Work Text:
Part One: Terms and Conditions
The curse was a nasty little thing, as curses went.
Grade-two, shaped like a mass of wet kelp with too many eyes, unremarkable in every way except for the sticky, luminescent spores it released when cornered. When Yuuta had cornered it in the basement of an abandoned Shinjuku bathhouse at eleven-thirty on a Tuesday night, he'd breathed a lungful of the things before he thought to seal his airways with cursed energy.
He'd killed the curse twelve seconds later. He'd started feeling the effects somewhere around the fifteen-second mark.
"That," Gojo said, arriving through the broken doorway with his hands in his pockets and one shoelace still untied, because he'd been pulled off a dinner reservation at a traditional Japanese establishment for this, "is a very unfortunate expression."
"Don't," Yuuta said tightly. He was crouching with his back against the damp tile wall, arms braced on his knees, trying very hard to think about grocery lists and mission reports and whether the heater at Jujutsu High had been repaired yet. Neutral things. Non-inflammatory things.
It was not working.
Gojo crouched across from him, tilted his head. His blindfold was still on. Yuuta had always found that somehow worse. Being looked at without being able to look back, no way to gauge what the man was actually thinking, only having the slight curve of his mouth as visual cues.
"Aphrodisiac-type spore curse," Gojo said pleasantly. "There's a category in the archives. Relatively harmless. Runs its course in four to six hours." A pause. "Or."
"Sensei."
"I’m not your teacher anymore. You can stop calling me that."
"Gojo-san."
"Closer." He was still smiling. It was a very particular smile, the one that meant he was vastly entertained and also absolutely aware of the power he held in a given situation. Yuuta had catalogued it exhaustively over the past four years. He hated how well he knew it. "You have three options. One: I call Shoko, she drives out here at midnight and sedates you while she calls you embarrassing things. Two: you spend the next four to six hours in extreme discomfort. Three—"
"I know what three is."
"Just making sure you've heard all your options."
Yuuta stared at the wet floor between them. His heart was going at an embarrassing rate that had nothing to do with the curse and everything to do with four years of very carefully managed feelings that were right now, at this exact moment, not being managed at all.
"You'd be fine with that," he said neutrally. "Option three."
Gojo's smile shifted into something harder to read. "I'm not asking out of charity, if that's what you're implying."
That...seemed complicated. Yuuta refused to deal with it right now, but he'd filed it away somewhere in his mind.
"Okay," he said.
Afterwards — significantly afterwards, with the spores metabolised and the adrenaline faded and the Shinjuku bathhouse considerably dirtier than it had been — Gojo sat on the edge of what had once been a washing basin and looked at Okkotsu Yuuta with the attention he usually reserved for curses he hadn't categorised yet.
Yuuta was pulling his jacket back on. He'd found it across the room. He did not look up.
"So," Gojo said.
"So," Yuuta echoed, very evenly.
"I'm going to be straightforward with you."
"You always are." A slight pause as he buttoned up his jacket. "Sometimes too much."
"That's a fair criticism." Gojo leaned back on his palms, unhurried, the way he always was when he'd already decided something. "I'm not interested in a relationship. I want to be clear about that. I like my space. I like my privacy. I'm not going to show up at your door with flowers and I'm not going to be particularly soft about things, because it's not — it's not really who I am. I'd be doing you a disservice if I pretended otherwise."
Yuuta finally looked up. In the low emergency lighting his eyes were very dark, shadows carved deep beneath them — he'd been running a three-day solo mission before this, Gojo had checked — and his expression was the careful, composed thing it always was, the one that had replaced the wide-open grief of the sixteen-year-old Gojo had first visited in that containment facility.
"I know who you are," Yuuta said simply.
Something about that landed in an unexpected place. Gojo ignored it.
"If this is something you want to continue," he said, "I'm amenable. But I don't want there to be any misunderstanding about what it is."
A long moment. Then Yuuta buttoned his jacket the rest of the way up and said, "Okay."
"Okay you understand, or okay you agree?"
"Both." He picked up his sword case. "You don't have to explain yourself, Gojo-san. I'm not going to make it difficult."
He said it like he had already thought it through three times. Gojo watched him shoulder the sword case and felt, obscurely, that he'd been neatly and efficiently handled, which almost never happened.
"Dinner," Gojo said, "is on me. Since I'm sure yours got interrupted too."
Yuuta turned at the doorway. A trace of something moved through his expression, too quick to catch.
