Chapter Text
In the rose-tinted glasses of Nanami’s memory, the tale of Yu Haibara will always be beguilingly bittersweet.
The story spins out soft, first. A full ball of yarn gently settled in a wicker basket. It unraveled like a commonplace romance, and though Nanami had known it the moment it began, even he was lost to the allure.
They met in the early spring, late March trudging lazily into early April, the only two first-years in the school.
How unlucky, Nanami had thought upon meeting his sole classmate, mildly indifferent to the whole thing. The both of them, boys crossed by a hapless star. He does not know just how right he is until the haplessness catches both of them in a net and Yu’s wings are clipped.
At that time, they had just graduated from their prefectural junior highs and the next step was looming over them with claws and jagged teeth.
Yu was a peculiar alpha, newly presented as of a couple months before they met. Kind, sweet, considerate, and engaging – he was the kind of sugared pastry one would crave at a cafe. He did not fit the archetype of an alpha, especially not one in his youth. Nanami had taken his personality, first, as a farce because of this assumption. Things always start out well before they spiral downward, and he expected the same of his partner. Nanami was distant, in nicer wording. Hostile, in worse.
He would soon learn, however, that Yu was nothing but genuine. Naive, honestly. Yu seemed to lack a callous bone anywhere in his body. He took Nanami by the shoulder, and gently led him into a flowered path he had not seen through the trees.
Nanami was an unfortunate omega. He had grown up too quickly, had presented well before the curve at a thin and gangly 13 when kids are still supposed to be kids and the rules of the world should not have applied so heavily. The truth of the matter is, regrettably, that once the symptoms of adulthood appear, it’s already too late. But Yu – he gave him a new outlook on the dull life he had gotten bored of, spun it into something new and invigorating.
He was electrifying. The manner in which they fought together was like weaving a basket out of straw. Over, under, over, uniform, vigorous, strengthening. In those rosy shades, it was like they were intertwined with one another in a way so intrinsically it would be impossible to remove one without damaging the other.
In a way, he was right – but Nanami still let himself get enchanted.
The overarching rules of fairytales are absolute, and the best poisons are always sweet.
Yu’s death came in the form of a bloodied half lying still in the cold morgue. It came in the form of his younger sister, a twisted expression on her sad, young face. In the form of his parents, grief-stricken, looking for comfort that would not come so easily and, certainly, would not fill in the missing piece so fully. In the form of sleepless nights, harried thoughts, gruesome nightmares that opened into a worse reality, dark eyes and pale skin, ruffled sheets, and wrinkled clothes. Calm before the terrible storm, the force of which no one could have ever predicted.
Nanami attended Yu’s funeral. It felt discourteous not to. It was the only thing he would drag himself out of bed, after days of mental unrest, and leave his room for. But the pictures of his smiling face, as though everyone comforted themselves with the idea that the sunshine boy swept out of this life with the same bright expression on his face – when Nanami had seen the truth of it, the hellish and mutilated way Yu had gone out? It was nauseating – and insulting. He stormed out with little more than a curt condolence to the family and returned to his room, the tomb of his memories with Yu.
Before that, Nanami had thought of Yu as spring personified.
But spring begets flowers, nauseatingly bright and enticingly sweet. Completely overwhelming his waxy, pallid body until only his unnatural, frozen face is visible amongst their blooms as they bury what’s dead and rotting underneath.
Spring would not fit Yu, but Nanami did not get the chance to find out what else would.]
It had appeared that Yu’s untimely death was the flame the match needed to get lit. The world seemed to be unable to handle a reality without the boy, and so that match was lit, taken to the detonating cord, and the burn started right at the jagged end. It followed the straight line of tension left in his wake, and the way things fell into place was almost too convenient. That mission that they should never have been given, Yu’s unfortunate death, Nanami’s distance, Geto’s doomed lapse in judgment, and everything that brought.
All too quickly, the whole thing went up in flames.
Nanami makes the decision to leave this world somewhere in between.
This world of curses was not meant for him, just as he was not meant for this world. He, who had no living family members with the same accursed affliction as him. He, who had found contentment in the laid-out path of his life, and yet was struck with even more misfortune when he was already down.
In the end, he is still just the poor, unlucky boy crossed by a hapless star.
Just before Nanami graduates, Gojo arrives at his door.
“Gojo-senpai?” he asks, rubbing his eyes. Sleep still finds its way to evade him, especially now that he is so close to that freedom he has craved for years now.
