Chapter Text
The cord was the problem.
You had been turning it over for the better part of forty minutes, this question of the cord.
A single white earphone wire strung between your right ear and Nanami’s left, drawn taut across the no-man’s-land of the shared armrest. One bud each, his on the left and yours on the right. The arrangement had serious logistics. If you shifted your weight to ease the dead patch in your shoulder, the cord went tight and tugged at his ear. So you held still. You had been holding still, in slightly varying configurations, since somewhere over the Southeast Asia Sea.
This was absurd. You, who had survived Ryomen Sukuna twice, were now devoting your higher-order cognition to not pulling an earbud out of a man’s ear. The King of Curses had taken two swings at you and got himself outmaneuvered. A cheap plastic earphone cord, it seemed, was where you were finally going to be brought low.
The man in question was asleep, or doing a very good impression of it. The cabin had gone to that low oceanic hum, three hundred strangers breathing in the dark, the seatback screens dimmed to the color of a bruise.
Nanami had chosen the movie. You’d let him, because letting Nanami choose the movie was its own small entertainment. The result was always what you expected and somehow still funny. Nothing in it would explode; no one in it would die. A tired man in his fifties had spent the last ninety minutes restructuring a failing family restaurant in a coastal town. The dramatic high point had been a scene about correctly pricing the set lunch.
You were fairly certain that, given an unlimited budget and the whole catalogue of human cinema, this was the film Nanami would choose every single time, forever: competent people, solving solvable problems, at a sensible pace, with good posture. There was probably a sequel about inventory.
You weren’t watching the movie. You’d given up on it somewhere around the time you became conscious of his arm pressed warm against yours on the armrest. You were doing the thing where you pretend not to notice a thing by noticing it continuously and at great length. You were very good at this. You had a lot of practice.
You didn’t remember deciding to close your eyes. What you remembered was the engines. They dropped pitch with that long mechanical sigh of a plane giving up altitude. You came up out of sleep all at once, on the old reflex, ready for something. There was nothing to be ready for.
There was only the fact, arriving in pieces, that your cheek was a little squished because it’d been resting on Nanami’s shoulder. There was a thin airline blanket over your lap that hadn’t been there before. And you had, possibly, drooled on Nanami. You sat up so fast the cord finally did what you’d spent forty minutes preventing and yanked the bud clean out of his ear.
“Sorry,” you winced as your brain conducted a brisk and merciless audit: hours asleep, approximately the whole flight; degree of drape, near-total; volume of drool, undetermined and best left that way; dignity, gone, no survivors. “How long was I—”
“The whole way,” Nanami replied smoothly. “You were tired. It’s a long flight.” He reached down to the seat pocket and produced a new bottle of water, then twisted the cap loose and held it out for you. “Drink something. The air in here dries you out.”
You took the bottle and drank. You didn’t look directly at the wet patch on the shoulder of his shirt. He didn’t look at it either, which was the kindest thing he could have done and which you chose, for your own peace, not to think about any further.
Here was what you didn’t let yourself think about too hard: that the bottle was ready because Nanami had kept it ready. That his left arm, the one your whole head had been parked on, had to be dead to the elbow. He hadn’t moved it once while you slept. The blanket had come from somewhere—that somewhere being Nanami, leaning across you at some point to ask the crew for you.
Nanami was just like that. He was a man who noticed what someone needed and provided it without making a fuss. It was, you’d decided long ago, simply his temperament, the way some people are tall.
You wound the earphones around two fingers, and put them in your jacket pocket. You patted the pocket once to be sure.
“You didn’t have to let me sleep on you the whole flight,” you said, somewhat embarrassed.
“No,” Nanami agreed. “I didn’t have to.”
