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Typically, Nanami Kento did not think of his life in separate stages but rather as an accumulation of events that led him to where he is today.
If he were to go even further than that, he’d say that most of these events were marked by loss. Whether it be a big loss, like losing a friend, or small, like minor inconveniences throughout the day, these events all centered around the loss of something. Loss is what makes someone an adult, after all, and Kento was not the child who had walked into the Tokyo school shoulder to shoulder with Haibara Yu all those years ago. His life was defined by loss, and had been so up until now.
Up until Itadori Yuuji.
Itadori Yuuji is an enigma: despite his massive potential for destruction and death, courtesy of the fact that he quite literally houses the King of Curses who was birthed from the hatred between humans, all he wants to do is help people. He says such when Gojo introduces him to Kento. Prove that you’re more than just Sukuna’s vessel, Kento tells him, prove to me that Gojo was right to postpone your execution, and Itadori does.
Kento wants to regret agreeing to take one of Gojo’s students under his wing, but he can’t. Meeting Itadori Yuuji had changed him, just as much as losing Yu had. Between caving into an ice cream run (he’d blame that one on Ijichi), cooking dinner for two instead of one, and throwing a blanket over Itadori when he’d passed out on the couch, Kento could feel the walls he’d put up slowly being chipped away at. For the first time in his life, Kento began to question if loss was really the only thing that defined adulthood.
Perhaps taking care of a child had changed him.
“Am I a hindrance, Nanamin? Take me with you next time.” Itadori says when they’re standing in the hallway. Ijichi’s waiting for them in the car outside, though Itadori keeps his feet planted where they are. “‘My comrade died. But I wasn’t there. Because I’m a child’,”
He frowns, clenching his fists.
“I’d feel bad saying that.”
And really, the answer is very simple to Kento.
“That’s out of the question,” comes the easy reply, and he continues before Itadori can interrupt. “As you know, the enemy uses restructured humans. Some people cannot be helped. As long as you’re in this business, there will come a day where you will have to kill someone… but today is not that day.”
Kento drops his arms from their crossed position and steps from the wall, beginning to make his way toward the door. He expects that Itadori will follow, but when he doesn’t, Kento stops and sighs.
“Please understand, Itadori-kun, being a child is no crime.” Putting children into this work field is the crime. Teenagers dying like Haibara Yu did is the crime.
The afterthought catches him off guard, and he’s glad he’d already stopped walking since he’s sure it would’ve sent him stumbling.
Haibara. It’s been a long time since he’d thought of his dead classmate, but suddenly he’s looking at a reflection of him in the child with the bright smile and the weight of the world on his shoulders. When Kento really thinks about it, they’re pretty similar, aren’t they? Always the optimist, always wanting to prove themselves, always…
“From today onwards, I’ll have you observe Yoshino Junpei,” he says, finally breaking the silence. It’s the safer option to keep him out of harm’s way, and Itadori at least seems to accept this responsibility.
Being a child is no crime. Itadori Yuuji deserves to keep his youth.
After Haibara Yu, Kento had promised himself that he would never care for anyone in that way again.
Gojo Satoru probably came the closest, just by virtue of spending so much time with him, but even then, there was still a wall there that Kento had no plans of taking down. Gojo was a friend, but a friend in the only way you can be when there’s an emotional disconnect that neither of you address, and a friend in the only way you can be when you both see each other as a replacement for someone who was lost.
Kento had promised himself there would be no second Haibara Yu.
He’d promised himself that, yet here he is, cradling Itadori’s head in his lap as a fear he thought he’d forgotten long ago settles in his gut.
Ijichi doesn’t take his eyes off the road when he drives, but it still feels like they’re going too slow. It’s not his fault, Kento knows this, so his stress can’t be directed at their driver. Still, as much as he passes himself off as calm and collected, the uncontrollable bounce of his leg gives it away.
His jacket is soaked in blood at this point—he’s not sure how effective it is to keep it wrapped around Itadori’s torso like it is, but that and the first aid kid Ijichi keeps in the back pocket of his seat is all they’ve got at the moment. At least he can still feel Itadori’s short breaths against his forearm when he presses down on his chest.
They shouldn’t even be in this situation in the first place.
Part of him is annoyed. Annoyed for letting this happen, annoyed for taking so long to find Itadori, annoyed for letting the curse get to him first, annoyed for not checking Itadori’s wounds despite knowing he was injured…
But he’s also annoyed for letting himself get attached. It’s easier to accept loss when he has his walls up, when there is no emotional connection to lose. Loss is what makes one into an adult after all, and accepting that is the only way to mature. And yet, Kento has decided he refuses to lose Itadori.
Perhaps he’s still the child who had walked into the Tokyo school shoulder to shoulder with Haibara Yu all those years ago after all.
It’s hard to make out what Ijichi’s mumbling, but Kento focuses on it anyway. Focus on that, compartmentalize, ignore the blood on his hands.