"You don't have to."
"I know I don't have to. I want to." He slid off the basin. "Stop making everything a negotiation."
They were very good at it, for a while.
The parameters were clean. They were both busy. Grotesquely, constantly busy, in the way only special-grade sorcerers could be busy, where entire weeks vanished into classified missions and cross-regional curse emergencies and the mountains of administrative work that Yaga's replacement kept piling onto anyone who stood still long enough. When their schedules aligned and they were both in Tokyo and neither of them was exhausted or actively bleeding (of course they weren't, they had RCT), Yuuta came to Gojo's apartment.
He never stayed the night.
Not because Gojo asked him not to — he hadn't, technically, specified — but because Yuuta had understood the shape of the agreement well enough not to need the specification. He always had that quality, an uncanny ability to read the room without appearing to. He'd arrive when invited, leave before it got late, and in between he was... present, in a way that was oddly comfortable. Gojo had expected it to feel transactional. It didn't, quite, though he'd have been hard pressed to articulate why.
He told himself it was because they had known each other for a long time.
He told himself a lot of things, that first month.
Part Two: Noticing
It started with the shadows under Yuuta's eyes.
They were always there. They'd been there since Gojo first met him, worn to transparency by grief. But they'd faded a little, over the years. The time overseas had done something good for him; Gojo remembered thinking Yuuta had come back broader, more settled, with self-confidence that had surprised even Gojo, who'd expected it intellectually but felt the reality of it differently.
Now they were back.
Gojo noticed because he was observant. It was professionally relevant to be observant; he would have noticed on anyone. He mentioned it once, offhand, in early October.
"You look terrible."
Yuuta, who was pulling on his shoes at the entryway at eleven-fifteen PM, paused. "Thank you."
"When did you last sleep?"
A brief calculation. "Define sleep."
"More than four hours in a bed, not a car or a—"
"Then Thursday."
It was Sunday. Gojo leaned in the hallway doorway and looked at him. "That's bad even for you."
"I had a long mission in Aomori." He got the second shoe on, straightened. "It's fine. I'll sleep tomorrow."
"What do you have tomorrow?"
"...A morning briefing, and then a grade-one in—"
"That's not sleeping."
"I know." He picked up the sword case with the fluid ease of long habit, and turned. Under the hallway light the hollows of his face were pronounced; he'd gotten thinner, Gojo realised. Not alarmingly, not mission-compromisingly, but... noticeably. The line of his jaw. The peek of collarbones above the collar of his shirt, before his white jacket covered everything up.
Gojo wanted, with a sudden and bewildering specificity, to make him eat something.
"Stay," he said.
Yuuta looked at him.
"Sleep here. You're in no state to commute and you'll just work when you get back to yours." He said it briskly, practically, the way he said most things. "The couch pulls out."
Another pause. Then: "You said—"
"I said I value my privacy, which I do. I didn't say you couldn't sleep on my couch when you look like a really sad ghost." He pushed off the doorframe. "I'll get sheets."
"Gojo-san." There was something in Yuuta's voice that Gojo couldn't quite name. "You don't have to."
"You need to stop saying that."
He got the sheets. Yuuta slept on the pull-out couch. Gojo lay in his own bed and stared at the ceiling and wondered, with some detachment, when he had started noticing when Yuuta needed to eat.
He had no useful answer.
He started paying attention in a way that disturbed him mildly and fascinated him more.
Yuuta ate like someone who'd learned to regard meals as fuel rather than enjoyment: quickly, efficiently, in whatever quantities were available, with the calm indifference of a man who'd spent four years treating his body as a precision instrument. He never complained. He didn't seem to notice when he skipped lunch. He just... ran on less than he should have, and performed at full capacity regardless, which was impressive and also, Gojo found, increasingly irritating.
It was not, he told himself, any of his business.
He invited Yuuta to lunch twice that month. Once at a ramen place in Nakameguro that Yuuta ate with the focused appreciation of a man who had been running on convenience store onigiri for three days (which he had; Gojo had asked, and then wished he hadn't). Once at a katsu place near the Jujutsu HQ annex, which Yuuta ate with equal focus and then looked faintly alarmed when Gojo ordered a second serving for him.
"I'm not that hungry—"
"You're eating it."
Yuuta ate it.
There was an evening in November, mission-adjacent, when Yuuta had come over with a half-healed cut along his jaw and sat at Gojo's kitchen counter while Gojo, who had not intended to be in his kitchen making tea at nine PM, made tea at nine PM.
