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❦
Of the two of them Getou had presented first. November, not that it mattered; only that nothing so tender as the frosting of snow atop Gojo’s lashes had ever made him feel so violent.
His friend’s voice sounded as though at the end of a long, narrowing tunnel, into which he tossed the words over his shoulder like salt, “you good?”
Ankle deep in the white plough Getou could’ve stripped down to his bones and burnt a crater straight through. It had been sudden, the onset: moreso than he ever expected. This fire traversed him as if he were touchpaper.
Still, he’d gritted, “think so.”
Gojo didn’t have a scent, not really, not yet. Getou still wanted to shred the scarf from his throat like poached meat and get to the blood of it. Flatten his tongue to search for something saccharine, nectar bleeding through the pale neck of a willow tree.
Gojo had come closer, which was a horrifying action, an entirely vital one. Getou could only stammer, a useless hand raised, “don’t.”
They were between the canteen and the dormitories, having just finished a game-stew supper. The thick, fawn sky of winter evening, slush underfoot. Getou had been ravenous.
Gojo’s voice came to him, coldly factual. “I know what’s happening. You know what’s happening.” Getou would have him belly-down in a second and it would be easy, too. He’d had fantasies about his best friend – thoughts that he associated with the bleak mauve of 4am and the tooth-ache presence of shame – but it was a desire that had always felt too boyish, too implausible, to be anything with teeth. It was a fact that simply united him with all the others who found themselves this side of Gojo’s glass cabinet. His awestruck fingerprints along with everyone else’s.
But desire felt different, now. It was no longer just an idea: it equipped him. Never had he felt such a desperate need to see it realised. To reshape Gojo by the claw; to pick his cells from his nailbeds come morning.
He’d always been so sure addiction only counted if you’d tried the thing once. That theory was fast waning.
“We should take you to Sensei. You look like you’re gonna black out.” He remembers that: how Gojo was sure that he would be the one to do it, to take him there. That he would be a part of it, this change that was befalling Getou, from the very start. He was testing him, probably, even then, as he took his elbow crook, not flinching at the unnatural heat of him. Authoritative. Curious. Even amused, maybe, in his owlishness, by Getou’s torment. But undoubtably present. Too present, for something that was not, and wouldn’t be, his.
Of course, he knew already that Getou wanted him. In a way, it was like Gojo had been waiting for his becoming an alpha. Like he’d sewn the seed himself one night under cover of darkness. His absence of fear, of trepidation in that moment, was the product of careful forethought, prediction; his glee a result of seeing success in his own hypothesis. No matter what, Getou’d always had this unshakeable feeling that he was part of Gojo’s plan.
Always, his was the hand to push and to pull. It wasn’t new. Getou was a stock-motion doll. Gojo’s fingers manipulated his frame. His thumbprints a permanent whorl in the soft plasticine flesh of Getou’s inner arm. It wasn’t new.
Gojo had given him a day, at least, before calling on him. He joked that Getou looked like he was about to make a hole in the mattress and fuck the springs. He said it while snapping gum between his teeth: it was band-aid pink, flavour sucked out.
Granted Getou’s first rut was, physically, the most physical torment he’d ever had to endure. Couldn’t touch his dick anymore for how much it ached. The presence of Gojo’s body sent his mind into a tailspin, into a regular disaster. Even he knew that the whole room smelled of sickly seasalt and despair.
They would’ve warned Gojo, no doubt, to keep well clear of Getou’s room, but of course he had entered, blasé as anything, directly through the bedroom fucking door. Warping would’ve been better, if staying put really wasn’t an option. But everything he did was a quiet and amused fuck you. Fuck you and try to stop me.
Then again, it took fear to be brave. This Gojo did not possess.
I don’t mind, he’d said. Getou remembers it clear as cut diamond. You can. If you want.
They were on Getou’s bed. It had been a small though fleeting victory to detect the jump of Gojo’s pulse right there on his neck. And Getou remembers how he removed the gum, unperturbed, and stuck it behind his ear. “Not inside,” he’d only instructed, before he turned around.
And so Getou hadn’t entered him, but it wasn’t like he needed to. He humped the backs of his thighs and knotted for the first time between them, afterwards falling asleep open-mouthed at the crease of Gojo’s groin, totally punch-drunk on the scent of him, there where it was strongest. Gojo had pet his hair thoughtfully, absently. He didn’t bother loosening the elastic, and so couldn’t quite scratch where Getou needed it.
“I’ll be an omega,” he’d said, tone casual, but sure, into the encroaching twilight. “I’ve always thought it. Felt it, too, maybe.”
There was no so what to it. No follow-up statement. No inference of compatibility, of commitment; nothing to say what that outcome was supposed to mean for them. Getou waited. It didn’t come. The words lay useless, like yarn across his hands.
Was Gojo planning in his head, even then? Did he will it into existence? It’s a stupid thought but Getou thinks it now, all the same. Gojo probably bartered with deities. Etched his own fate on scroll-paper and burned it over tealights, whispering some sort of bullshit incantation. Getou’d always thought it. Gojo sitting one-on-one with the Gods. Cheating deals, shaking on it. Sneaking chess pieces into his pocket with his fingers crossed behind his back.
He’d been right. His presentation as omega came a rounded three months later. Their first time both presented had been without grandeur – which, privately, had mattered to Getou. They had fucked unceremoniously against a schooldesk, Gojo wailing with abandon while Getou tucked his burning face into in his neck, blue-hot embarrassment flooding him, fear of being caught and consequently expelled making his dick wither which Gojo still found the capacity to admonish him for. The staff wouldn’t look at him for a full week afterwards, but despite this, not one of them said a word in his direction. They couldn’t, because it was a Gojo matter, which was when Getou realised that for better or for worse he’d been selectively pulled within Gojo’s forcefield, unbonded as they remained. It felt good, and righteous: the sponsorship of his protection, of his name. It also felt unearned, and at times, inescapable. Like a large, staring blue eye, a permanent ceiling fixture to every room he entered.
❦
It’s how they fell into an unspoken arrangement whereby they would tend to one another when the need, for either of them, arose. As it happened, though, for better or for worse, their cycles never seemed to once align. Gojo’s heat was always medically controlled in strict alignment with his contract with Jujutsu Tech – while Getou, admittedly, could not take suppressants for how it clashed with his mood stabilisers and sleeping aids, a fact that he both discovered the hard way and also consistently lied to Gojo about.
Allergies, he’d told him. Gojo never enquired, anyway. He didn’t seem to care.
It didn’t escape Getou’s notice that Gojo’s presentation had gifted him a certain lustre. He sailed about campus like polished chrome, haloed with an air that Getou found at odds with every notion of vulnerability he’d been trained to expect from an omega. Arrogant, untouchable: these were words that already applied to Satoru Gojo, but his presentation took him somewhere beyond this. He became a boxed jewel. A moat of venom. Too precious to reach for and too bright to observe directly, beyond a snatched glance through squinted lids. Getou couldn’t be imagining it, what he left in his wake: that which made those he passed by quiver, like a wet branch.
