Gojo’s hand has shot out to grab his face, tilting his head this way and that, examining him from every angle with those eyes that glitter like shattered glass even without a ray of sun to catch in them.
“You haven’t been sleeping.”
“You’re one to talk,” Geto says, failing to wrestle a derisive chuckle from his voice. “When was the last time you got more than four hours?”
“Deflecting. Come on, you think I can’t see these dark circles?” He prods at one. “You look like hell, Suguru.”
There’s no judgement in Gojo’s gaze, but still, Geto is consumed by the urge to pull away. “I guess guzzling curses day in and day out doesn’t make for the best skincare regimen,” he says to the wall behind Gojo’s head.
“How many?”
“Hm?” Geto says, though he knows perfectly well what he’s being asked. He exhales slowly when Gojo only stares at him. “More than you’d want to know about.”
Gojo’s thumb finds the dried blood by Geto’s hairline. He licks the pad of it and goes in to start scrubbing. “I want to know about all of them.”
Another count of three passes before Geto leans back. “We’d be here all night.”
That perks Gojo up. “Like a sleepover!” he says. “We haven’t had one of those in forever. I can tell you all about my poor, poor head, and you can tell me about your dozens —”
“Hundreds.”
“Huh?”
The sourness Geto has been swallowing down this entire time finally bleeds up his throat and into his words. “Hundreds of curses.”
“You —” Gojo starts, but he’s silenced by an ice pack wrapped in a washcloth being pressed to his forehead.
“Hold that,” Geto says. He makes use of the distraction to catch Gojo’s chest with his other hand and presses him back against the pillows that surround him. “Grill me once you’ve rested.”
“How am I supposed to rest when you’re practically skin and bones?” Gojo says, springing right back up.
“Everybody is skin and bones, Satoru. Some people just have more muscle and fat to cover them up than others.”
“And you’ve hardly got any of either.”
Geto gives him another push, holding his shoulder so he stays down this time. “I brought you here to rest, not to smother me. Stay put.”
“Smothering’s what you do to a fire that’s burning too hot, isn’t it? By the sound of it, you’re burning yourself out.” Another thing you can always leave to Gojo: weirdly poignant, on-the-nose bullshit out of nowhere that makes you feel like he can see right through you.
“We’re all overworking ourselves these days,” Geto says, shaking a few of the painkillers into his palm.
Gojo grasps Geto’s sleeve and jostles him without much effort; Geto tugs it away and replaces it with a glass of water. “If my skull wasn’t full of knives and bees right now, I’d shake you till your brain rattled back into place.”
His brain has been sinking in quicksand for months now. Geto is fairly certain it wouldn’t budge no matter how hard Gojo shook him. He stays quiet as he passes over the pills.
“Hey.” To his credit, Gojo remains lying back. He downs the meds and half the water in a single gulp, then holds the glass up in the air for Geto to take. “Hey.”
“Yes?”
“You still haven’t told me if I got that curse’s stink on me.”
As if the universe would ever allow Gojo Satoru to smell bad. Geto leans a fraction of an inch closer to confirm, and he’s greeted by the same fresh, woody smell that always hangs around him. “You didn’t,” he says, setting the glass aside.
“You sure?” Gojo lifts the neck of his uniform up to his nose like he doesn’t believe it. “That thing really reeked.”
“I am intimately familiar with the way curses smell,” Geto assures him. He’s had the foul stench of them lingering in the back of his throat for weeks — untamed violence, unspeakable pain, fears and disasters and sentient despair. There are plenty he would’ve rather hurled himself off a cliff than consume. He’d done it anyway. Exorcise, absorb. That’s how it goes, how it always goes. How it will go until he drops. “And you know I’ve got a massive sample size to reference.”
Gojo’s laugh is an abandoned house, wind rattling through its broken shutters. He draws in a long breath before he speaks. “You’re downing a thousand curses, I’m picking up on so much cursed energy I don’t have enough neurons to process it all, and neither of us have slept in weeks. What a happy pair we make, huh, Suguru?”
Maybe he’s expecting lighthearted cynicism in response, but Geto’s heart hasn’t been light in months. “Why are we doing this?” he asks, drained and raw.
Gojo’s response is instant. “Because we have to.”
“Because you’re the strongest.” There’s more bitterness behind those words than Geto intends.
“Do I look the strongest to you right now?” Gojo asks, and alright, no, he looks exhausted and in pain, but that doesn’t mean anything.
“One headache doesn’t change the fact that you could vaporize a city block with a flick of your fingers.”
Gojo presses his knuckles to the space between his eyebrows in a fruitless attempt to relieve whatever pressure must be threatening to split his head in two. “Only thanks to the thing that’s giving me the headaches to begin with. God, ‘headache’ doesn’t even start to cover it.”