He was telling Gojo about the mission, which he always did in that efficient, de-briefy way of his: location, curse grade, tactical complications, resolution. The information was almost certainly in the report he'd already filed. Gojo listened to the report and watched Yuuta's hands wrap around the mug he'd been given and thought, obscurely: he does that every time.
Every time he was handed something warm, he held it with both hands. Not obviously. Just, with both hands, slightly curved around the ceramic, like warmth was something to be held onto.
He'd grown up cold. Gojo knew that, theoretically. Abandoned by his family, avoiding contact because contact hurt people he loved. Six years of isolation after Rika. Even at Jujutsu High, Yuuta had taken a long time to learn how to take up his own space in a room comfortably.
He still held warm mugs with both hands.
Gojo looked away before Yuuta could catch him looking.
"The grade-two was interesting," Yuuta was saying. "The main curse had sub-expression, smaller manifestations. Took a bit to realise they were connected."
"Mm." Gojo set his own mug down. "Eat something."
Yuuta broke off. "I ate."
"When?"
"This morning."
"It's nine PM."
"...I was going to eat when I got home."
"You were going to fall asleep when you got home and then tell me you ate in the morning. I know your pattern."
A very slight pause. Then Yuuta looked at him with an expression Gojo couldn't quite untangle. It was careful, a little guarded, and underneath it, there was something that flickered too fast to catch.
"There's no reason for you to know my pattern," Yuuta said mildly.
"I'm the strongest," Gojo said. "I know everything."
This was an obvious deflection and they both knew it. Yuuta, mercifully, let it stand.
"I'm fine," he said.
"You're skinny and you have raccoon eyes and you haven't eaten since this morning. You're not fine, you're functional, which is not the same thing." He opened the refrigerator. "I have leftover rice and I'm reasonably sure there's miso in here somewhere. Don't argue with me."
Silence from the counter.
Gojo found the miso. Heated the rice. Did not think about why he was doing this or what category of behaviour this fell under or what it meant that he knew Yuuta's schedule well enough to call out the sleep-and-claim-I-ate manoeuvre. He made rice and miso at nine PM on a Tuesday and Yuuta sat at his kitchen counter with both hands wrapped around his mug and ate when the food was put in front of him.
"Thank you," Yuuta said quietly.
"Don't make it weird."
"I'm not making it weird."
"Good."
But Yuuta was looking at him with that careful, flickering expression again, and Gojo didn't look back, and the kitchen was very quiet in a specific way when two people were not saying something.
Part Three: Sweet Paradise and the Devastating Miscalculation
It was Shoko who told him, with the deadpan precision she deployed like a surgical instrument, that he had a problem.
"You're mooning," she said.
They were in her office. She was filling out paperwork; Gojo was occupying her couch in defiance of the 'no visitors before noon' sign she'd put up especially for him.
"I don't moon."
"You just asked me if Okkotsu attended his post-mission debrief last week."
"That's professional concern."
She looked at him over her coffee cup. She had the look she used when she was deciding how much rope to give him. "You texted me at seven AM to ask if he'd eaten breakfast."
"...He has a nutritional deficit—"
"Satoru." She set the cup down. "I've known you for a very long time. You have never given a single thought to whether any other sorcerer was eating breakfast."
He opened his mouth.
"Including Itadori, and you're fond of Itadori."
He closed his mouth.
Shoko looked at him with something between clinical interest and genuine sympathy, which on her face could be difficult to distinguish. "How long has this been going on?"
"There's nothing going on."
"The thing I was told is a 'straightforward physical arrangement with clear expectations.'"
"Who told you-"
"Okkotsu, three months ago, when I asked why you'd started showing up to his post-mission medicals."
Gojo had the specific experience, rare and always unwelcome, of having been significantly outmanoeuvred. He stared at the ceiling.
"I told him upfront," he said. "No complications. No... I'm not built for the whole. The whole thing. I told him."
"I know what you told him."
"So there's nothing-"
"Satoru." Her voice was not unkind. "What do you call making someone eat miso at nine PM?"
He didn't have an answer for that.
"Friendly concern," he tried.
She made the sound she made when she was being polite about finding something very stupid.
He was thinking about it, in the imprecise, avoidance-adjacent way he thought about things he hadn't categorised yet, on the Thursday when Yuuta texted him.
Are you free this Saturday? What do you think about Sweet Paradise all-you-can-eat in Ikebukuro? I think you'll like it. It has lots of dessert options.