***
You hadn’t wanted to go on this vacation. At least, not initially. Left to your own devices you’d be in Tokyo right now in the worst weather of the year, neck-deep in paperwork and politics. Nanami knew that. Nanami had known it well enough to do the patient work of getting you onto this plane, kicking and screaming metaphorically. He wasn’t going to say a word about it now that he’d won. Gloating wasn’t in him, and the not-gloating was somehow worse.
Kuantan had been a promise. It came from a blood-soaked memory—the stretch of minutes in which you’d been certain you were going to lose Nanami, and had said, “Okay, yeah, let’s go to Kuantan. I’ll take two weeks off work. We’ll see the sunrise over the beach and eat all the delicious local food there.” You’d said it because you’d thought he was dying. You’d have promised him anything. Promises had been the only currency you had left and you’d have spent any amount of it on Nanami.
Then he hadn’t died. He’d recovered and announced that you owed him a beach. The promise had outlived the emergency. That was the whole of it. The most dramatic vow you had ever made was being honored in the least dramatic way imaginable, on a budget airline, with a seatback screen that wouldn’t hold its brightness, and a movie about set-lunch pricing. The man you’d made it over was alive and well beside you. Of all the things he could have wanted from the world, he wanted to show you a coastline.
There was another thing Nanami had started saying, too, that you’d started not-answering. That you should think about going to school. A real one, the regular kind, somewhere with lecture halls and a real cafeteria and preferably no curses in it. “See some of the world that isn’t jujutsu society,” he’d said. You understood this trip to be, in some sense, his closing statement. Here is the world, it said. Here is what it looks like when no one is dying and you don’t have to fight for your life every day. Consider it.
You’d promised Nanami you’d consider it later. You’d been considering it later, with great diligence, for several months now.
***
The doors opened and Malaysia walked in.
There was no other way to describe it. The heat didn’t wait. It rushed to meet you, thick and wet and dramatic. The wall of warm air slammed right into your face, smelling of jet fuel and rain that had already fallen and the green, fermenting sweetness of growing things. It got into your collar. It got into your lungs. Within thirty seconds your shirt had opinions about your back.
Beside you, Nanami stood at the top of the jet bridge in a linen blazer.
You turned and took him in. He had, you now fully appreciated, packed for a tropical holiday how he always packed for a mission—thoroughly, conservatively, and with collars. The man was wearing a blazer to the equator. You had no doubt there were two more of these folded in his case, ironed, interleaved with tissue paper.
“You’re going to die,” you informed Nanami helpfully. “Right here. Heatstroke. I’ll have to explain to Ieiri-san how you wasted all her healing efforts and were felled by Pahang.”
“It’s breathable linen.”
“It’s a blazer.”
“There’s a difference between dressing for the climate and surrendering to it.”
Ignoring your commentary, Nanami took your bag off your shoulder. You hadn’t asked him to and he hadn’t asked you. The strap simply left your shoulder and arrived on his, and he walked on toward the terminal with both of your luggage.
Kuantan in the late afternoon was a town leaning into evening. You came down out of the airport and into the long gold light of it. The streets were coming alive for the evening. The hot country shook off the day. Everyone who’d been hiding from it came out into the bearable part of it.
Scooters were everywhere, threading the traffic in loose shoals, whole families on single seats. The food carts were waking up. Somewhere a grill had been lit, and the smell of char, lemongrass, and palm sugar going dark at the edges laid itself over the diesel and the wet pavement. It made your stomach announce that the in-flight meal had been a long time ago.
You took Nanami’s free hand in the crush at a crossing. It was a tactical decision and nothing else. The sidewalk was a press of bodies. The light was going. A person could lose another person in this. You’d held his hand on missions for this reason, to keep the team intact in a crowd.
It meant nothing. It was procedure. The fact that his hand closed around yours with no hesitation at all, that it had clearly been waiting to be held, was good team cohesion. People held a colleague’s hand in heavy foot traffic constantly. There was, you were prepared to argue at a tribunal, nothing in it whatsoever.