He’s dealt with this before.
“He’ll be ok,” he says suddenly, startling Ijichi out who looks at him through the front mirror, eyebrows furrowed in worry.
“He’ll be ok,” Kento repeats, and he decides against figuring out who he’s trying to convince.
The forty-eight hours after Yoshino Junpei’s death pass quickly. Kento takes Itadori out for ice cream when Shoko clears him.
“How are you feeling?” he asks Itadori when they’re sitting at a table outside the parlor, a quickly melting cone of salted caramel and ube ice cream in Itadori’s hand and a bowl of pistachio in Kento’s. Itadori looks up from his ice cream and shrugs.
“Pretty ok for getting impaled two days ago, I think. Ieiri-san is really good at what she does, I’m only a little sore from throwing my weight around and my hands kinda hurt, but it could be worse, plus—“ Kento holds up a hand to cut him off.
“That’s not what I meant, Itadori-kun.” Itadori closes his mouth. They’d sort of had this conversation in the morgue, where Kento acknowledged that Itadori is a jujutsu sorcerer in his own right, but it had been far too brief for either of them to fully process what had unfolded. Itadori had been tired and on pain medication, and Kento had still been covered in his mentee’s blood. He’d never thought about keeping spare clothes at the college until that night.
“Um… I don’t really know,” Itadori mumbles, long forgotten ice cream dripping onto his hand. “It’s not like I haven’t lost people before but… even though I only knew him for a little bit, something about this one feels different.”
Despite how much Itadori has lost, he’s still a child at the end of the day. He’s still naive enough to want to save everyone.
Some people cannot be helped.
Kento sets his spoon down in his cup. He’s not very good at the whole comforting thing—Haibara had always been better—but it feels wrong to breach the topic and then leave it without closure. He doesn’t want to do that to Itadori.
“Why don’t you tell me about him?” he suggests and something lights up in Itadori’s eyes. It’s easy for Itadori to talk about Yoshino Junpei, Kento quickly learns.
He learns a lot of things while Itadori talks, actually. He learns how Itadori befriended Yoshino through their mutual love of Worm Humans 2, and how Itadori had pranked a school principal in order to make Yoshino more comfortable when they first met. He learns Yoshino’s favorite dish—cold soba, Itadori tells him—and what type of music the two liked to the listen to. He also learns of Yoshino’s conflicting morals, but because of how he was treated in school, not through any fault of his own, and he learns of the kindness of Yoshino’s mother, who cooked a meal for all of them despite not even knowing who Itadori was.
Through this, Kento remembers how to mourn. Yoshino was a child, just as Itadori is, and watching Itadori recount their days together as ice cream drips down his hand reminds Kento of just how young the boy in his charge is.
“Even if I couldn’t give him a proper death… I’m glad I met him,” Itadori finishes, his tone slipping back into something more serious and sad. He almost sounds wishful—his memories of Yoshino will forever be bittersweet.
Kento swallows his own memories before they can overcome him and nods, looking down at the remains of his own melted ice cream. After a moment of contemplation, he reaches over to toss it into the bin.
“I’m sure he was glad to have met you as well, Itadori-kun,” Kento assures softly, readying to stand up from his seat. Itadori does the same, though Kento gestures to the ice cream that’s practically soup in a waffle cone now. “You might want to watch that. It will get on your shirt if you don’t.”
At that, Itadori seems to suddenly realize that his hand is half covered in the melted sugar now and leans over to lick the purple drops off his wrist. It’s a childish sight, but it’s no crime to be a child.
Kento feels his lips twitching up into a smile.
They rent a set of movies on Itadori’s last official day of being dead.
Or in other words, his last day staying with Kento.
Kento knows it’s the series that Itadori and Yoshino Junpei had bonded over. He’d seen the way Itadori immediately honed in on the title when Kento had passed it over while scrolling, recognized the name from their conversation by the ice cream parlor when he took a closer look, and while Itadori had insisted they didn’t need to watch it, Kento had rented all of them anyway. The three thousand yen wouldn’t even be a dent to his paycheck, and it was worth it to give Itadori some sense of normalcy as a child before returning to school.
It’s how he winds up sitting on the couch on his day off, watching a movie he doesn’t understand while Yuuji sits next to him, one of Yaga’s cursed dolls snug in his lap.
“Three is definitely the worst out of the series,” Itadori’s saying as the movie plays, and Kento pretends to know what he’s talking about. “But ummm it’s a splatter movie so I guess you can’t really expect much substance out of it. But two—”
Itadori pauses, as if he’s remembering something. Kento gets the feeling that he’s had this conversation before.