Gojo read this three times.
Sweet Paradise was a buffet. A dessert-heavy buffet. Yuuta, who ran on half a day's calories and looked pained at the suggestion of cake, was inviting him to a dessert buffet.
He's planning something nice for me, was the thought that appeared, and Gojo was horrified by how immediately and completely he believed it.
He replied: Obviously. When have I ever said no to dessert.
Great! Let's meet on Saturday, noon. I'll send the address.
Gojo spent Saturday morning thinking about whether this was a date. He had told Yuuta it wasn't going to be that kind of arrangement. He thought about that. He thought about the way Yuuta held warm mugs. He thought about the sound Yuuta made when Gojo touched him a particular way; he set that thought aside. He thought about how Yuuta had said I know who you are in a wet bathhouse at midnight and meant it completely.
He arrived at Sweet Paradise at noon.
Yuuta was already there.
Yuuta was already there, and so were Itadori Yuuji, Fushiguro Megumi, and Kugisaki Nobara, spread across a booth with plates of spaghetti and fruit crepes, all of them looking deeply delighted in the way first-years who'd become fourth-years somehow never stopped being deeply delighted by all-you-can-eat buffets.
Gojo stood at the entrance.
"Gojo-sensei!" Yuuji waved with the enthusiasm of a golden retriever. "Okkotsu-senpai said you'd come!"
"He did," Gojo said.
"He said you like dessert!"
"I do."
Yuuta appeared from the buffet line with two plates and looked across the restaurant and met Gojo's eyes and said, completely naturally, "Oh, you made it. I'll get you a plate." He held out one of the plates he was already carrying. "There's a good tiramisu in the back."
Gojo took the plate.
He sat in the booth beside Megumi, who gave him the respectful-but-long-suffering look he always gave Gojo, and he ate a plate of tiramisu and two servings of strawberry cake and listened to Yuuji describe, in tremendous detail, a curse he'd fought in Saitama that had been shaped like an enormous sentient dishcloth. Nobara debated the aesthetic merits of various cream puffs with the seriousness of an art critic. Yuuta ate across the table from him with the focused quiet pleasure of someone who'd been convinced to actually enjoy a meal, which — that part had worked, at least, Gojo noted. He was eating. Three plates. That was good.
Gojo smiled at all the appropriate moments and laughed at the right things and told Yuuji the dishcloth curse's probable category classification and ate a third serving of tiramisu.
He texted Shoko under the table: it was a group outing
The reply came in under thirty seconds: LMAOOO
Then: karma. also I TOLD you
Then: how's the tiramisu
He typed back: excellent. don't gloat.
She sent a snorting emoji. Then: did you really think he was asking you on a date
He did not reply to that.
On the train home, which he took alone because Yuuta had gone the other direction with the students, he slouched on his seat and thought about it with more honesty than he usually permitted himself.
He had thought it was a date. Not in a panicked way, not in a way he'd have named out loud, but in a quiet background way — the way you assumed a door was going to be unlocked before you tried the handle. He'd just... expected it. That Yuuta had made a plan for the two of them, specifically. That the dessert detail meant something.
The dessert detail just meant Yuuta had correctly identified what he liked. Because Yuuta paid attention. Because Yuuta was like that.
I'm not going to be particularly soft about things, he'd said. I don't want there to be any misunderstanding about what it is.
He'd said it because he meant it, at the time. He'd said it because it was kind to be clear, and unkind to let people build things on unstable ground. He'd said it because it was true.
He looked out the train window at the dark tunnel walls rushing past.
He had been very, very clear.
Part Four: What He'd Said
The problem — and Gojo was intellectually aware this was a problem he had constructed himself, with great care and total sincerity, which made it both his fault and cosmically unjust — was that Yuuta had listened.
He'd listened with the attentiveness he brought to everything, filed it away with the same thoroughness he applied to mission briefings and curse-type classifications, and then he had proceeded to be scrupulously, perfectly, infuriatingly correct in his behaviour.
He didn't text unless it was relevant. He didn't initiate. He arrived when invited and left without being asked and when they ran into each other in HQ hallways he was warm and collegial and perfectly, normally friendly. Not guarded or stiff or awkward about it at all. He was genuinely easygoing and showed no visible sign that anything meant more than met the eye.
Which was exactly what Gojo had asked for.
He found it maddening.
"You're sulking," Shoko said, in December.
"I'm working."