Gojo had tried to explain it to him before. “You know how rain sounds nice, but a single dripping faucet is, like, the most irritating sound on the planet?” he’d asked.
It had been another bad day. They were holed up in a blanket fort they’d made in the corner of Geto’s room, and Gojo’s head had rested on his bent knees, fingers digging into his temples. “When it gets like this, all the cursed energy that’s usually rain turns into a hundred individual leaky faucets. And the faucets… are stabbing me? Lost the metaphor. Whatever.”
If cursed energy was overwhelming him, wouldn’t it have made more sense for him to be alone? Not that Geto had wanted to leave him, but he wanted Gojo in pain even less. When he’d voiced the question, Gojo’s eyes had flicked up to meet his, even though he should’ve been keeping them closed.
“Stay,” he had said. “You help.”
Geto still doesn’t understand it, but there’s plenty about Gojo he doesn’t understand. If he can help, then he’ll stay.
“I left my glasses off for too long,” Gojo is saying when Geto tunes back in. “Got showy while I was taking out those curses earlier. One of them kept taunting me whenever I missed it, so I made a whole thing out of blowing up its friend, and by the time I got around to killing the first one, my damn head felt ready to explode, too. Yaga always says I’m great at getting in my own way.”
“And everyone else’s.” Geto gestures for Gojo to hold out his hands, and Gojo does, letting him press on the space between forefinger and thumb as they talk. It’s some pressure point thing that Geto’s mother swears by for headache relief. This isn’t a headache she’d ever be able to comprehend, but Geto needs to feel useful right now.
“As long as the mission gets done, the steps that get me out the other end don’t really matter,” Gojo says, wiggling his fingers to gesticulate now that he can’t move his hands. “Break yourself in two, patch yourself up, rinse and repeat. Those might as well be the terms and conditions for being a sorcerer.”
That’s not good enough. It’s all any of them have ever been told, and it’s not good enough. He’ll follow orders until his organs fail, but he’d sooner hack off his own arm than have Gojo do the same. “Don’t answer me as the heir to the Gojo clan,” Geto says. “Answer me as yourself. Why are we doing this? Why are you doing this?”
There’s a beat of silence as Gojo’s head tips just slightly to one side. He pulls one of his hands away to lift the edge of the ice pack and peers up at Geto. His eyes narrow slightly, unfocused, as if he’s searching for an answer somewhere Geto can’t see — then they zero in on his face again, still pensive, still puzzled.
“I’m… doing it for the same reason you are,” he says.
“I don’t have a reason. That’s the problem.”
A shrug. He drops the ice pack. “Then neither do I.”
Maybe Geto would find this amusing if he could remember how to feel anything other than tired. “All of this really is pointless, isn’t it?”
The question hangs in the air between them, dense and dark. Who are they helping? Why is the cost of duty more than any of them are able to pay? It’s pointless. It must be. Geto prepares to say as much; in the same moment, Gojo starts to speak.
“It’s felt like that more often lately.” He sounds like he’s piecing the words together as he goes, almost like this is the first time he’s ever given this a moment’s thought. “But it never did with you. Fighting with you by my side has a point.”
They haven’t fought together since Riko. When Toji split them up that day, he may as well have split them up for good. Gojo had stayed topside to be sliced open and gutted, and Geto had gone below ground to lead a girl to her death. There had been no grand meaning to that mission. It wasn’t worth innocent lives. Maybe together, they could have changed things. But they weren’t together. They hadn’t been together in a very long time.
Gojo scoots his way upright and flicks him in the forehead. “What’s going on in there?” he asks. Geto’s having trouble hearing him over the echoing memory of the gunshot. “Oi. Suguru.” A tap to the temple this time. Bang. Geto flinches; Gojo pulls back.
A blank face that had just been smiling. A torn headband, split clean in two by a bullet. A puddle of blood that pooled toward the vast pit where Tengen lurked, waiting patiently for a sacrifice he didn’t even need.
“Riko died for nothing,” Geto bites out. He means to leave it there, but the words start heaving out of him in waves, a sickness he can’t contain. “I spoke with Tsukumo Yuki before Haibara — before his final mission. She told me Tengen was stable. That he has been this entire time. Riko wasn’t the only Star Plasma Vessel, and the fate of jujutsu as we know it didn’t hang on her delivery. She was hunted down in the name of a burden she shouldn’t have had to bear. The weapon that killed her wasn’t even a cursed tool — it was just a handgun, just a lump of metal, made by monkeys —”
Gojo is holding his face again. Both hands this time, one on each cheek, trying to get Geto to look him in the eyes. “Okay,” he says, “okay. Stop. You never told me this.”