It’s the middle of the night, and in the evening those closer to him had held a small party for Nanami, the only graduate of his year, the only one who would escape this wretched cycle of birth, curse, and death. Three people were missing – though two of them would not be able to attend, no matter how much Nanami could have wished for it.
And the last one has shown up at his doorstep, several hours after its end.
Gojo is still, frozen in the moonlit night. His hands are clenched at his sides, his head bowed so low that Nanami can not see the crystalline brilliance of his cerulean irises through the messy mantle of his hair.
“Nanami.” His voice is low, his tone is clean and neutral. The lack of… anything in it brings Nanami to greater awareness than even standing had. He had not cheered that infuriating, “Nanamin!” that he had honestly grown used to, nor had he given himself the allowance to call Nanami’s first name like he sometimes does. And without those elements, Gojo’s presence is not high and superior, it is not loud and obtrusive, and it is not vast and potent.
This, Nanami knows, is not that Gojo he has come to perceive.
Carefully, he reaches out with his name once again. “Gojo-senpai?”
Gojo is still, even as the tendrils of his voice grace his ears.
“Senpai?” he tries once more, his arms falling down to his side with his fleeting drowsiness. He stares up at Gojo, tries to see the light in his eyes, and scans the rest of his visible body in an effort to find blood or bruises. He had not bothered to turn on the lights in his room when he trudged out of his bed after hearing the persistent rap of knuckles against his door, and Gojo is in his usual black school uniform, so in spite of the illumination that the moon provides, he is still unable to locate anything in particular after a couple minutes of scrutinizing silence. So he narrows his eyes, tilts his head, and questions directly, “Are you injured?”
The mess of his hair sways as Gojo slowly shakes his head in response. Not one word comes from his mouth, and now his withdrawn demeanor is starting to unnerve Nanami. He has never seen Gojo like this before, even when Geto left. Though, that can be attributed more to Nanami’s forced distance at the time than Gojo’s lack of mourning. Hell, once Geto left, Nanami can only remember seeing Gojo in passing, and every time it was like Gojo was on a planet of his own. Far, far away. That same impossible height he had seemed to stand at when Nanami was a freshman and Yu first dragged him along to greet their seniors. If Nanami had given more thought to anything other than his own misery, surely he would have noticed something more amiss?
Yu. Nanami presses his lips into a thin line. Once again he is reminded of the memory of a person he is leaving behind in these walls.
“Do you want to come in?” Perhaps it is pity that prompts him to offer his time like this, even at such an ungodly hour. Maybe it is the newfound guilt lighting up his veins as he recognizes how, at that nightmarish time all those years ago, he was not the only person drowning in pain. It does not matter, because once it leaves Nanami’s mouth, it floats between them, lone, unapproached.
Gojo does not move, does not speak. Nanami waits a few fruitless beats of silence for a verbal answer he will not receive. The cool air of the new season is letting the warm air out and it is setting deep into his skin, pushing up goosebumps like daisies. In a bold display of either reassurance or great impatience, he takes a step up and grasps at Gojo’s hand.
The chill surprises him. He looks down at their hands, which should not have been able to meet at all, and stares at the cold skin he is able to feel underneath the pads of his fingers. It has become the third thing of the night Gojo has lacked. His typical obtrusive personality. Visible physical distress. And now, Infinity.
Nanami peers up at him again, and steps back at the blue irises that have risen to meet his gaze with the slight upturn of Gojo’s face. They seem duller than Nanami remembers after months and years of seeing what hides behind his typical pitch-black glasses. The joyous light has been sucked right out of them and now what’s left is a lifeless husk.
“Senpai?” he ventures, staring unabashedly into his eyes with the realization that those typical glasses are nowhere on his face. A fourth thing Gojo has lacked. If there are any more missing features, he might start suspecting this is not his senior at all.
And despite his sorry state, Gojo moves fast.
He quickly crowds Nanami’s space, crosses the threshold, and enters the dorm room without so much as a protesting creak against the worn floors. Nanami startles, his shoulders jolting up and his body tensing for what would indisputably be a very one-sided fight if it came down to it.
But Gojo is not aggressive with him. Instead, the older boy leans flush against him, his arms loosely wrapped around Nanami’s shoulders, his head stuck against Nanami’s neck. He is heavy, and Nanami feels oddly like a poorly constructed barricade, easily pushed back by determined resistance. Gojo has a superior height and weight, and so when he carelessly throws himself onto his junior, Nanami is forced to stumble back into his room for a couple of steps in an effort to keep upright.
"Senpai," he says once he is balanced, surprised, irritated, and coming off the shock of alarm the sudden movement had brought. He stands stock-still with Gojo practically hanging off of him. If he were on the outside looking in, he imagines he’d look a bit like a desk chair, a mountain of clothes draped over it like tablecloth, even though the closet is close by.