"You're staring at a mission report you filed in October."
He turned the page. "I'm reviewing."
"Satoru." She dropped into the chair across from him, lit a cigarette despite the signs everywhere, and looked at him with the flat patience of seventeen years of friendship. "What happened?"
"Nothing happened."
"You've been like this for three weeks."
"I've been perfectly-"
"You snapped at Ijichi twice last week."
"Ijichi is-"
"And you ate lunch alone on Tuesday even though Okkotsu was in the building."
Gojo put down the October mission report.
The thing about Shoko was that she'd known him when he was fifteen and had known everything, and she'd watched what that did to a person over time. She was one of maybe three people in the world who understood what it meant when Gojo Satoru was being very loud and very present about something, which was that he was very quiet and very absent about something else.
"He treats me the same," Gojo said. "As always. As if-" He stopped.
"As if you'd meant what you said," Shoko said, not unkindly.
The problem, articulated with that sort of precision, was embarrassing.
"I did mean it. At the time."
"And now you don't."
Silence.
"He invited me to that buffet," Gojo said.
"With three other people."
"It was a group outing. Because... because he was being appropriate. Because I told him I don't-" He waved a hand. "He's following the rules I made."
"This is the funniest thing that's happened to me in years," Shoko said. "I want you to know that."
"I hate you."
"No you don't." She took a long drag. "Have you tried telling him?"
"I tried-" Had he? He tried to inventory the last three months. He'd made him eat. He'd let him sleep on the couch. He'd shown up to his post-mission debriefs twice, which in hindsight was... He'd thought it was subtle. "He thinks I'm being collegial."
"Are you sure he thinks that, or are you assuming he thinks that because it'd be easier?"
That landed with surgical unpleasantness.
"He doesn't believe me," Gojo said, and the honesty of it surprised even him. "When I say something, that sounds like... he gets this look. Like he's waiting for the clarification. Like I must mean something else."
Shoko exhaled smoke at the ceiling. "You told him very clearly, at the start, what kind of person you are. And then you behaved exactly like that person for three months. And now you want him to believe you're a different person."
"I'm not a different person-"
"No, but you're-" She looked at him for a moment with something unusual in her expression, something that might have been affection if Shoko showed affection openly. "You're someone who changes when it matters. You just can't stand admitting it." She stubbed out the cigarette. "Karma," she added.
"Stop saying karma."
"You said, and I'm quoting: 'I'm not going to show up at anyone's door with flowers, I'm not built for it.'"
"I-"
"You showed up to his medical review for a grade-three mission last week, Satoru. That man had a sprained wrist, which he'd immediately healed with RCT. He did not need you there."
He had no counter for this.
"Karma," she said again, and stood up, and left him with the October mission report.
Part Five: The Gap
The difficulty was not knowing what to say. Gojo was good at saying things. He'd given speeches, set terms, declared war on the existing order of Jujutsu society without breaking stride. He knew how to make himself understood.
The difficulty was that he'd made himself understood perfectly the first time, and now anything he said had to travel across the distance he'd created, and Yuuta had adjusted the whole architecture of himself to that distance, and-
He tried, in the ways available to him.
He started texting more. Not constantly, or overwhelmingly. Gojo did not do hovering, dear God. But enough, like a found article about a curse type Yuuta had mentioned, a photo of an absurd sign outside a ramen shop, occasionally just are you eating actual meals or convenience store garbage which was probably too transparent but he couldn't stop himself.
Yuuta replied with easy friendliness that was making Gojo lose his mind. Polite. Warm. Normal. The kind of warmth extended to a respected colleague who was being odd but well-meaning.
He invited Yuuta to dinner, just the two of them. Yuuta came, ate with gratifying enthusiasm, talked shop for an hour and then caught himself and asked, with that slight self-conscious quality, "Sorry, is this... you probably don't want to spend dinner on case analysis."
"I don't mind," Gojo said, and he didn't; he genuinely didn't, and that was the problem, he didn't mind anything Yuuta did, even the talking about work, even the measured pauses where he chose words carefully, even the way he cut his food.
Yuuta looked at him the way he'd started looking. That careful assessment, like he was checking whether Gojo meant it or was being polite. Then he looked back at his plate. "Okay. So the grade-two cursed spirits-"
"Yuuta."
He looked up.
"I'm not being polite."
A pause. "I know," Yuuta said.
"Do you?"
The pause was longer this time. The flickering thing moved through his expression again, the one Gojo had spent months trying to read.