As you walked, Nanami drifted to the street side of the pavement. He did this without any visible consideration, sliding himself by half a step into the lane between you and the traffic, and stayed there. He did it again at the next corner when you turned and the street changed sides. You liked it, the small constant math of him keeping himself between you and the moving danger.
(This was the pattern, if you’d cared to look at it, which you didn’t: that you were the sharpest person anyone knew about every single thing in the world except this one thing.)
The desk clerk found your reservation the same as one might find a tooth that had come out—with apology and a fascinated horror that it’d happened at all.
“I am so sorry. I have—There is no booking. There was a booking?” He typed. He un-typed. He turned the monitor a degree as if a better angle would conjure your room. “It is not delayed in the system. It is not under another name. It is just—It is not here. And we are full tonight, very full. There is a conference—”
He spread his hands at the impossibility of it, the whole apparatus of the hotel arrayed against you. Behind him, a corridor of cool tiled lobby stretched away, full of rooms that all belonged to other people.
You turned to Nanami. He was already turned to you. Neither of you was really upset. That was the thing you’d have had to explain to anyone watching, that across the desk from a man delivering truly ruinous news, the two of you had simply started to laugh.
“It’s happening again,” you said.
He nodded. “So it would appear. It does seem to keep finding us.”
This was a tradition for you and Nanami. There’d been the assignment in Hokkaido where the agency lodging fell through. You’d ended up staying together in the one last room of the hotel. There was the one outside Naha after that. It’d stopped being a crisis and become a private joke, the universe’s apparent determination to keep folding the two of you into the same space and then standing back to see what you’d do about it.
You always did the same thing. You did nothing, very politely, all night.
The new thing was that Nanami was actually enjoying this. The old Nanami would have grumbled. This Nanami had chuckled. It seemed he’d decided that nothing as small as logistics was going to be allowed near the thing he’d decided to enjoy. It suited him.
You sat in the little café two doors down and hunted for a new place to stay.
The search went nowhere. Everything in the center was full, some sort of international conference having eaten the whole town. Everything outside the center was either a number that made Nanami’s mouth go flat or a smear of unbookable nothing forty kilometers up the coast.
Your phone loaded each listing grudgingly. Bad signals kept the spinner turning and turning. Nanami got two iced coffees and set one in front of you. Then, he went back to his own screen. It was you who saw the poster, and only because you’d given up and gone to the counter to ask the café owner whether she knew anyone with rooms.
It was pinned to a corkboard by the till—the kind of board that accretes a town’s small business over years, layered taxi cards and a lost cat and a faded flyer for a dive school. The poster had clearly been there the longest. It’d gone the soft tobacco brown of paper that has lived years in sun and salt air, the colors bleached toward the warm end, the corners furred where a hundred thumbs had pressed the pin.
PARADISE, it said across the top in a swooping sun-drenched typeface that no one had used to sell anything in a very long time.
Below the word was a photograph of a perfect crescent bay, white sand drawn in a clean curve around water that went from glass-clear at the shore to a blue with weight to it further out. A headland at one end, dark and green. Low white buildings set back under palms. The whole thing was lit by a sun that the camera had loved.
Beneath the photo was a list of everything Paradise proposed to give you: Full-board package. Private beach access. Spa & wellness. Fine dining. Water-sports. All inclusive in our one comprehensive rate. And then the rate. You read the rate twice. Then you read it a third time, in case it had been a trick of the light, or jet lag, or false hope.
You carefully peeled the poster from the board and brought it back to the table. “Nanami-san, look at this.”
He took the poster from you and considered it. “That price is wrong.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Nanami turned the poster a quarter-turn toward the window light, frowning as he read it for the catch. There was fine print along the bottom, a line of small type and a date faded nearly into the paper.
The thing was old, the design was old, the place had obviously been here for decades. That was a point in its favor. This was unlikely to be some fly-by-night booking scam thrown up last week to skim deposits off tourists. This resort was an established institution that had been quietly doing the same thing on the same beach since before either of you was born, and had never updated its poster, which was charming and the opposite of a red flag.