It feels like there’s a curse lodged in Geto’s throat, thick and foul and awful. He swallows hard. It doesn’t help. “It didn’t matter,” he says. “None of it matters. She was raised like a lamb to the slaughter and shot down before she could even make it to the executioner’s block, all to protect people who don’t have a clue they’re being protected in the first place.”
No interjection comes to cut him off; no witty jab steers this conversation back toward calmer waters. So Geto keeps talking. “Some days,” he says, “I just wanna watch it all burn.”
“Then we’ll burn it,” Gojo says, short and simple. He lets his hands drop, but only to Geto’s shoulders.
Geto’s sigh is so damn heavy for someone so young. “You don’t mean that.”
“Sure I do.” The faintest whisper of the emptiness that Gojo had radiated as he held Riko’s corpse begins to creep into his eyes. “Point me in a direction and tell me where to shoot.”
And that sets Geto’s blood boiling even hotter. He’s tired of this, tired of Gojo throwing himself on the rack because he has to, because he’s the strongest, because he’s a weapon first and a person never. “I’m not going to be the next man in the endless chain of command that sets you loose like an attack dog on every cursed spirit in Japan.”
“Suguru.” Gojo’s voice is sharp enough to pierce through the haze in Geto’s mind. “I’d do anything you told me to. You’re the reason I’m anyone at all.”
Geto swallows again. He has no idea what that’s supposed to mean, and he says as much.
“You let me borrow a pencil on the first day of school,” Gojo says. It doesn’t seem particularly relevant. “You didn’t stare at me like I had twelve heads, or go all stiff like you weren’t sure if you should bow at me every time we talked. I was digging around in my bag for a pencil I had no hope in hell of finding, and then you were holding one out to me like it was completely normal.”
“It was normal.” Wasn’t it?
“Not to me. Not back then. I wasn’t anything until the day I met you.” Gojo’s jaw is tense against the relentless pounding in his head, but he presses on. “Everyone before you always looked at me like I was Buddha, or like I was gonna bite them.”
As much as Geto wants to respond in good faith, he has to point something out. “You’ve bitten several people since you started school here.” Nanami once, just to see if he could; Geto more times than he could count, whenever he made the mistake of pointing a finger in Gojo’s face; Haibara on a dare, who had tried to bite him back and nearly broken his teeth on Infinity —
“Only when it was funny!” Gojo says, indignant.
Geto inclines his head faux-sagely.
“You get what I’m saying, don’t you? I could’ve totally lost it in this place without you. You’re like… the reason I’m able to breathe. All the tiptoeing and worship and reverence and whatever, it’s been riding my tail since the day I was born.”
“Non-sorcerers are the reason for all of that.”
“Well, yeah,” Gojo says in that ponderous way of his, “but without them, I probably wouldn’t have been born. Even if I had been, I wouldn’t have met you.”
Geto’s not sure what to say to that. He searches Gojo’s face for any indication that he’s misinterpreting this. “You’d take this miserable world as it is just to have me in your life?”
“Yeah,” Gojo repeats, like it’s the most obvious thing anyone’s ever said.
“Huh.” He brushes past that because trying to process it right now might kill him dead. He lifts the warming ice pack from where it lays discarded on a pillow, averting his gaze when those impossible eyes try to meet his. “You deserve better than this.” Better than me, he doesn’t say.
“If people around here got what they deserve,” Gojo said, sitting up properly now, “the higher ups would be boiling in a soup right now. A soup full of old people.”
“Still clothed, I hope.”
“Ew, obviously.”
Something like a laugh starts to stir in Geto’s chest, but the sensation only reminds him of how massive the hollow space inside him has grown. “You should do us both a favor and rest. Quit trying to talk me off my ledge — I’ll be fine. You’re the one whose head is threatening to explode.”
“It sounds like yours is, too,” Gojo says. “Just in a different way.”
Geto can’t argue with that, but Gojo, it seems, can’t quite dodge the allegations either as a grimace flickers across his face. Geto taps the back of his own head in question; Gojo nods and leans forward. Another pressure point sits right in the spot where spine meets skull — two of them, actually, one on either side — that Geto reaches around to push against. A barely-audible sound of surprise escapes him when Gojo keeps coming closer, only stopping when their foreheads are resting against one another.
The silence is growing too heavy too fast. Too thick with some unspeakable meaning. “Is it — helping?” Geto asks.
“You always help.”
Geto can’t seem to get any more words out, and he can’t nod his head for fear of jostling Gojo’s, so he puts his attention toward applying consistent pressure with his first two fingers. His thumbs are left free to brush over the nape of Gojo’s neck, which he does not, for the record, do intentionally.
They sit like that, still and silent, for longer than either of them could quantify. There’s a high likelihood that their legs will be numb when they finally try to stand. Gojo’s breath is warm on Geto’s face, and the tension is seeping slowly out of him beneath Geto’s palms. It’s with genuine surprise that Geto realizes he’s crying, and he’s not at all sure when that started. He’s even less sure of how to make it stop.