"You're..." Yuuta set his chopsticks down, careful. "You're good to me. You're good about... checking in. I know that." His voice was very even. "You said you care about the people who work under you."
"You don't work under me-"
"Who work with you." A slight correction, equally even. "I know you care about that. I'm not... I appreciate it. I'm not reading more into it."
He was being scrupulously, perfectly reasonable. He was doing exactly what Gojo had taught him to do. Calibrating. Not overclaiming.
"What if I want you to," Gojo said, "read more into it."
Yuuta went very still. "Gojo-san."
"Don't Gojo-san me."
"You told me-"
"I know what I told you."
"You were very clear. You were clear on purpose." His voice was still even but something had changed in the quality of the even, the way a calm surface changes above a current. "You've always been... You're never vague about anything. You said you don't-"
"People change their minds."
Yuuta looked at him for a long moment. His expression was doing several things simultaneously in a way that Gojo wanted to stop and study properly, like a particularly interesting curse.
"That's not-" He picked his chopsticks back up. "That sounds like something you'd say."
"Because I'm saying it."
"Satoru-san." The name landed differently from his mouth than from most people's. Gojo had noticed that too, filed it under increasingly long list of things he noticed. "I've known you for five years. I know you care about people when you care about them. I know this isn't nothing. But." He ate a piece of eggplant. Gojo watched him. "I think you're used to wanting things and getting them, and right now you want things to be-" a brief search for the word- "different. More. And I'm not saying that's- I'm not saying that's not-"
He stopped.
"You're not saying it's not real," Gojo said.
"I'm saying you might feel differently next week."
"I won't."
Yuuta ate another piece of eggplant. He looked out the window. He was handling this with such quiet, careful, considered dignity that Gojo wanted to overturn the table in frustration, which would have been counterproductive.
"Let me think about it," Yuuta said finally, mild, like Gojo had proposed a minor logistical adjustment.
"How long."
"Satoru-san."
"Is there a timeline-"
"Satoru." The faintest edge of something in his voice, not quite exasperation, not quite amusement. "I'll let you know."
He ate his eggplant. Gojo ate his own food in a state of profound, unfamiliar, somewhat undignified uncertainty.
Part Six: Shoko Has the Time of Her Life
Word got to Shoko the way words always got to Shoko: through some ambient network Gojo had never been able to fully map, operating on information gathered through years of medical access to every sorcerer at HQ.
She was snorting before he'd finished the sentence.
"He said he'll think about it."
"Yes."
"And then he ate eggplant."
"He was very calm. It was infuriating."
The snort became something closer to a laugh. "Gojo Satoru, the strongest sorcerer alive, told a twenty-year-old he'd changed his mind, and the twenty-year-old said he'd think about it and then ate dinner."
"He wasn't dismissive-"
"No, that's better. He was perfectly pleasant about it." She was definitely laughing now, in the controlled, private way she laughed at things she genuinely found funny. "Karma."
"I told you to stop-"
"I will never stop." She pulled herself together. "Satoru. Did it occur to you that Okkotsu Yuuta has been in love with you since he was sixteen?"
He opened his mouth.
Closed it.
"He has not-"
"He absolutely has. Everyone with eyes knows. Nanami knew." A pause. "You knew too, I think, on some level. Which is why you were so careful to set terms." She said it without accusation, but it landed anyway, with the accuracy of someone who'd known him for more than half his life. "You gave him the speech because part of you already understood it was going to be more than it looked like."
"That's-"
"And now it's more than it looks like. And he gave himself the same speech, word for word, except he's been giving it to himself for years. So when you say 'I changed my mind,' what he hears is..." She gestured with her coffee cup. "I don't know. He probably thinks you've momentarily reclassified him from 'convenient' to 'interesting' and you'll recalibrate when things level out."
Gojo sat with this.
"I told him I wasn't going to act lovey-dovey," he said.
"And have you?"
"I've been-" he thought about the miso. The sheets on the couch. The post-mission medicals. "I've been considerate."
"Considerate," Shoko repeated.
"What."
"You once told Fushiguro he could handle his own hospital transport after a grade-one mission because it 'built character.'"
"That was-"
"You told me, first year of high school, that emotional needs were a structural weakness in sorcerers."
"I was fifteen-"
"You have never, in the seventeen years I have known you, made someone eat miso at nine PM." She looked at him steadily. "What you've been isn't 'considerate.' What you've been is..." she picked up her coffee and continued her deliberate pause. "Satoru-shaped lovey-dovey." She declared with flourish before she drank. "Karma."