“Well, two was really something I think! That’s the one we just finished. It isn’t really different from one and three when you first look at it, but there’s a nice emotional transition with the perfectionist giving up everything, right? Even though it’s the most gore-y, it has the most depth, so I really like it. Three kind of falls short after that… but I think we should still watch three since you already rented it, and you can see what I’m talking about. And it might be entertaining if you like that sort of stuff!”
Kento doesn’t really, but he doesn’t say that. In fact, he can’t really see the appeal to these movies at all, but if Itadori enjoys it, then he figures he doesn’t mind.
It does remind him of something, though.
“Before I forget, I have some old movies I’m never going to watch. You should have them. I’m sure Gojo’s picks get tiring,” Kento says as he stands up then walks to crouch beside the cabinet. A brown paper bag sits inside when he opens it, and he pulls that out. “They’re mostly movies from when I was a teenager but these Worm Human movies are older than that, so you might know a few already.”
The rustling of the bag and Kento’s comment easily break Itadori’s attention away from the movie—after all, he did say three was the most boring out of the series, and it’s barely even started—and he tips his head to the side, eyes wide in confusion. “Are you sure?”
Kento hands the bag off to him.
“Yes. I have no use for them and they will just collect dust if I don’t give them away,” Kento assures him and that’s all the invitation Itadori needs to start digging through. It’s mostly Ghibli movies, some American action films, and a handful of Chinese films too, like the Ip Man films—Itadori stacks them in a pile next to his thigh as he goes through, though he suddenly stops just as Kento’s settling back into his seat on the couch.
“Hey, Nanamin?”
“Hm?”
“Who’s Haibara Yu?”
Kento freezes, though Itadori doesn’t seem to notice at first, too busy looking down at the letter at the bottom of the brown bag. “There’s a card signed off from him under all the movies here. It looks kind of old, though…”
Kento immediately recognizes the slightly crumpled blue card when Itadori holds it up: a birthday card with Haibara Yu’s messy writing scribbled over it. He remembers when Yu gave it to him, and remembers tucking it into the bottom of the bag underneath all the movies when he cleared Yu’s room out following his death. The movies were the only thing he hadn’t returned to the Haibara family.
In that moment, all he can do is stare, long enough that Itadori picks up something is wrong.
“Oh… I’m sorry,” he says after a moment and it’s enough to break Kento out of his shock. He opens his mouth, closes it, then shakes his head.
“There is no need for you to apologize, Itadori-kun,” he says and Itadori silently holds the letter out for him to take. He hesitates for a moment before accepting, then folding it in two to put in his back pocket. Itadori doesn’t ask anymore questions about Haibara Yu—just goes back to commenting on the movie as he had been before, like nothing had happened, and Kento’s grateful for that.
It isn’t until the final scene plays through that Itadori fully turns to look at him once again.
“You’ll still talk to me even when I’m back in school, right Nanamin?” Itadori asks when the credits are rolling, as if it’s even a question. Kento almost snorts in disbelief.
“Of course,” he responds, and Itadori beams.
Nanami Kento sees a lot when he looks at Itadori Yuuji. He sees the pink hair first. Then he sees someone with bright eyes, and after, he sees a blinding smile. He sees someone who’s determined, and someone who’s selfless. When he looks past all of that, he sees a child who’s been wronged by the system that should’ve supported him, and his own inability to protect Itadori from that.
He sees Haibara Yu staring right back at him.
What the hell was he trying to do anyway?
Haibara’s still there when he blinks. Or winks, really, since he can’t feel his left eye anymore, much less if it’s even still there. He must really be losing it now, Kento muses to himself, but he still turns his head when Haibara lifts up an arm and points across the platform.
It almost looks like Itadori’s standing at the end of Haibara’s finger.
Most of all, Kento sees his purpose when he looks at Itadori Yuuji. That’s not right though if he says it to Itadori, because then it’ll just become a curse for him. It’ll curse him like how Haibara inadvertently cursed Kento when he died.
I can’t do that to him, Haibara.
Kento thinks about his life. He thinks about his work, about running away from the jujutsu world only to return four years later, about why he chose to leave and why he chose to come back. He thinks about the young woman working behind the counter at the bakery, about his coworkers that he left behind without a second thought, about Gojo Satoru and how he must feel being sealed away like he is.
He thinks about Malaysia and all the books he’s bought but never read. He thinks about flipping through the pages, like taking back the time he lost, and he thinks about whether or not he’s done enough. He thinks about whether Maki and Naobito are ok.
And as Haibara’s apparition fades, he thinks about Itadori Yuuji. Just Itadori Yuuji, standing on the other side of the station.
Kento’s tired of running and losing. He’s all grown up now after all this loss, isn’t he?
Perhaps it’s time for him to let go.
“You’ve got it from here,” Kento says with a smile, finally registering the cold hand pressed against his chest.
He’ll pack for Malaysia tonight, he thinks. That would be nice.
I’ll bring you back a souvenir, Haibara.
Do you prefer something sweet or salty?