Gojo has him stopped in the middle of his own room, stock-still like a statue. Nanami breathes, and tries to quickly become accustomed to the turn of events and prepare for what is next – in this state, Gojo is unpredictable; Nanami does not want to get swept away by mercurial tides.
He counts the warm breaths that cross over his cheek and brush the strands of his hair. One. Two. Three. Four. The fifth hitches and stutters and Nanami braces himself as Gojo starts walking forward. He stumbles as he is forced to move backward on unsteady feet to accommodate his actions and hisses out an irritated breath when his foot kicks something from the earlier gathering that could have tripped him.
Gojo leads them right back to his bed and falls. Nanami gasps his name, startled by the momentary free fall he is subjected to, but his head meets the soft plush of his pillow and while Gojo’s body falls right on top of his so that the bed is a mess of sprawled limbs and sheets, his head was pressed into the nook of his neck and remains that way when they fall onto the bed.
Nanami takes several breaths, calming himself from the earlier fright and bracing himself for something he had not completely thought through before he agreed to it – then pauses, noting a minty scent in the air. Faint, tentative, but present. He looks up at the white hair covering his vision in surprise.
Without Infinity’s protective barrier, he is vulnerable to not only the touch of others but the perception of his scent. He has never scented Gojo before. Despite his frivolous personality, in some ways he has reserved a part of himself, continuously keeping others at arm’s length. Nanami can assume that only Ieiri and Geto have gotten the privilege of meeting Gojo at this length. At least, until now.
He turns his head, looking at the other end of the room through the tussled strands of his hair, avoiding acknowledging the boy on top of him more than he must.
Above him, Gojo is limp. He can feel his unsteady breaths gracing the curl of his ear. He imagines Gojo silently crying, his inhales broken up into pieces and his exhales all too quick to leave. But Gojo is not moving in a way that suggests tears. Just breathing shallowly, like he had just run a mile. He imagines Gojo running, escaping from something, and then he wonders if it was actually a person on the other end of that race.
Warm breaths mingle across and kiss the shell of his ear, in spite of the pale, cold body they belong to. Soft as loving words, quick as dreadful ones. They go in, and out. In, and out. An undulating rhythm that swells over their joined chests and up his neck like tropical ocean waves. Through his uniform, he can feel the beats of Gojo’s heart. Solid in the way things are when they are real, hard in a grounding manner, swift as though it is trying to pound right out of its cage.
Larger hands than his move, glide over his pillows, push into the space between himself and the bed and they dance across his back in strangely comforting circles. But Nanami gets the impression that this is not meant to comfort him as much as it is to comfort Gojo himself. His head moves closer to his own. White hair tickles Nanami’s nose and clouds his vision like steam. Their cheeks are pressed together. The feeling is far more intimate than it should be.
Nanami stiffens, and Gojo seems to take note. His breathing hitches, and his neck inclines further back so that the white strands of his hair trickle down into Nanami’s face and brush his pale skin like a paintbrush on a canvas.
“If you tell me to go, I will go,” Gojo breathes out; so, so close to his ear. His hair covers his eyes and something stirs in Nanami, unsettled, flustered, jumpy.
And once again, he feels what must be pity needling up his back, what must be guilt creeping up his throat.
The words he spoke were phrased plainly, a statement that suggests that he would not care whatever Nanami’s response is, but his words hit the air and plummet heavily as though there is all too much packed into it. He does not really want to be turned away. He is fraught and despite his quietude, the fact that he has sought someone out – sought Nanami out, of all people – says that he is just about coming undone.
Gojo is overwhelmed with something sharp, crackling, and hissing and Nanami is to be his fuse breaker – before the whole house burns down.
He closes his eyes and shakes his head minutely. As if something had been waiting for him to utter these words, he lets them fall from his lips without properly acknowledging their weight, “You can stay.”
And he feels it now, the shift in the space of his room. It feels like time has stopped. The invisible dust floats freely in the moon’s light, refusing to settle. The breeze of the outside has calmed into an eerie stillness. The sounds of the cicadas crying and crickets chirping fade into the background. He thinks that, if he turned around, he would find that the hands of the analog clock on the wall no longer move.
He’s at a fork in the path, and whatever choice he makes here will spin endlessly and snowball into something far bigger than can be contained.
Gojo pushes himself up, his deceptively lanky arms proving a firm enclosure for Nanami as he looks down from above with an impassive expression. He is a predator lying in wait.