And maybe it was just a Gojo thing, that in line with the more predictable ascent of his allure, of his radiance, so too did his thorns seem to lengthen, seem to grow more polished at the tip.
Getou, on the other hand, seemed only able to withdraw within himself. On presenting as alpha he’d thought to restore some family pride, having been born a brotherless boy and a problem child at that. Yet the fact never did eclipse what his mother saw in him, like he’d hoped it would. Maybe it was because, rather than grow into his status as alpha, he only seemed to detach and shrink from the walls of his being, like a balloon popped within a paper mâché cast.
They both, in Getou’s mind, never did quite fit the mould. But Gojo was always going take what burdened others and wear it like a fur coat. He was defiant. The kind to step on cracks, to dare the universe to grant him an adversity. Godless. Superstition was not his burden, guilt a stranger.
Getou knew guilt. Knew it like a hand on his shoulder. Knew it like nostalgia: the smell of his mother's perfume, her disappointed stare reflected in the eye of her embroidery needle.
Still. He understood how to salve the inadequacy that at times seemed to seize him. Fucking Gojo felt like fulfilling that duty. It felt a righteous kind of act. Something he could deliver, unfailingly. It was the only time he stepped into the alpha shoes and found not only that they fit, but made him taller. It made him want more; more from their arrangement, more beyond this temporary patronage. He wanted adherence, he wanted promise. He wanted, simply, to feel like this all the time. Sky-high and chasing purpose.
Getou did ask him, once, towards the start. Maybe it was after Gojo’s first few heats, which had always seemed to feel so hasty – Gojo’s face pressed to the shower tile, Getou’s back getting scratched up on the shingle beneath the bleachers. These quick fucks snatched between lessons, all because their professors refused to grant Getou the time off, claiming they wouldn't grant such concessions to an unbonded pair.
“Don’t you wanna, like.” Gojo’s chest was still lifting, flushed pretty, the fragrant smell of grass crushed beneath his knees, and Getou was trying – failing - to achieve a casual tone. “I dunno,” he went airily on, “sync it up, next time? If you come off your pills when I’m due, then –”
“Are you dumb as a box of rocks?” After the expletive, Gojo’s eyelids fluttered closed, dismissive. Getou had bitten his lower lip during and though Gojo had lurched away, he still saw it swell, pocked with the indent of his tooth. A blistering berry in the sun, a testimony. “I’m not risking pups by you,” Gojo sniffed.
“That’s not what I mean,” Getou protested, and it really wasn’t. They could still be careful – if anything, he was thinking they’d at least both be granted time off, and therefore get the chance to fuck in an actual bed rather than out here in the mulch, snatching ten before fifth period. He rolled his eyes, flopping back onto the flattened thatch of grass. "I know you won’t, anyway,” he grumbled. “You won't even let me bite you."
And it was true. Gojo said it too often to be a joke: that even Getou's gauges and chipped black nails would have him turned away at the Gojo Clan’s gates like a factory reject. He'd clamp his earlobe as he said it between thumb and forefinger, a motion that made Getou realise he could not always successfully differentiate between affection and mockery.
That was another thing about their arrangement. Getou knew the clan disapproved of him as a companion for Gojo, let alone as a mate. He’d worked hard to quarry the information out of Gojo: that Getou’s inferior lineage of non-sorcerers rendered him incompatible, a non-option, despite his power being the only in the world to even come close to their heir's.
And it was maybe because of that fact, he thinks at times bitterly, that the clan rejected his involvement. In those private moments when he’d shed his feigned indifference like an overly-cumbersome coat, he imagined himself and Gojo as two blackholes dancing. Even he knew they’d be unstoppable as one. It was easier to swallow, the notion that their combined power was a risk the clan was too frightened to take, and not that they simply hated him. Even if Gojo never really said much to convince him against the latter.
As it was, strictly no marks.
"Of course I won't," Gojo affirmed easily.
To prove it he'd once shoved a pillow between Getou's teeth when he’d started to climax. Laughed when Getou surfaced with a mouthful of feathers, a cruel edge to it, probably imagined. His feet remained hooked, nonetheless, to keep him locked. And he had let Getou manhandle his legs higher, pretending not to know why it pleased him.
Still. Getou still found it hard, sometimes. Control. Getou’s ruts allowed the reigns to a different version of himself. One that wasn’t reliant on pressed pills and melatonin, that didn’t cower like a street cat from his own shadows, his own material. It was hard not to give in completely. It was hard not to chase permanence.
Gojo would give him flack for it, but Getou didn’t mind some of that. They fucked how they bickered, how they sparred, which is to say, how they generally interacted. He wouldn’t have it another way. Getou would recoil if Gojo ever attempted tenderness. This is what he told himself.
For instance. Inside the warmth of him. Prickly heat and too much lube, Gojo between heats but on his back for him anyway. "Puppies," Getou would whimper, control simply detaching from him, jettisoning. It was always the raw of him articulating. He was coming up on his toes. Gojo always told him he was whiney for an alpha; that he could probably slap him about and he'd cry for more.
This is how his rut-peak got him. Round the neck and with both hands, saying this shit, like something swept up. The host of him sent to bed by a malignant and immovable occupier. He was helpless to it.
Averse to all that – the baby talk, Gojo'd coined it, these ramblings that Getou only uttered on his very last thread – Gojo would only huff something like a laugh, and pat his head with what could be considered fondness. Even folded up like this. Even flushed and full of him. Sometimes he rolled his eyes, which would make Getou hump deeper. Whine, pathetic, into his neck.
And how he’d ache, ache, to bite. To sharpen his teeth on pink muscle, to see two jewels of red blossom from each puncture. Too see them glint like pomegranate seeds.
It felt harmless, is the thing. He was already play-acting, he could admit it. Maybe, in those moments, they both were.
Like how he had Gojo pinned, rubbing up half interestedly between his legs. Getou all high from a sparring match victory against Yaga; Gojo low off the back of his own failed experiments, out solo on the tennis courts.
“Don’t act like you don’t want it.” Fingers that knew where to find the milky inner of his thigh, where to part him like warm butter. “I’ll put your ass to sleep.” These are the things Getou boasted.
“Mhm.”
“Come on.” He was so alpha cocksure, those over-zealous hormones reinforcing his bones with steel. He sat back on his heels, celebrating the way Gojo’s gaze would drop to his stomach, to the lifted veins there. To his cock, where it was hardened, interested, between them.
Getou, again: “who wouldn’t jump at the chance to take my seed?”
He’s not always sure how that shit came about. Gojo’d always scrunched his nose at it anyway, unsure. Regardless, the hormones were making soup of Getou’s blood such that Gojo’s apathy, forced or not, only spurred, rather than discouraged him.
“Our child would rule the world,” he went on, words hissed against Gojo’s flesh through teeth that would’ve clamped down if he was allowed. He saw blood rise to the skin, his throat pretty as a blushed pear; he tasted his pheromones stirring, caramelising, just as sweet. Gojo liked it. He always acted like he didn’t, but he did.
And maybe the bell had chimed, distant, signalling third period. Their shirts, as ever, halfway loose, schoolbooks forgotten, splitting their spines face-down on the floorboards.