“The catch is the location,” Nanami said after a while, and tapped the line at the very bottom.
It was far from town. A road, a coast, and not much else.
“Sure,” you hummed, turning your iced coffee on its ring of water. “But if it’s a scam, we’ll know inside the hour, and we leave. If it’s a dump, we’ve both slept in worse. And we’re sorcerers. Realistically, what is a budget resort going to do to us that hasn’t already been attempted, professionally, by something with more teeth?”
The corner of his mouth moved. “The math works out,” he allowed. From him, it was a wholehearted endorsement. “Worst case, we get a story.”
“Worst case we get a story,” you agreed cheerfully.
You called the number on the poster. A pleasant voice said, of course, of course, they had room, they always had room, and they’d send the shuttle.
The driver was a courteous local in a clean van who took your luggage and asked twice whether the air-con was cold enough. The trunk road ran with the coast. The light did its slow tropical business out the windows, gold thickening to amber, amber bleeding down to a blue that finally lost the sun altogether and let the first lights come up.
You passed the last of the ordinary world at a junction maybe forty minutes out. A small kampung strung along the road, a petrol station with its forecourt lit hard and white, a few houses with their windows yellow and a television flickering blue in one of them, a man hosing down the apron in front of a shuttered shop.
What came after was nothing. The van turned off the trunk road onto a single narrow access road. The kampung’s lights slid backward and were gone, and there was nothing more. The road went into the trees. Coastal scrub first, then the long ordered ranks of an oil-palm plantation strobing past, then proper jungle closing overhead. The headlights bored a moving tunnel through it and found no other buildings, no other cars, no other anything, only the road unspooling and the dense black wall of growth on either side. Under the engine, when the driver slowed for a bend, there was an enormous layered roar of insects, and beneath even that, close, was the sea.
Somewhere at the back of your mind, a small professional voice observed that this was, structurally, exactly how a great many cautionary tales opened: two people, one stranger, an unlit road, a phone down to its last bar, not a soul within earshot, and a destination no one back home could point to on a map. You informed the small professional voice that it was on annual leave, same as you, and that it could file a complaint with the universe in writing.
You were both tired and pleasantly far away from everything. You’d ended up leaning toward each other again somewhere back along the coast, his shoulder and yours. At some point, you’d dug the white knot of the earphones out of your pocket and worked one bud loose and handed Nanami the left. With the long drive and the dark pressed intimately against the glass, a song seemed like the right thing. One bud each, the cord between you. You held still so it wouldn’t tug. This time you didn’t think about it being absurd at all.
All of a sudden, the trees broke. They stopped all at once, the jungle releasing the road. The headland opened out ahead and below. Paradise was lit against the night.
It was so much more than the poster. The bleached old photograph on the corkboard had undersold it. The crescent of the bay lay below you precisely as drawn, the white sand catching what little light there was and giving it back as a long pale curve.
The resort itself was strung along the headland in gold—lanterns, lit windows, the underwater glow of a pool, paths picked out in light winding down through dark gardens toward the water. The buildings were low and white, open-sided and lovely. The sea beyond was black and enormous and very calm. You could hear it now over the slowing engine, a long even breathing against the sand, patient, in no hurry at all.
The van started down toward it, the headlights swinging onto the last stretch of drive. You sat there with one earbud each and the cord between you and the whole impossible loveliness of the place rising slowly up to meet you through the glass.
“I hope they haven’t increased the rate,” you said, earning a soft chuckle of agreement from Nanami.
The driver said something you didn’t quite catch. A welcome, you thought, or the name of the place. The van rolled on down through the dark toward the lit windows and the gold-lit paths. Shoulder against Nanami’s, you marveled at the sight and were as certain as you had ever been of anything that you were about to have the best two weeks of your lives.