Nanami feels like Gojo is a trick on the eyes. He is much larger than he looks from afar. He has made the realization time and time again, the very same thoughts clouding over his brain when he was standing and sitting by him in the cafeteria or those few classes they might have shared – but now, up close and personal, he is huge.
He looks up at Gojo and remembers what he was in better days. Brighter, louder, weightless. He remembers his own better days and those who had to be left behind in them. Geto, the lock to Gojo’s chest. Yu, the saccharine presence to his existence.
In a few days, he will cut himself loose from the tight coil of this society. In a few days, he will leave behind Gojo and Ieiri and only have the memories of their better days to keep him company.
He thinks of how unfair it is, that people like them have to go through this, sacrificing their childhoods and their lives for a world that uses them as pawns on a chessboard. One is taken, another is put in its place, and the war on the opposing side continues. The perpetual motion machine.
Yu has already become a casualty. He was selfless to the bone, so readily sacrificing himself for one realm that is blissfully unaware and another that is ungrateful. He was a victim, ultimately killed by the expiatory expectation that he should be ready and willing to lay his life on the line just because he got stuck with the right combination of the wrong genes.
But Nanami has never once considered himself a selfless person. He is sick of the threat looming over their heads like a predator eyeing their prey. So much so that he is running away at the earliest convenience, taking a turn as soon as the guardrail breaks. Instead of living for the sake of others, he will live for only himself. He wants to do what he wants to do, live as precariously as he so chooses, and act recklessly in a way he could never afford on the field.
Even if only for a night.
So he reaches up, holds Gojo’s face in his hands, and guides him down just as he pulls himself up. When their lips meet, neither of their eyes are closed. Nanami watches Gojo, just as Gojo watches him. He waits for a moment, gauging a reaction, but he doesn’t get one. Gojo stares at him unblinkingly, his blue irises peering into his own, and in his core, Nanami feels himself wilt. The foolishness of his decision churns his stomach, warms his throat. He pulls away from the kiss as though to escape, but Gojo leans in, following the faint trail of his lips.
They live for the tether for a few moments, languidly connecting and breaking apart over and over again until Gojo shifts downward, kissing the sharp edge of his chin and pressing pecks that trail down to his collarbone. He nips at the delicate skin, encouraging a breathy exhale from Nanami. He tilts his head further back, his neck creating a pretty arch off the bed, as he allows Gojo more canvas to work with.
Gojo’s knees move, bending on either side of him. He continues on his warpath, mouthing at his collar, biting and sucking and tasting what he can. He travels often, never showing too much attention to one place, and Nanami wants to pretend that he does not freeze, the pleasure and delirium of doing something so strangely wrong halting to a heart-shocking stop, every time Gojo laps at his scent glands, every time he circles around the valley where his neck meets his shoulder. But it's thanks to that that he can recognize the subtle stutter and pause in Gojo's own movements at the same spots.
Neither one of them is prepared to take this particular plunge, and neither one of them is far gone enough into their biology to gather the courage to do so.
They continue to dance around it, Nanami sighing and groaning and panting as Gojo nibbles and licks and sucks at the safest spots on the map of his body. One of Gojo's hands wanders from the side of Nanami's head and it leaves goosebumps along his skin as Gojo drags it down his chest to his waist, raising his nightshirt at the hem and slipping languidly inside. It presses at his stomach, grabbing and twisting the patches of skin it touches.
It feels, in all fairness, weird. Ticklish, almost. The kisses are nice, an action of warmth from another person that he has not felt in a long while. Gojo’s hands are cold, reminiscent of the winter’s touch against his pale skin. And all he’s doing is rubbing his fingers into Nanami’s dips and superficial nooks and crannies.
The only thing guiding Nanami is the assurance of an intimate embrace, the promise of a kind of passion that he has lacked for a long time. A balm to soothe the shrieking in his soul – it’s a temporary solution, at best; will only get him through this difficult night. Anything is better than thinking about the small party they’d hosted in his dorm room tonight, his graduation ceremony the day after, and the bright non-jujutsu world waiting a few days later. He doesn’t want to remember that he is the only person of his year to make it far enough to see any of the three.
He can only guess what’s in it for Gojo. Perhaps a night to help him forget, too? Or maybe just another omega sleeve to sink his knot into. Maybe he’d dreamt about this, thought about it so many times he could hardly stop himself from jumping Nanami right before he had the chance to leave forever. His instincts pulling and taunting and dragging at the thought of yet another omega going too far from his reach. Perhaps a moment of weakness brought on by the painful throes of withdrawal from the one who hurts him most. Just one night, Gojo had probably thought for days, weeks, months leading up to this, Just one to tide me over.