On the bed, impervious, Getou folded him. Pressed with hands, pressed with words: “you don’t think?”
Gojo conceded. “Yes,” he pondered, words fully-formed, considerate, “he would.”
And later, when Getou started to come inside him, too fast for all his bravado, Gojo had taken hold of his palm and pressed it low to his own stomach. Swallowed down Getou’s stuttering gasps with his mouth smiling. His mouth knowing.
❦
It went like this. Implicitly utilitarian, but largely uninterrupted. Of course, Getou loved him, but this was a useless fact, a fact they needn’t acknowledge. The love he held for Gojo hung pointless as a star in the daytime. Which is to say, it had always been there. It probably always would be. But against the vastness of everything it remained little, and unseen, and was good for nobody.
And so he sought sex within the dance of ruts and heats, the two orbiting, never colliding, and in the empty spaces between he often found himself looking down at his own clasped hands and wondering, logistically, if the space he’d made in his heart would ever remould to fit someone else and knowing, unequivocally, that it wouldn’t.
They were on the subway, returning from a mission downtown. They probably looked thuggish, one torn-up teen, tacky with blood and gravel and, well. The other, whilst unspoiled in uniform, was no less clean, not with the way the adrenaline tumbled from him, malignant satisfaction darkening the wells of his eyes enough to make the other passengers shift in their seats. Getou never revelled in it so much. It was true, that the sickness had by then become a consistent and reasonable expectation. Nausea looping his guts like a thick rope lasso, tighter with each and every curse he consumed.
He found relief, though, in watching Gojo’s lashes. From the flesh of Getou’s bicep he was industriously extracting little garnets of embedded glass, teal-edged, shockproof, with thumb and forefinger. A gritty accident. As always Gojo was ungentle, to see how much Getou would hiss.
“Easy,” Getou finally conceded, because it did sting. The fact, that is, that Gojo could heal himself, now, and Getou could not. The fact that Getou would never lick Gojo’s wounds again; that it would always be the other way around.
It had been a messy mission. Tarmac churned to chunky soup, foundations uprooted, windscreens caved in. The amassed glassbits bloodied Gojo’s palm, individual like milk teeth. He only said, “almost done,” and when he was satisfied that each little pock-hole was rid of shards he latched his mouth over Getou’s wound and sucked.
It made Getou jolt. And then relax.
The train stuttered, rhythmic, over the rails. There was a sway the carriage, and so their bodies, in time with the lathe of Gojo’s tongue. Getou felt himself heating up at the wet feel. At Gojo’s unabashed nature, his aversion to boundary. They were five stops from home.
“You look like my mate,” Getou whispered to him, out of nowhere. Maybe because he felt the need to warn him of shit like that. To give him the option to stop.
Because it was true. The notion was making him molten inside. To be catered to so intimately, so publicly, and at Gojo’s own detriment. It made Getou dry in the throat. It embarrassed him. It was all he wanted. Really, it was all. He wasn’t imagining it; that the eyes of the wary passengers around them were averting out of respect, of understanding, and Getou wanted to preserve their image, what it portrayed, for as long as he possibly could.
But Gojo unlatched his mouth. The sound was lewd. “Fuck off,” he said, with an eyeroll and a laugh that made Getou’s heart sink. His saw his own blood stain the teeth, and that they looked pink, and hostile. His cleaned flesh, in the wake of Gojo’s hot mouth, pulsed. Longed.
❦
Despite the onset of summer heat, it was as though winter had set in. A blanket, unshifting, of numbness, seemed to coat Getou like a stubborn frost. Still, through a crack in the emotional barricade, like a splinter of light, he thought of that moment on the train during the days that proceeded it. Thought of it with thumb to wrist, distracted by the hopeful jump of his pulse.
Maybe he could kid himself that Gojo was thinking of it, too, because he wasn’t sure why else he called on Getou randomly one day not long afterwards. Getou found him waiting in his room when he returned from a mission, clothes hanging half off the slopes of his shoulders, looking like moonlight spilled on black water. Getou knew he wasn’t in heat, nor was he, himself, in rut. It was a fence they hadn’t crossed before, which is why he was surprised that Gojo then suggested, without much ceremony, that they fuck.
He might not have meant for it to come out so transactional but to Getou’s ears it did, as if he recommended they go ask the kitchen for hot miso, or if he could borrow his shampoo. They’d tangled together regardless, and Getou couldn’t get hard, and after a few moments more he’d had to go to the bathroom to hang over the toilet seat. His confusion at Gojo’s offer was quickly eclipsed by unstoppable, but by now predictable, curse sickness.
Gojo regarded him upside down on his distressed bed, unserious.
“That’s getting worse, isn’t it?” he commented, observationally. The words, his apathy, felt like acupuncture needles to Getou’s bunched shoulder blades.So he had noticed. It made him blink into the toilet bowl, confounded. He couldn’t answer, though of course Gojo was right.
Between retches he heard the TV switch on. Digimon titles. The dull of it backlit his mindscape like static, weirdly comforting. He wouldn’t have known what to do had Gojo actually put a hand to his shoulder. This is what he told himself. And resting cheek to cold porcelain he listened to the tinny victory music as Gojo unconcernedly completed the level he’d been stuck on for months.
After a while he spat into the sink, swilled his raw throat with Listerine. He had tablets for this, but opted for a ginger tea instead, teabag strung around his pinky, hot water straight from the tap.
Back on the bed, Gojo handed him player two, clothes buttoned wrong.
It was an isolated attempt.
❦
Weeks later, on his way out of the infirmary, Gojo fell into step with him, his silence supernatural. Getou swore.
“Whatcha got?” The immediate atmosphere felt static from his warp.
“What’s it to you?”
“Ieiri knows.” Ieiri did in fact not know, for Getou had recently started to request scripts, simultaneously, from the trainee district nurse, playing up his nerves to ensure total confidentiality.
“Tic-tacs,” Getou told him bluntly, and he knew that the slack was up; that Gojo would not push further.
He still scrutinised him, though. Eyes watchful behind opaque black moons. He oscillated between backstepping and hovering, his movements unnatural, glitch-like. Malevolent, Getou thought. He was doing it more, lately, his magic-tricks. Powerplay. He wanted to show that it cost him nothing anymore.
Getou, on the other hand, had been watching his skyward trajectory from the shadows it cast on the sidewalk. By now too hollow to keep questioning why, with every curse he forced down his throat, he only felt further crushed into the asphalt, rather than sailing on some similar comet-tail.
The sun pelted down as they trudged. The stickered orange vial seared him through the wall of his back pocket. Same place his mother used to slip talismans on his way to school without his notice. It occurred to him, randomly, how he’d step out of his trousers for PE, the little cotton sacks plopping fatly to the floor, hastily embroidered by his mother’s unskilled hand; how he'd scramble to collect them quickly, like spilled cards, to avoid ridicule. To avoid suspicion. It was only ever too late. The other kids tormented him mercilessly: not for having a mother obsessed with voodoo-magic but for his being the subject of it, which was an obvious indication that something wretched and paranormal was making sick his soul. Something worthy of excision.