He wanted very much to argue with this. He had no arguments.
"So how," he said, with great restraint, "do I fix it?"
"Be obvious. You're good at obvious, when you want to be." She set the cup down. "Be obvious in a way that he can't file under 'collegial concern.' Get it wrong a few times. Let him see you get it wrong. You've been-" a brief consideration, "very controlled about this. Very considered. It's made him careful because it looks careful. Be a little-" She waved a hand. "Human."
Gojo considered this.
"That's terrible advice," he said.
"Probably. Let me know how it goes." She picked up her files. "I'm invested now."
Part Seven: Being Human About It
He brought food to Yuuta's apartment.
Not announced. He texted open your door at seven PM on a Thursday, which was either confident or deranged, and Yuuta opened the door looking like he'd been in the middle of a post-mission write-up: hair slightly dishevelled, pen behind his ear, still in his mission clothes.
Gojo held up the bag from the tonkatsu place on Yuuta's street. "You forgot to eat again."
Yuuta looked at the bag. "How do you know I forgot to-"
"Your light's been on since five. You eat before five or after nine when you have reports, never during. It's nine-forty." He pushed the bag toward him slightly. "Let me in."
A moment. Then Yuuta stepped back.
He ate the tonkatsu at his own kitchen table while Gojo sat across from him and did not look at the mission reports spread everywhere and did not comment on the three empty coffee cups or the hoodie that appeared to belong to Yuuji, which Gojo filed under 'not my business.' He stole one of Yuuta's pickles. Yuuta gave him the look.
"These are mine."
"I got them."
"They came with the meal you're making me eat."
"I'm not making you-"
"You absolutely are." But there was something in his voice, the almost-not-there kind of warmth he kept very controlled. He pushed the pickle dish toward Gojo. "You can have the rest."
"Generous."
"I know."
They ate in the particular quiet that had always been easy between them, which was something Gojo had not acknowledged to himself until recently. The comfortable kind of quiet. The kind that didn't need filling.
"Satoru-san," Yuuta said, at some point, over the last of the rice.
"Mm."
"Why are you doing this."
Gojo looked up from his pickles. Yuuta was watching him with the careful dark eyes, pen still behind his ear, expression doing its complicated thing again.
"The food," Yuuta clarified. "The checking in. The-" He paused. "You don't have to. I'm fine."
"You were not eating."
"I was going to eat."
"At midnight, standing over the sink."
Yuuta did not deny this. "I've been doing that for years. I function-"
"I know you function. You function extraordinarily well." Gojo set the chopsticks down. "I don't want you to just function."
Yuuta was very still.
"I find," Gojo said, with more precision and less comfort than he was used to, "that I... care about the specifics. Not about your performance metrics. About whether you're sleeping. About whether you're eating things that are actually food." A pause. "About whether you're-" he looked at the pen behind Yuuta's ear, "taking breaks. Occasionally." He looked back. "This is new for me. I want that noted."
"I've noted it."
"I'm not good at it. I'm told I'm being-" he heard Shoko's voice, "controlled. Considered. That it reads as professional."
"It doesn't always read as professional," Yuuta said, quiet.
"No?"
"No." He set his own chopsticks down, aligned them precisely on the edge of his bowl. "I know what it is when you-" He stopped. Tried again. "I'm not as confused as maybe you think I am. About what things mean." He looked at the table. "I just don't know how to-" The slight catch of someone choosing words carefully. "You were very clear. And I believe you meant it. And I also don't know how to believe that it-"
He stopped again.
"Changed," Gojo offered.
Yuuta looked up. His expression was somewhere between unguarded and braced, the way someone looks when they're letting themselves believe something they've spent a long time not believing.
"You said you don't like clingy," he said. "You said you don't act lovey-dovey." A pause. "You said that because it was true."
"I said it because it was true then."
"Or because you knew I-" He stopped. Collected himself. "Or because you knew how I felt and you wanted to be kind about it."
The accuracy of this, at least in part, was something Gojo could not fully deny. He'd had the conversation knowing that Yuuta had feelings that went further than the situation they were creating. He'd had it because it was kinder to be clear than to let something grow in the wrong direction.
He had not planned on the wrong direction being his.
"Both," he said. "It was both. And now-" He looked at Yuuta, the pen behind his ear and the careful eyes and the thin line of his wrists resting on the table. "Now I'm the one who's grown in the wrong direction."