He’s been starved, surely, for this specific flavor of attention.
Is it the same for himself?
Could he say for sure that Gojo is the only one being pressured by the beckoning of his biology? Likely not, he must admit. Nanami does not mistake himself so resilient as to ignore such a part of himself. The urges of his instinct come in sharp, quick bursts. So sudden that he would never have the chance to defend himself, even if he wanted to. He never felt the need to embrace Gojo intimately like this before, but then Gojo comes up to him, presents himself in this vulnerable manner, begs and pleads to be let in, and suddenly all Nanami has ever wanted was to give in, just this one night, to the pull of the dark.
Things continue at a comfortable pace from here – it must be, because clothes aren’t thrown around and the sheets don’t fall, and nothing bangs against the wall. But the truth of the moment is that for Nanami, time feels equal parts too slow to take patiently and too fast to believe happened. At one point, he is letting Gojo take off his pants – watching with great focus as he pulls at the drawstring, tugs at it so that the neat bows come loose, pries gently so that the secure cinching around his waist goes slack, and curls two fingers from each hand into the waistband, pulling it down his legs and off his feet.
At another moment, Gojo is shirtless and then lacks his pants as well, and Nanami can only recall a blurry memory of Gojo easing himself out of those articles. All too quickly, they’re both essentially down to their boxer briefs, though Gojo has saved Nanami’s shirt from the process. A peculiarly timid thought has Nanami looking away, his knees drawing together as though to hide his core in between.
The last time he had done anything like this was over three years ago, with Yu. Even then it was nothing like this.
That time was fervent and so intense, from beginning to end. They had finished up with their hardest curse to date – not yet the hardest curse to come – and Nanami was running high on a slightly manic combination of adrenaline and pre-heat nesting energy and the relief that neither of them had just fucking died.
He remembers being quiet, as much as he could be, as they were driven back to the school. Yu had filled the space of the car with loud, continuous conversation – a conversation where both sides were himself, really – but at some point, he trailed off to a stop, having noticed Nanami’s new demeanor. While he had been quiet, Nanami wasn’t ignoring Yu. He was watching him. And he hadn’t been subtle.
The sight of Yu’s hands, which had moved with such precision as they fought, and the sound of his voice, just slightly hoarse from all his barked techniques, had felt uneven and coarse against him, but not in an unpleasant way. Yu’s voice had scratched against his ears, scratched at him somewhere low, and all he had wanted to do was rut against him until he was raw and red.
Back at the dorm, Nanami had just enough self-control to last him up until his door, and from there he had grabbed Yu and hauled him inside. The adrenaline hadn’t seeped out of his bones, not with the extra energy of pre-heat egging it on and the fact that Yu was sitting right beside him continuously catalyzing a violent flurry of reaction. He’d pulled and yanked and twisted, guiding and simultaneously being led across the floor in a hasty dance until they were atop his bed, naked and lively.
He remembers that Yu had kissed him like he was a homecoming. Yu had kissed him like he was something precious. Like Nanami was the sun and the flowers and the clouds in the sky. Yu was passionate, the room alive with the heat of their joined beings. He took to his role with the same ready vigor he took anything else in his path. And it was so quick, they raced through some steps. They couldn’t stand to be apart from one another for much longer. They were both still warm and breathing, but it was as if they needed to feel it. It ached when Nanami took Yu whole, but in the type of way it aches to lay in a tub of steaming water. He had yearned for it, and the comfort of finally having it made his entire body pulse. It felt like every inch of himself was for Yu, was of Yu, was by Yu.
And this…this is slow and carefully stable. Gojo presses and pulls gently, as though this fragile thing between them will break and fall away if either of them makes any sudden or heavy movements. Yu was generous, and Nanami had gone into this with no inclination as to what kind of lover Gojo was.
But Gojo takes him in with a calm that almost unnerves him. He is slow, once again, but this time it feels different. His hands move to Nanami’s underwear – here, Nanami can feel himself tremble and his breath hitch with apprehension; there is no going back from here – and he digs his finger into the tight waistband. Nanami watches as he carefully peels them from his thighs down off his feet, then looks at it as it drops off the edge of the bed.
He hears the shuffle of fabric and turns his head to see Gojo doing about the same thing to himself. Nanami can’t help himself – he stares. Gojo is built quite well. A bubble of forgone amusement pops in his mind – he remembers just flagrantly conspiring with Yu, after yet another shirked duty by their group of seniors, that Gojo had the money, the status, the distinction, and the obtrusively carefree attitude of a man hiding something. Compensating, perhaps?