Against the sunshine, he avoided Gojo’s eyes, lest he gleaned the same expression he'd found so many times on the school playground. “Do you wanna get lunch or something?” he said brusquely, to fill the unfamiliar silence. “Or, I don’t know.”
25mg. To be taken once, before bedtime. This one was something new. His new doctor’s strategy to double down on the insomnia, apparently. Whereas guardian, his old prescriptions used to read, handsewn in his mother’s lumpy kanji rather than printed onto plastic cylinders: purity. Repel evil. One he remembered with particular penitence: safety of the household.
The irony didn’t pass him by. His soul had always been held together by doweling and glue, reinforcement a requirement since the day he was born. In the past he thought what he’d needed was something ironclad and airtight, something to keep the bad shit from coming in. Only later did he realise a solution like that would only further contain that which naturally spawned within him.
Mercifully, Gojo didn’t interrogate his evasiveness. Only shrugged his assent, began to grumble about the cold soup they were serving that day. Set down on the pavement to walk level with him, meet his slower pace.
It was only the following day that Getou returned from a mission to find Gojo in his room, cross-legged in front of his chest of drawers. About him was Getou’s underwear, strewn carelessly, and in his palm sat the plastic orange bottle, like a pilfered conch shell Gojo couldn’t work out if he wanted to probe for meat or toss back into the ocean where he found it.
At Getou’s appearing, which he did not explicitly acknowledge, he took his time tucking the bottle back into the cotton recess from which he extricated it.
“I was looking for my sweatbands,” he offered by way of greeting, smoothing Getou’s clothes back down like compacted earth over a sapling.
Ridiculously, Getou had to remind himself he didn’t need to ask permission to enter his own fucking room; he still crossed the threshold with stifled hesitation. “I don’t have them,” he replied plainly.
Silence wedged itself between them, personified. It looked between the two of them, expectant for a response.
Ask me, then, Getou thought. Just ask.
Gojo did regard him, then; showed him the tilt of his jaw. And for all of Getou’s exhaustion, for the new tinge of humiliation he’d found bleeding at his corners, he felt, with an unstoppable vehemence, that he could hit him. The expression on Gojo’s face – the source of Getou’s immediate and blood-hot fury – was pity. He was certain of it.
Gojo shut the drawer carefully, slowly, and Getou trembled in the doorway.
“I’ll check laundry,” he said lightly on his way out, letting their shoulders brush, and headed uncaringly in the wrong direction.
❦
There was a never a time Getou wasn’t seeing things that others could not.
His mother, of course, had been the first to know. The first to catch his prolonged, fixed stares into the corners of each room; to stifle his cries when the nightmares didn't end upon opening his eyes. His bedroom had crawled with curses. Crawled. It was a cyclical thing. She was the first to wash his soiled sheets come morning, first to daub at the circles beneath his eyes at the breakfast table. Worry and shame forced silence upon her; her son became her best kept secret.
See, Getou was touched by the evil eye.
She tried everything right from the start. Once they’d exhausted the assistance of every temple they could get to (nothing in the immediate vicinity - she was too afraid of rumour), borrowed myths met with borrowed customs. Apple slices and jugs of milk left at the feet of stone deities; troughs of water whispered over, enchanted, soaked into his skin in delicate crosshatches. Stepping over salt piles and sage, his growth spurts sending him knocking into the twists of rope that festooned his doorframe like year-round mistletoe. Despite it all he remained scarred, scorned, maimed, marred. His mother’s invocations were consistently ignored.
Getou, aged twelve, would watch her hands work at speed to produce countless omamori, her embroidery needle dipping in, out, a dolphin-dive through silk, firelight flashing on the metal eye. He was, by then, accustomed to the presence of cursed energy within their walls. He knew they were no threat to him, even if his seeing of them made them uncomfortable. Mostly, for his mother's sake, he pretended not to at all.
Suguru, she would usher. Have you said your prayers yet?
The cursed spirit on his mother’s shoulder always observed her craftsmanship with idle and unseeing curiosity. Its talons hooked into the meat of her shoulder; right there, where she complained that the sporadic bouts of pain unfailingly signalled an oncoming storm. His mother was terrified of storms. A hurricane had chewed up her parents’ house fifteen years prior, spat it back out like a woodchipper. Her fear took the form of a malevolent little fly-head, which materialised when the weather predictions on the TV or radio were unfavourable. When they were bleak enough to frighten her.
On this occasion, in response to her question he'd nodded, even though he hadn’t prayed in months. And when she handed him the cotton pouch he did what he’d carefully trained himself not to do, which was that he looked at it, the cursed spirit. However fleeting, it was long enough that she caught his vacant stare and her hand faltered where she had it outstretched.
Again, she’d commanded, and that night over clasped hands he swore he heard it laughing at him from the next room.
This is what he'd felt, seeing the vial in Gojo’s upturned hand. Exposed. Self-scolding, like he should have hidden better. Like he was getting lax. It was a learned response, a sudden one, a fleeting once. There and gone, replaced by a certain indignance, rage, that he also failed to fully understand.
Gojo never said anything. Getou could interrogate that. The fact that Gojo had witnessed his decline with both eyes open and never once given it words, never once breathed life into it. He could even throw the accusation at him, like a spiked ball; why don’t you say something? But it would gain him nothing. Do nothing, except maybe send him spiralling down the drain with every other wretched thing he expelled from himself.
Because he’d been right. It had been getting worse. Not only this nausea but the psychological torment that encased it: facing the fact that the only good he could give to the world was purchased at the price of his own poisoning. The fact that he wasn’t even sure if it was worth it anymore.
When? When did he allow such thoughts to take root? And worse: when did he become so pathetic that a simple word of thanks might be all he needed to keep on upholding the bargain? Unsmiling, sure, but shouldering it nonetheless? When did one simple, petty word become the stopsign between Getou and obliteration?
He could interrogate it. All of it; the seeds, the roots. The pangs of guilt, instinctual. The withering looks he often caught Gojo casting him; the existentialism that sometimes knocked at his bedroom window like a night witch. But he tried, actively, not to. Cut half-moons into the meat of his palms for trying. But yes, he was getting worse. The growing line of pill bottles on his bathroom ledge would suggest that curse consumption was, in fact, killing him. And Gojo’d watched that grow, too.
❦
Above all he wondered how hard he’d have to bleed for Jujutsu Tech to take notice. Yi Haibara showed him that answer one Wednesday in July.
It had been the hottest day of the year so far and until that afternoon, an unremarkable one, which is always how it goes. Two days previous they’d shared cans in the quadrant. Haibara hadn’t commented on the growing dark smudges beneath Getou’s eyes and together they’d watched, with Haibara reeling off biological facts, the cabbage-white moth that had landed, with freshly unfurled and trembling wings, on the joint of his friend’s thumb.
Getou’s mother would call that a sign. Something premature, a soul vessel. A gentle warning that it was close. She would always call a sign, though only ever with her hand held by hindsight.