Gojo doesn’t speak. Thank god. Instead, he ducks his head down, burying it once again in Geto’s neck, and wraps his arms tight around Geto’s middle. They loop around him much more easily than they used to. There’s so little of Geto left these days.
There’s a long moment where Geto doesn’t move; where he considers wriggling away and telling Gojo to get some sleep and pretending this didn’t happen at all. In the end, though, his body knows what to do before his mind does.
His arms come up to encircle Gojo’s shoulders; his cheek rests atop Gojo’s head. He holds his breath to keep it from shuddering but gives in within moments, all his threads coming loose, unable to stitch himself back together.
Everything inside him he’s been holding in place with children’s glue and force of will is coming undone all at once. What is he supposed to say? I miss you? I wasn’t anybody till I met you, either? Going back to being a solo act burns like hellfire after being part of your two-man show? That’s not what they do. They stand shoulder-to-shoulder and understand without speaking, and when they can’t be beside each other the space between them yawns infinitely wider.
Space between them isn’t an option anymore. He drags Gojo closer, all but crawling under his skin. Lowering his own head, Geto hooks his chin over Gojo’s shoulder. Their chests are flush; one rises and falls like he’s gasping for a breath that’ll stop him from drowning, and the other moves with quick hitches like a butterfly’s wings as if barely containing a scream.
Geto doesn’t know what he’s crying for. Gojo? His childhood? All the cold bodies on Shoko’s table? He presses his hand to Gojo’s back, right where Toji’s blade went through, and feels his fingers curl against the fabric, digging into the skin beneath.
They haven’t talked about it. Maybe they never will. There’d be nothing to say.
A realization begins to dawn on him as he traces a trembling palm over the faint imprint of the scars. He was never jealous or angry or any other vindictive thing he thought he’d been feeling. He was lonely. He was sad. He still is. Two embarrassingly simple emotions disguising themselves with a dozen different hats, gnawing through his chest for ages until he felt like his heart might fall right out of it.
Gojo’s hand is at the back of Geto’s head now, almost cradling it. If one of them doesn’t speak soon, it’s more than likely Geto will keep unraveling until he can’t put himself back together.
“Solo missions… suck,” Geto says lamely. There’s no better way to put it.
The pause that follows is long enough for Geto to wonder whether he said that out loud. He’s considering repeating himself when Gojo asks, “When’s your next one?”
“Tomorrow,” Geto says, and the mere thought of it makes the black cloud of exhaustion behind his eyes swell ever larger. “Some small town being plagued by cursed spirits. It shouldn’t be too difficult.”
“Oh, no sweat. It’ll be easy.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I’m coming with you.”
The correct response is Really? or You don’t have to or You’re busy enough without needing to help me. The response that comes out of Geto’s mouth is, “And you’re the strongest.”
“Would you stop —? We, dumbass,” Gojo says. He extricates himself from this tangle of a hug they’ve twisted themselves into and sits back to look properly into Geto’s face. He’s got a hand on each of Geto’s shoulders, and he gives them the shake he threatened half an hour ago. “We’re the strongest. The two of us, together. No matter what all those hero worshippers say, I’m the one trying to catch up to you, Suguru. I always have been. How long have you been thinking it’s the other way around?”
The answer is years. Several years.
“I’ve got god powers or whatever, but I was born with ‘em,” Gojo goes on. “Everything you can do, you do because you’re good at it. You’re good at it. I wouldn’t be half as strong as I am without you.”
“Not true,” Geto says, “but I believe that you believe it. God knows why you do.” He gets roughly one and a half syllables into saying something more and is cut off by Gojo twisting around and pushing Geto against the pillows this time.
“Believe what you want.” Gojo fluffs one of the pillows behind him as he speaks. “Maybe my Six Eyes let me see the truth better than you. Ever think about that?” Once he’s satisfied with the setup, he sits back, too, settling his head on the space between Geto’s shoulder and his chest.
It’s without much thought that Geto hooks a leg over Gojo’s and drapes an arm around his back. So much time spent pushed apart, and all it took was a little breakdown to slot them back together. Gojo is still tense; Geto is still tired. The quiet between them is filled to bursting with a billion things that might never be said. Intertwined, though, it’s just a little more bearable.
“We,” Gojo mutters again, the word half muffled by Geto’s chest.
Geto is about to tell him to shut up and sleep already. Then he notices that Gojo’s breaths have evened out. He reaches for the ice pack and settles it over Gojo’s eyes; adjusts it to make sure no light gets through.
And for the first time in a long time, he sleeps without the weight of the world pinning him to the mattress. Now, the only thing holding him down is the warm weight of Gojo pressed close to his side.