At the time, he never would have hoped to find out. Now, he sees that he was wrong.
He breathes slowly as Gojo bends down, atop him once again so that he lays prisoner in his cage of deceptively lanky arms, his knees just brushing his inner thighs. His eyes, though dulled by his lack of character, are still startlingly bright. He feels cornered just looking up at them, like a deer stopped before headlights. Gojo leans down, bringing his face closer and closer to his, and Nanami tilts his neck to welcome him, to escape, to submit.
He takes what he is offered, breath hovering over Nanami’s shoulder. He feels a wet trail being made against the meat of it, and then Gojo bites softly. He inhales in surprise at the dull ache, the boldest move Gojo has made the entire night. It doesn’t feel sharp – he never broke the skin – but it will certainly bruise.
His own feelings on the matter are mixed. Part of him trills at the prospect of an alpha’s mark again. It has been much too long, it says. Another part despairs loudly, because this one is not the right one. He is replacing someone else’s whispered claim, retracing their touch with another’s, forgetting their existence by taking shelter in another’s. What will be left of him , if you are not left to remember?
Nanami falters, this time. Just this one time, he hesitates. Things he resolutely denied himself tonight just start inching ever closer, creeping into his mind’s eye. In this moment of quiet, where he is waiting for the next bit, standing at the precipice of recklessness, his ghosts choose to commence their haunt.
But Gojo shifts, and Nanami gasps as tingles light up against his spine.
Between them, he has brushed their bare members together and the skin-to-skin contact has him reeling, the thoughts of all else but this moment kicked back into obscurity. Gojo nips the shoulder he had just bitten, laying small kisses as though in apology. Nanami wonders if the tenderness is for him.
Gojo rocks against him with a slow pace, the brushes light and languid as though painting a soft picture of a fleeting spring. The feeling is strange, at first, but then Nanami gets a bit used to the teasing pleasure. A suckle close to – but, importantly, not on – his scent gland has him sighing, purely because it feels apropos for the moment, “Gojo-san .”
He doesn’t expect Gojo to stutter to an abrupt stop.
The quick cessation of the sway of their bodies sends Nanami’s mind reeling. He stares at Gojo’s hair, immediately wondering if he’s done something wrong.
He doesn’t move up, so he can’t see Gojo as he suddenly shivers atop him. “Not tonight,” he says – pleads, really – and though his voice is whole, Nanami can hear that there is something cracked and broken in it. Gojo’s height and weight engulf Nanami completely, keeps him exactly where he is like a paperweight above important documents. Despite being taller than Nanami, their heads are at just about the same place. His head is slotted right into the space above Nanami’s left shoulder, a warm nook where it rests between that, his neck, and the bed underneath. The breaths that leave his lips gently caress the shell of his ear. “Please,” he hears, so desperate, so quiet that the gentle early spring breeze could have brought it in from far, far away.
Nanami closes his eyes because he knows. Knows in a sorry, desperate, and intimate way that this is all just an act in escapism. “Satoru,” he acquiesces.
Above him, his senior tenses, like he had not expected the concession. He relaxes just as quickly, and far more than he was before, in a way Nanami did not think he could. He goes almost boneless, just a heavy blanket of skin and muscle that pins him down into the mattress. Gojo could be assumed asleep, maybe dead, if not for the next curl of air against his ear.
“Kento.” His name, brushed over him with a soft bristle paintbrush over the pale canvas of his frame. “Kento.” He rocks again, and again. This time, it’s more regular, less slow, and much longer. He moves in a way that works both of their cocks together, from base to tip.
Thank you, Nanami thinks, moaning under his breath and laying his head back, neck bare as he takes the offering bestowed upon him. It’s a thank you wrapped in the letters of his name.
At some point, between one roll of his hips and another, one of Gojo’s hands begins sliding down his body, below the waist. He doesn’t think of it, doesn’t register it in any meaningful way until a finger pokes and prods at his entrance. Gojo is gentle with him in a manner that makes him think this is not meant for him. He is careful, listening to Nanami’s vocal cues. When his breath hitches in discomfort at a wrong move or a stretch, Gojo is attentive, apologetic. When he pushes in two slim fingers, he pulls away from his junior and slides down to his hip.
Nanami stares, momentarily breathless by the stimulation and irrationally vexed by the sudden ending of it. Cerulean eyes peer up at him through the flutter of delicate lashes. His gaze is bland, watching Nanami for a reaction but not in a mischievous way. If he didn’t know better, he would think Gojo is playing coy.