He remembers little about the day, only that there was something agonizingly cruel about the summer heat. With Haibara dead Getou found himself wishing for biblical rain, a cyclone, a forest fire; for the world to rightfully reflect the anguish he so acutely felt, to acknowledge the cruelty taking place in their albeit small and concrete corner of it. Instead the grasshoppers had hummed in contented ignorance and the sky had remained blissfully, unfairly, painfully blue, and he was sure that somewhere, elsewhere, not far from their own schoolyard, other teenagers were taking the occasion to gather on grass patches, kiss one another beneath bleachers, smoke up on cheap weed like they, too, were supposed to.
Relentless. Unstoppable. These words had become part of his vocabulary the day he’d met Satoru Gojo. It was only now, when he could swear he felt the world spinning beneath his feet, beneath the torment of that terrible and perfect summer sun, that he truly understood their meaning. These words captured grief, and grief was a carousel. It was a ride you couldn’t get off. In the quadrant he begged, if not for a forest fire, for a form of winged life to float nearby. There remained not so much as a jetplane in the sky.
Under the strict instruction and careful decision making of their management, Gojo, who was abroad on mission when the fatality happened, was not to know of the tragedy until his return. So as not to disrupt his mission, they’d said. So as to be told in person, they’d then corrected. In the meantime, unaware, Gojo would insist on taking three extra days in Singapore to sightsee, ignoring the obsequious advice to the contrary.
There was no world, Getou had always thought, in which Satoru Gojo would have to taste a drop of hardship on his tongue, and so naturally it seemed only a given that he was spared this, too. Would he have pulled back the plastic, had he been forced to face reality? Would he have looked? For some reason Getou was driven crazy, wondering this. Wondering, too, if death would ever touch Gojo like it surely would the rest of them. These thoughts all but noosed him in the black dark of night when he was scrubbing his hands clean for the eleventh time, certain he’d detected a speck of blood in his cuticle. And above all it sent him insane, that in the slow slip from denial to anger, he could only seem to think of Gojo. Gojo, who this simply wasn’t about. Gojo, who was resolutely not there.
And even when sleep finally claimed Getou, an obscured and unhealthy amount of days later, he did not dream of Haibara, nor, like he’d feared, of Kento’s wails, which had somehow stirred he acid of his stomach more than the sight of their friend’s remains. No: of course he dreamt, in a thousand splendid colours, of Gojo.
He dreamt that they hiked to the mountain spring together, the two of them stomping through the mulch until sweat soaked their shirts. He dreamt they removed their clothes without embarrassment, submerging beneath the cold sheet of water in giggling tandem. It was a technicolour contrast. It was heavenly whiplash. In the spring’s cooling embrace, Gojo tugged Getou’s fingers towards his thighs. His skin surface was pearlescent, like the stomachs of oysters, and when he laughed it was calcium white. Getou’s hands adhered to his waist like the seal of an envelope and he laughed, too, until they were laughing together. Pheromones absent. Just the slip of wet rock and clay, earthtoned; just summer’s fragrance of willow fronds and magnolia and wild mint.
The dream didn’t end when they kissed. Nor when Getou entered him. Their teeth bumped for all their smiling. And when he finally did wake, he didn’t know why he was crying, nor why the dream had the quality of a memory when nothing like that had ever happened.
❦
The balance tipped that day. The gravity of it carried Getou down, down; when he stepped off the scale he blinked to find himself in the modest yard of their small local temple, choked in black tie. That’s how those days passed by. Getou coming to intermittently, as if to conserve mental energy lest it supplement darker recesses.
He remembers that it was strange to see so many affiliates of the Gojo Clan in one place, amongst them benefactors, board-members, alumni. He looked freely, for they very pointedly did not glance in his direction. Haibara’s funeral was no small affair, and it should’ve been, what with his small family so dwarfed by these outsiders they had no choice but to smile at.
He pitied them. Pitied his mother, haplessly thanking a hundred suited strangers, all for what? For their attendance? For their sympathy? Or for enrolling her son and patronising his death? With Haibara gone, Getou no longer bothered to close the window to these types of thoughts, not anymore. He let them fill his head like so many moths, where he nourished them, privately, with a small flame.
My condolences. Cufflinks dancing as fat hands clasped hers; Getou probably didn't blink a whole hour, staring at that. My condolences. He felt himself circling down a spiral drain, like money. Picking up speed. Your son was one of the best at what he did.
“You look like you could use one of these.”
Gojo hated the smell of cigarettes. Chastised him ‘til he stopped. Getou didn’t know why the thought occurred to him: he hadn’t seen Gojo since the church procession, some starstruck alumni having taken him off by the arm, gabbing devotedly.
He accepted one, thoughtlessly, though it was a Camel, which he hated. She’d either just arrived or was about to leave, leather-clad, boots laced firm. Her eyes were two hardened amber stones, judgemental.
“I’ve heard of you,” this stranger told him.
The sound of borrowing: a clipper bringing flame to life. “That’s the other one you’re thinking of,” he muttered around the filter. He couldn’t be fucked for coy.
“No,” she corrected, eyes remaining measured. “I’m thinking of you.”
Her tone was firm, suggestive. Amused. Alpha. Getou’d never met a female one. It made him look, and then shrink for doing so. She couldn’t possibly want him. To play with him, maybe. She seemed the type: feline, lawless.
His gaze flicked down her body. There was a blue eye on his shoulder. Her hair tumbled past her waist, brassy, moving by itself. The blue eye hardened.
“You’ve potential,” she told him, which he found instantly annoying. Her words stayed clipped, like she trusted him to inherently understand her meaning. Maybe he did, as much as he’d have liked to dismiss her ambiguity, but it didn’t mean he wanted to join her in beating around the bush.
He just scoffed, disinterestedly. It could’ve only been a taunt. Where was Gojo?
She pressed on. Her voice interwoven with intention. “We should chat.”
He became irritated. It was hardly the fucking place. He didn’t know her, her abrasive alpha pheromones and cursed energy sloping from her freely, clogging his senses. Nicotine in that mix, kicking him high, melting his nerves like a blue flame to frayed polyester. “What’re we doing now?” he snapped.
“C’mon. Look around. Is this a wake or a fucking old boys’ club? Your principal’s been making board deals with Kyoto over by the canapes. And your boy?” She ashed her cigarette with one disapproving flick. “He’s out back promising a lightshow for some governor’s kid’s birthday party. Little puppet boy. Took a smoke from me, though, of course he did.”
Getou went frigid, like air-dried clay. She clocked it, righteous, before turning to him fully. This time her voice was hissed, and serious.
“You strike me as the only person who truly sees the fucking tragedy in this situation. Tell me. How many more?”
His cigarette, untouched, started burning a chestnut shine to his thumbtip. “Huh?” he could only say, dumbly.
She looked at him square on, then, and there was true fury in the ochre of her eyes. It was markedly strange, to see evidence of an emotion truer than he’d felt in months. It was almost a relief, its existence a proof, an archaeological relic, glinting at him from some forgotten soil. That’s right, he remembered. That anger that you tamp down daily; it’s worthy. See? It’s elsewhere, too.
“How many more of these things do you think we’ll have to stomach this side of Christmas?” she asked him, and maybe it was the nicotine fog but he felt like her voice was transmitting from somewhere inside his own head.