Yuuta stared at him.
"The wrong direction," he said, very carefully.
"From my original position." He waved a hand. "From what I planned. It wasn't supposed to-" He made a helpless gesture he would never, under normal circumstances, make. "I notice things about you. I notice too many things. I wanted to know how you take your tea after you'd mentioned it once three months earlier. I know which kind of post-mission tired is fine and which kind means you're going to try to skip the medical. I know-" He stopped. Chose the particular truth. "I know what sound you make when you're actually relaxed. Not just not-tense. Actually relaxed. I've been-" He looked at the ceiling briefly. "Cataloguing it."
The silence was very complete.
"You've been cataloguing it," Yuuta repeated.
"Yes."
"For how long."
"September."
Another silence.
"That's," Yuuta said, "three months of cataloguing."
"Yes."
"While I was-" He pressed his lips together. Something was happening in his expression, something large and carefully managed. "Gojo-san."
"Satoru."
"Satoru." He said it the way he always said it, with that particular weight. "I have been-" He exhaled. "I've been in love with you since I was sixteen years old. That's-" A slight, slightly wrecked quality entering his carefully even voice. "I've been careful for years. I've been... I worked very hard at careful."
"I know." Gojo looked at him steadily. "It showed."
"And you want me to just-"
"I'm not asking you to do anything suddenly. I'm asking you to let me-" He stopped. Tried again in the way Shoko had told him to: human about it. "I'm asking you to let me try. Badly. I'm probably going to be bad at this. I'll be annoying about it, I'll-" another helpless gesture. "I'll almost certainly bring food over at inconvenient hours and show up to your debriefs and tell you you're eating wrong, and I might not-" He reached for the precision he was better at. "I might not say it the way you want to hear it every time. I'm not built differently than I told you. I'm still-" He looked at his own hands briefly. "Private. Still not going to be... soft, in the obvious ways. But the specifics will be there. They're already there." He looked back. "You said you know who I am. So."
Yuuta's expression had gone very still in a way that was different from his normal stillness.
"So," he said.
"So."
A very long moment. The tonkatsu containers between them. The mission reports covering every other surface. The three coffee cups.
"I have a grade-one in Chiba tomorrow morning," Yuuta said, with the absolute control of someone managing a large emotion with both hands.
"I know."
"I should be back by three PM."
"I know that too."
"If you wanted to-" He stopped. Looked at the table. Looked back up. The careful eyes. "There's a place near here that does good soba. You complained about the last soba place I recommended."
"Unfair. I said the broth needed work."
"That is complaining." The edge of something in his voice, warm and almost involuntary. "Do you want to try it? On Saturday."
"Just us?"
A pause that went on one beat too long.
"Yes," Yuuta said. "Just us."
Gojo felt the particular shift of something settling. Entirely, properly, into place. "Yeah," he said. "I want to."
Shoko got the text at nine PM on Thursday:
saturday soba, just the two of us. he said yes
She read it twice. She set down her report. She stared at the ceiling of her office for a moment in silence.
Then she typed: karma finally paid out
And then: you're buying me drinks to celebrate
And then, because she'd known him for seventeen years and knew what this cost him and knew what it meant: I'm glad, idiot.
She added the snorting emoji. It felt appropriate.
On Saturday it rained, which was not part of the plan, and Gojo complained about his hair for six minutes on the walk from the station, and the soba place had a twenty-minute wait, and Yuuta stood in the small shelter of the awning and looked at him complaining about his hair with an expression he wasn't, for once, managing quite properly — that large, careful thing visible in it, finally without the careful part.
Gojo, mid-complaint, noticed and stopped.
Said nothing.
Just shifted slightly, so they were both under the awning, and the rain came down, and Yuuta held his umbrella with both hands.
Omake
Three weeks later, Shoko found them in the break room at HQ: Gojo at the counter, stealing Yuuta's coffee, Yuuta attempting to take it back with the focused commitment he brought to grade-one exorcisms. Normal, in most respects.
Except Gojo's hand was around Yuuta's wrist when he reached for the mug. Not quite holding it. Not quite not.
And Yuuta had gone slightly pink.
And neither of them was saying anything about it.
Shoko poured her own coffee, turned around, looked at them for a moment.
"Karma," she said, to no one in particular, and left.
She was still snorting when she reached the end of the hallway.
End
A/N: if you have enjoyed the story, please leave kind words and/or kudos.