With a third addition, Nanami grimaces slightly at the stretch, and Gojo presses kisses along his pelvic bone until he reaches his cock, and then he makes sure to stare right at him as he presses his lips against the tip. Nanami can’t withhold the twitch that starts in reaction to it.
“G-Satoru,” the name comes out hesitant, the mistake just barely covered. “Don’t–” You don’t have to do this, he’s trying to say, but Gojo licks a bold stripe over the sensitive length and welcomes half of it into the plush warmth of his mouth – Nanami hisses in enraptured surprise.
A strong hand pushes his thigh down flush against the bed when he jolts. Gojo sucks in just the right ways to counter the dull discomfort of being stretched open, and with quick expertise. His fingers travel, searching, and then press against a particularly sensitive spot. He shudders with a hitched whine.
Gojo’s extra motions suddenly become fuel to the growing fire. He is relentless, pressing and curling and twisting within him, all directed at the very same spot. Nanami is embarrassed by the way he pants for purchase against the current of pleasure that inundates his senses. Something his lower stomach tingles, and with an admittedly bratty strike of frustration, he gathers enough of himself to refuse it.
“Enough,” he grits out lowly, jaw clenched, pushing a brave hand into Gojo’s brilliant locks of hair and tugging demandingly at the strands until he lets up. He stares at his senior with a gaze he tries to harden, but he knows the effect is lost somewhere in the way his legs tremble or along the wavering of his voice.
He doesn’t say more, too proud to vocalize his wants with this particular man, nor does he repeat himself, but this version of Gojo seems content with listening, anyway. Even this far in, Nanami feels that strum of apprehension quiver beneath his skin as he watches Gojo draw himself up into a more proper position. He hasn’t done this with anyone other than Yu. And, irrationally, some part of himself had felt he had been made for the shape Yu, and it hasn’t let up on that conviction yet.
But good things have already come to their end, he thinks. Only the damned are left behind to fester.
Gojo lines himself against him. Nanami is dutifully quiet, save for a few measured huffs, as he presses inside, mercifully slow, uncharacteristically considerate in a way that still kind of unnerves him. The incessant buzzing of his thoughts, both displeased and relieved, is pushed out with each inch forward. There is a bitter twinge that follows behind them, the faintest disappointment that, as currently proven, he was not made for Yu; Gojo does a pretty good job of filling the space himself.
And by the time his senior bottoms out within him, Nanami has no more reservations to appease. From here on out, words are superfluous.
Gojo is skilled in this, too, it appears. He thrusts with a healthy pace, confident and never faltering. He moves with efficient rolls and tucks. Nanami is all too happy with wrapping his legs around his slender waist, throwing his arms over Gojo’s back, and being led through the waters.
Throughout, in a frame of mind that still stubbornly thinks, his head idly tucked into the nook of a strong shoulder, Nanami ponders if Gojo is in the same boat as him. Old traces of soft kisses breathing on his lips, brushing up against them with a teasing embrace. Memories of impulsive, rushed moments where they could not do much, but needed, itched to touch one another in some way. The thin tendrils of scents stuck in his nose, hot with pleasure, maybe a ghost in his hand, maybe a phantom in his mouth. Languid mornings and calm nights spent going not too far, yet not far enough.
He ponders if Gojo is thinking of all of that right now, replacing reality in favor of the dream. Erasing the dissonance between who is really in front of him and the specter in his mind. Nanami’s long, deft fingers swapped for bigger, calloused ones; Nanami’s blond curtains darkened into midnight locks; Nanami’s sculpted, euro-typical face molded into a rounder, eastern one.
He ponders if he would be bitter if he were not doing the very same thing.
The exchange feels equal parts wrong and right. When he says Gojo’s name, moaning, sighing, panting, the boy sags with something just a tad too desperate to be relief. It feels like scratching an impossible itch. It feels like feeding long-sought drugs to an anguished and wretched addict with his own hands. When he says Gojo’s name, Nanami feels a bit like that god Gojo has always seemed to be with all his height, his appearance, his power.
But, surely, at this moment, at this time when Gojo has sought him out for solace – when Nanami can so clearly run his fingers through the white locks of his hair and dance his hands down the pale expanse of his body, unfettered by the gates of Infinity – surely, Gojo is not that god? Not a god at all. Just a poor boy in despair. A tormented sinner knelt at the steps of a church.
This is the power Gojo heralds over all of them, the power to take down God and become one. Nanami has to close his eyes at the idea of it, of the options that lay hushed, undulating, quivering underneath his fingertips. Surely, this is too much for one person to handle.