He was seventeen, he heard. Getou found nothing to say. Shit, he wasn’t even presented. In her voice he registered disgust. No other word for it.
“Suguru.”
Getou let the filter fall from his fingertips, where it was quickly extinguished beneath the toe of Gojo’s shoe. Gojo’s hand found the elbow of his jacket, and clamped down.
“Come,” he said, and nothing further. He did not shrink at, nor even regard, the stranger before them, in a way so blatant Getou worried instantly, stupidly, that she wasn’t real for his eyes.
He handed back the woman her clipper, wordless. He was quick to pocket whatever it was she slipped into his palm in return. Practiced, covert. He felt embossed plastic, smooth against his burnt thumb. He thought of talismans.
He recovered it an hour later in the bathroom stall. It was no rune, no hand-embroidered prayer. It was her student I.D., outdated. Jujutsu Tech. Special Grade. Tsukumo Yuki. He’d never heard of her.
When he returned outdoors he felt Gojo’s stare before he saw it. His eyes, from within listless crowds, tapped into him, hard and unreadable. Distracted, like he’d forgotten to look away. Getou got that feeling again, like he’d looked something in the eye. It was alarming, seeing Gojo’s face read the same as his mother’s had, all those years ago. Must you? it said. What am I going to do with you?
He looked away before Getou could.
❦
On medical recommendation following what the school struck off as unfortunate events Getou was directed to take a mandatory break. Without debate, question, nor fuss, Gojo took on all of his missions.
It was a bitter, sandy pill to swallow, despite it only confirming a suspicion he’d harboured for the better part of a year. Gojo’s power, now with perfected RTC, was insurmountable. Incomparable. And by then, he kept needing to remind himself, inexhaustible. The rest of the student body existed not even as drones, but as window dressing. He felt, truly, that his only relevance on campus was to keep the payroll lady in her job, and this he realised without affording it anger. He couldn’t even laugh. He was too tired.
In simple terms, it was true. They didn’t need him anymore. And along with the grief for his friend that he finally allowed to flood him, like saltwater to his lungs, he let the realisation wrap around him and, nourished by that blanket, he stopped leaving his room.
They, being everyone else, understood that grief arrested him, and left him be. Over the days, weeks, that the September moonlight charted over his floorboards, he understood it to be something more.
It was bitterness that he tasted. Resentment. What by then gaped inside him was a virulent, fleshy, scooped out cavity where purpose used to dwell. He felt like rotten squash. This hole within him, absence expanding, became a warm hovel for each cursed spirit he’d swallowed past. Within these walls they bedded down, enmeshed themselves, crowded his lungs and made monkey-bars of his ribcage. And over time they synthesised his shame into something usable. In the asylum of his body, he felt it. Felt every pang of unworthiness, of otherness, of self-reproach, become sharpened into something tapered, weaponised. Outward pointing. Barbed.
It was true, that when fruit rotted, it also soured.
The days, devoid of interaction, of activity, lost shape. Time unspooled like a useless mess of yarn. As such, he didn’t know how long it was until Gojo, in a breeze of mall-air and spun sugar, barraged into his room with the energy-high of an enthusiastic jogger, despite tumbling off the back of God-knows how many consecutive missions.
His arms were full. That, itself, was cause for Getou to assume himself the observer of a strange mirage; Gojo, with arms encircled around a cornucopia of goods, of gifts, it appeared, for the wellbeing of someone else, seemingly hand-selected, seemingly hand-purchased. Getou blinked against the blinding light that burst from behind the flung-back curtain and decided that this sorry facsimile might be the only taste of Heaven he might ever be afforded, and consequently that the dark and lonely hole of his unwashed duvet was a preferable alternative.
“Food,” Gojo rattled, "rehydration. Prescription.” That last one made Getou flinch, but Gojo boomed on, upturning paper bags, dumping their contents on Getou’s bed. “Your laundry,” he said proudly. “I did it myself.”
It resonated, for some reason, before Getou remembered with a sickening feeling that the ID of the stranger from Haibara’s wake, by now almost a month ago, had been sequestered in the pocket of his funeral pants, which he now saw, folded sloppily yet ceremoniously, amongst the rest of the clothes set down on his dresser. In all the time he’d let the days slip by, he’d devoted not a single minute to calculating what the token was supposed to mean for him. And now, in a heartsinking moment, he saw the opportunity as the tail-end of a missed train, long diminished over the horizon.
He listened submissively, absently, through Gojo’s attempt at an inspirational pep-talk, until he left the room on the condition he’d return later to assess Getou’s assured turnaround.
In his immediate absence, Getou scrambled. Wobbly on his feet. With numb fingers he unearthed and clutched his dress pants, which were waxy with too much softener. Out-turned the pockets. His heart jackrabbited. Empty, like he’d feared.
Gojo returned with agonising punctuality. “You’re up,” he observed cheerfully. He didn’t comment on the mess, nor Getou’s position therein.
He helped him to his feet. Getou’s peripheral warped like iron. Deepened to something dark, and cave-like, and filled with a thousand watching eyes.
“I’m glad you chose this.” As Gojo spoke, he nodded decidedly. He smoothed out a wrinkle on Getou’s shoulder, as if the whole of him wasn’t crumpled as a paper bag. “There are people relying on you.” He sounded like a clansman, his voice authoritative, a tannoy. The muscle of Getou's shoulder where Gojo's hand rested remembered the weight of Haibara’s funeral casket. Of his mother’s hand, forcing him to his knees for evening prayers. Isn’t that the problem? Getou’s brain screamed. Relying on us for what, exactly? To die for them? To die without thanks? To die defending them with the very powers they ridicule us for?
But Gojo didn’t mean the populace. He said people but meant only himself. Getou could see it in his eye-cavity. A blip. And it struck Getou that even then, when they both knew that hearing it might save him, Gojo would never let Getou know how much he needed him.
“You know that, don’t you?” he asked Getou, like a pinched cheek.
His scattered clothes pooled at their feet like so many dead snakes. What did you do with it, Getou thought, weakly, dazedly, shaking his head, you fucking motherfucker.
Gojo stilled him by the chin. “Let’s get you bathed.” Raked a hand through his knotted hair and inspected the grease between his thumb and forefinger. “Hm? I’ll even wash your hair. Can’t have you looking like this much longer.”
Compassion was foreign on Gojo. A forgery. He wore it like a borrowed suit. Getou wanted so badly for it to fit him, but that still didn’t make it his.
Still, despite everything, Getou felt himself sag for it.
He let himself be led. He had to.
Gojo never mentioned finding student ID, and Getou, for the life of him, couldn’t conjure the alpha’s name from his fucking fucked up brain, those days lost to him permanently, having joined the factory line for sharpening.
❦
Months passed by like that. Gojo handled everything, sometimes here, mostly there. Getou’s leave was extended twice. When he entered the infirmary following his second sign-off, his one task for the week, Ieiri took one look at his face, her ring finger beneath his chin, sighed, and fetched his refill.
Busy with her counting, she snipped, “I can only assume that Gojo believes he’s found your hidden candy stash which is why these are going down so quick.”
For her pointedness, she looked tired as well. Gaunt about the cheeks, labcoat bumping over prominent collarbones. The room was stale with cigarette smoke, the window part cracked; she’d stopped bothering to take her smoke breaks outside.
Her fingers took his wrist-pulse, counting under her breath. He looked at her hand. In the mortuary, where he’d been the one to help her cover Haibara’s body, he’d noticed how they’d shaken like wheatstalks in a hurricane.
“Rutted recently?”
He was used to her directness, and happy to return it. “No.”
“Might be all the medication.”
“Might be.”
She regarded him witheringly. “Might have to lay off.”
“Might have to.” He knew he couldn’t do that, but to echo her felt like the easiest thing to do.
He also knew he was being a dick. Her eyes flashed to him, warningly, and then down again.
“You know I’ll have to consider medically inducing one if this goes on. When was the last time you and Gojo –”
“Ieiri.” This he snapped – and he felt bad. He understood the importance of having a rut, of seeing it through. Recognised, too, she was probably under direction from the higher-ups to track their cycles, given that they needed to organise a schedule, re-weave him back in. But at that point he didn’t feel like walking around with the entire periodic table dissolved in his blood: he was already running on artificial alertness, artificial emotional stability, artificial sleep assistance, artificial whatever the fuck you want to name. His psyche so bolstered by scaffolding he felt like a hollow suit of arms. Adding hormonal control only felt like overkill.
His tone had bristled her, evident in the way she bit back at him. “I’m unhappy with your weight. Your amount of sleep. Your cycle, being frank, is aborted. To be perfectly honest, you look like shit. Did the hiatus help your stress levels at all?”
“Oh my God,” he complained. “Why’s everyone so fucking worried that I need –”
“Just be thankful they didn’t put you on watch,” she snapped. “If you ask me, they should be more concerned about that giant fucking chip on your shoulder.”
There was then a silence, palpable, after which she immediately apologised. Pinched the bridge of her nose, wincing. She used his given name. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
He blinked, just once. “Me, too.” He meant it, though he wasn’t quite sure for what. Chip on your shoulder. The words bumped around in his brain, seeking meaning, finding none.
They were miserable in the quietness that followed. Alongside the fug of antiseptic and smoke seeped the undoubtable scent of loss, though from which of them it emanated he couldn’t decipher.
She fetched cream for his calluses and applied it, quietly, in apology, her fingers careful on his palms. He’d been picking at them something wretched, and felt thankful for the attention.
He asked her – and it was partly to divert attention, and partly because he, himself, had only seen Gojo in snatches since his official return – “how is Satoru?”
“Don’t know.” He’d expected this answer. “He heals himself now, didn’t you hear?”
He didn’t say anything, surprised at the hurt in her voice. Her hands were careful on him when she took his final vitals, feeling at his glands, the juncture of his neck. Unbitten, which he wouldn’t let himself forget. And despite the tension in the room and the vague shame he was processing, he appreciated the feeling of being touched gently.
She worked quietly, always so quietly. “He doesn’t need me anymore,” she said.
On leaving the office Ieiri had kissed his crown, stilted and uncharacteristic, and seen him off with a concerned look, an extra refill and, to his embarrassment, a singular pill that would induce his rut if he ever found it necessary. He’d pilfered a cigarette from her open bag and, kindly, she’d pretended not to notice. Under the awnings he clippered up, exhaling heavily, his nerves hotwired.
Chip on his shoulder. He’d wanted to ask her what she meant. And yet when suddenly in the distance his gaze snagged movement, a sleek black motorbike crouched like a panther in the brush, the word potential instead sprang to mind like a sudden translation. A callback to months ago; her imploring amber eyes.
She was coming from Yaga’s office. Long hair moving.
“Hey,” Getou shouted, before registering that he was going to. He raised a hand. For the first time in weeks, his heart picked up, which he discerned, belatedly, as hope. Something, for the first time in months, seemed to be animating his bones: a need to speak, to be listened to. A need to tell her he'd been thinking about that conversation, constantly. To tell her it was getting worse. To ask her why she cornered him, only him; what she saw in him. To ask what it was she was about to propose, had Gojo not taken him away.
She turned at the sound, and saw him. He knows she did.
And he watched her mount, and kick from the curb. Gravel skittered. Her form shrank with distance, the sound stretching, until it was gone.
He stamped the cigarette, only half dead, underfoot.
❦
One of the strangest aspects of Getou’s mother's beliefs had been that in all her devoutness, in the stock she siphoned into the existence of demons, never once did she believe in Getou’s visions. She was all to ready to insist that his delusions were the product of his demonic possession, but it was never a possibility that those demons could conceivably be abundant outside of him, autonomously, acting of their own agency within the rooms of their house and beyond, as he had tried and tried to articulate.
It was never on the cards that cursed spirits tormented him. If evil was real, manifested, it was a product of him. It had to be.
Logically, there had to be something about him that fostered this ideology. Something off, so to speak, that he was never able to identify in himself to this day. He still wonders. Still shrinks to meet new people in case they see it, too. Whatever it is that says, no, yeah, that’s you. That’s definitely just you. He's tied himself in knots for wondering. What it is about him that seemingly screamed perpetrator and never victim.
What he means to say is, it didn’t surprise him that the alpha female didn’t look back. Most people see it in him, he knows that. The Gojo Clan. His mother, who was the first to. People see through him, to that dark seed in his soul that attracts the bad and repels everything that is good, and ordinary.
It does no harm to admit it, now. That he had left that curse on his mother’s shoulder. He told himself she would be nothing without it: superstition was her life. If her shoulder pain no longer accurately predicted the weather, then her other theories, too, would disintegrate as a pile of dry sand, her efforts wasted, her forward-path bulldozed. He told himself it would do her just as well to sever a limb; her belief was fundamental, as vital as lungs, the stilts upon which the altar of her life was mounted. It was a faith she’d die without. For fifteen years, her aches had never proved her wrong.
This is what he told himself. In reality, it was simpler. In reality, it was his private kind of punishment. If he had to live with pain, then so did she.
He took three buses to get to his house.
He can’t remember what he thought about. Probably the female alpha, pushing off on her bike. Probably Kento’s screams, probably Haibara’s mother’s pale hand. Most likely, though, it was nothing at all.
The neighbourhood was as he’d remembered. Grey, tired. Crosswalks fading. Electrical wires humming. He was expecting, or maybe hoping, for something to leap out at him, to clasp his heart. A memory to move him, a flower to bloom right in his face. A moth, trembling, to land on his primed hand. Yet arrested there, wretched and alone, he stared before him, and his childhood home stood mortuary still, indifferent as any unwitting prey.
He didn’t know what he was going to do.
His phone rang. It was Gojo. To this day he isn’t sure why he picked up. But he did.
“I need to talk to you.” Static crackle, storm interference. “Where are you?”
Getou didn’t want to tell him. “Out.”
Had it always been this bleak? He’d come out without a jacket. He felt it then, those first few fat drops of rain, making him aware for the first time of the cursed energy he’d let wreak havoc, unabated, within and amongst his body. On campus they’d have stopped him for a less obnoxious display. Energy crawling his skin like a mass of starving, anticipating termites.