For the first time, much later than he should have, given the events that enshrouded them all – Nanami thinks, Gojo is an unfortunate alpha.
It is possible, then, that Gojo was crossed by that same hapless star as Nanami. As Yu.
They spend the night together, entangled in desperate embraces that do not belong to one another. Just before dawn, Nanami falls asleep. When he wakes up in the late morning, the sun high and blazing through his window, every concrete trace of Gojo is gone.
He does not see Gojo again until graduation day, and he is back on that far, far away planet. He stares pensively at Nanami, in a dapper suit and with a new diploma and final transcript in hand, offering a false shell of the enthusiasm he had lost after that period three years ago – if he intends to send Nanami off like this, send him away from this side of the world with a good memory of those he has left, it doesn’t work.
Frankly, he’s offended that he thinks it would truly deceive him. It would have been better if he hadn’t tried to say goodbye at all.
Nanami remembers that night and that side of Gojo he had never seen before. It’s like seeing a new picture out of an optical illusion that houses two. Now that Nanami has seen it, knows it’s there, it’s all too hard to unsee. He knows now that Gojo’s playing a role he’s known to, as though acting it out will make the real thing come back. He knows that’s all it is – an act. He’s seen what lurks behind the red curtains – a boy who is ever lost in a universe where he and Geto can not be at each other’s side.
His bags are packed, though. In a week, he’s left campus and a life he’s grown to truly despise.
The spring term starts with a flourish of soft, pink cherry blossoms, a sea of new faces, and a scene of normalcy he has not laid witness to in years. He no longer has to think about his next mission, no longer has to worry about the missions of others, nor prepare himself to hear of another violent and untimely demise of a person the same age that Yu will stay.
And yet, he feels it’s hard to get properly acclimated. These factors are not something he will mourn the absence of, but living in a world that does not know about curses, cursed energy, and everything that comes with it makes him feel like an outsider. He had been enshrouded in the pitch-black darkness of the cursed world for so long, it was like he was living under a rock as the rest of the unaware world moved at lightning’s pace. Now that he is out, it’s hard to relate to any of the normal experiences the rest of his peers share.
He is polite to his dormmates and those few classmates who approach him out of sheer sociability, amicable at best. He tries, for a few weeks at the start, to become more communicative, but the warm tones he tries to raise always fall flat. He quickly gets irritated by the naive and rowdy – sometimes arrogant – nature of his fellow students, who are oh so blessed not to know the true hardship that lurks behind the veil. Invites for parties and other useless gatherings get civilly declined. Interactions are saved for class discussions or unavoidable conversations with those he must associate with.
He does not offer any more of himself than he needs to, and soon most people steer clear. He gets polite offers that everyone knows he will refuse. He converses only when necessary. The rest of his time is spent studying – he finds, ironically, that even though he had coveted to only study back in high school, doing so here feels unproductive. His grades prosper, and his professors sing his praises, but he is maddeningly unsatisfied. The hole in his chest is not filled.
Still, Nanami gets accustomed to university life in the blessedly unaware world.
What a big fucking joke.
Muttered curses fall through his lips, the only survivors from the ruins of what feels like a mental collapse. He sits there, wide-eyed and frozen in one of the bathroom stalls, as he looks down at the plastic test in his hands. It’s early June, just about two and a half months since he left the world of curses, and he can feel the life he has struggled to craft for himself circling down the drain in a turbulent spiral.
Given the lateness of his normally timely heat and the distinct lack of a pre-heat when he was scheduled for one just a couple weeks ago, he took the test just to prove to himself that it was not possible – and yet, the evidence is right in front of him, sitting innocuously in the palm of his hand.
The recent weeks of dizziness and nausea play through his memories with low, suspense-building strings. He chalked it up to stress, encouraging himself to assume it was the very same reason his heat was late. He had not let himself realize the threat that settled just beyond until the abrupt, lurching reveal. By the time he did, it was already too late.
It had to have been that one night; there is only one person who this problem can be attributed to, at least in part. Only one, and Nanami had just happily left him behind when he all but ran from the world of jujutsu.
He grits his teeth and bows forward, tightening his hand into a fist that makes the plastic creak. He viciously curses his carelessness, tearing down the events from nearly three months ago in his brain. He should not have let Gojo in through the door. He should not have agreed to that night. He should not have felt pity, nor guilt. He should have left it all be, because now his choices have piled up and piled high, spun out and spun far, snowballed into something far greater than he can afford.
Jujutsu society is not kind to those who manage to escape it. It always has the last fucking laugh.