“Can you get to campus?” He’d never heard urgency on Gojo, and it still wasn’t anything close. But something about his tone was pulling him into focus. He noticed, for instance, that the sky was charcoal black. Remembered other ironies, like how storms had always been his mother’s most acute fear. Aside, of course, from him.
Then suddenly, he was dizzy. At the thought of her, he saw it. His mother’s silhouette. A twitch in the lace, definite. He flattened his back against the alleyway wall, a rat bolting by his foot, and breathed.
In the pause, Gojo said his name.
Getou closed his eyes.
“Can you give me an hour?”
Gojo did not sound happy. “Sure.”
Getou’s voice was meek, even to his own ears. “Can you stay on the phone?”
He’d already hung up.
❦
Weeks prior to this, to his visit to the suburbs. It was sometime during the inglorious haze that had immediately followed the funeral, when Gojo had summoned Getou via text during his brief salvation mission back to campus.
The message was singular: pre-heat. No frills; he didn’t have to. Getou felt more ghost than man those days, but even still, Gojo knew that he could rely on Getou’s bones to reawaken as if in response to an incantation, and traverse the distance to his room like clockwork. Even at the time it spelled shame for him, as it does now to recall. But his psyche, no matter in what tatters, seemed to equate these particular requests to acts of survival.
(In his defence, Gojo had washed his hair two days previous. Worked out three weeks’ worth of matting with his fingertips, even gently at times, without making much of it. Because of this tender act of selflessness Getou owed him life, owed him animation. He couldn’t trip up in this probation period, the eye on his shoulder more expectant than ever.)
Unsurprisingly Getou hadn’t rutted in a while, a fact he knew Gojo was aware of, even though he hadn’t spoken to it. His body was unable to articulate, his blood too sedate. Gojo, clearly, suffered with no such dormancy. Even if the saccharine scent of him hadn’t filled Getou’s lungs the second he entered the hall, he’d found Gojo in his room amongst a makeshift nest, which was a first. Gojo's heats could be intense but always lacked tenderness, lacked affection. He’d take it face-down and dirty on a concrete floor and sooner that, too; he made laundered linen sheets seem overkill, like a truckload of red roses.
Getou had sat down beside him, mattress dipping. Gojo was feigning sleep, the scent of him still humble. Gentle. Like spring, Getou always thought: a soft ear of sage. A greenstick snapping, exposing that smooth birch lining.
Under the covers his hand had found Gojo's thigh, where the downy hairs were kept cropped. And, trailing up, he felt at the soft inner of him, where he was weeping only slightly. Tight, but giving, at Getou's practiced touch.
Between fake-sleep and wakefulness Gojo whined, and hitched his leg higher on the linens. "Dreamt of you," he'd mumbled, contentedly. He was particularly soft in that moment. Sighing into his elbow-crook, regarding Getou sleepily, through mussed hair. His one cracked eye was blue as lapis but opaque as it, too. Lucid. Getou's fingers stuttered.
He swallowed. "Oh, yeah?"
This dance was unfamiliar, this breach of gentleness. Despite the newness of it, and temporary though it felt, Getou found that he liked it, and that it made him shy. He’d been worried about getting hard but the tenderness, weirdly, was getting him there, his pants constricting, shifting his weight on the springs, crooking his finger to get him ready quicker.
He was used to this. This, he could do. They’d been fucking for years; it was good to feel useful, and skilled, and in routine.
Gojo hummed in assent. A rumble Getou felt in his own chest.
“Was I there?” he asked, throat sticking.
“Hmm. Yeah.”
“What were we doing?”
“Something like this.” And then Gojo moaned, and it was genuine, Getou’s hand having found a soft thatch of nerve-endings within him, there where his body sang. In fact he’d bucked back, catching on the second finger that Getou had primed, and Getou had felt, then, that he was not ready.
"Ah –"
"Be calm, Satoru." It worked on him sometimes, to talk like this. Sometimes.
"Inside me." Not this time. The warmth in his demeanour waned quickly, a slipping eclipse. “Get inside me.”
"I can't," Getou'd said. "Not yet." It made him blush to talk like this, even years later, when he wasn't in the throes of his own rut, and he stuttered a bit: "you're not wet enough."
Gojo would never beg. Worse, he’d use Getou’s name. "Suguru."
His resolve crumbled, like slate down a quarry-side. "I don't want to hurt you."
He hissed - and there might've been annoyance, there - "RCT." Which was, of course, Gojo's new toy. This thing he'd been practicing: a constant, a cure-all, a cause for promotion. All alone on the tennis courts all those afternoons, refusing help, the headaches rendering him mean. It did not ring alarm bells at the time, like it perhaps should have.
In fact Getou found it was good enough. He wasn’t in rut – his pills made sure of that – but he hadn’t expected to be; he still needed Gojo like his lungs needed to ventilate. The warm, balmy heat of him was a sedative, a steaming pool, saliva beginning to juice up in the well of his tongue. He could see nothing else but blue and white. Hear nothing else but Gojo’s stuttered breaths, his own monsters for once neglected.
"You smell different," Getou had mumbled, once fitted inside of him. Nose to the hairs at his nape, he was tight-sheathed: it was a struggle to pull out. Gojo writhed. Getou still wanted to knot him, his hormones stirring in response to Gojo's scent, however preliminary. He wanted to kiss him, too, but couldn’t in their position.
"Harder," Gojo only gritted out, ambivalent, back bowing to take him deeper. And despite the congestion of Getou’s mind, the tiredness that quickly began to claim his disused muscles, he found that he had missed it, missed him, quite frantically, his hindbrain puppeteering his strings with ease, resurrecting him in order to buck with abandon until he was coming, copious and whimpering, already thinking about how he wanted to do it again, and again, both to satiate the unstoppable hunger that had so quickly overtaken him and also to stave off the shadows that he knew would only reclaim him once this small task was over.
And it didn’t ring at the time. When they lay locked and panting it didn’t occur to Getou how much Gojo had begged for it, how much he had insisted. How he’d displayed himself, pale shoulders bared, spine softened and arcing, throat exposed, pliant. The attempts at tenderness. The warmth in his words to make him putty-soft. And the nails at his neck, to keep him from drawing back.
A rarity. In or out of his heats, Gojo scarcely showed Getou he needed him, only that he wanted him. The novelty of it had Getou drunk and compliant. He hadn’t thought twice.
Afterwards, Gojo had even reached for him. Allowed Getou to move his hand down, settle his fingers in his own mess and marvel at the give of him, and at what they were capable of. Beautiful things. You’re incredible, he’d said, and blushed, probably, as Gojo looked back him, an angry flush on his cheeks, eyes swallowed black.
In retrospect, the tenderness had been short-lived. If only he had inherited his mother's kinship with hindsight.
“It might a few weeks more before you see me again. They want me to handle just a couple more missions.”
Getou’s head had snapped up. “So soon? I thought…” you were back for good, he wanted to finish. Though he realised how stupid that would sound, having just given up his full-time job: who else did he expect to take up the mantle?
Getou’s response was light, if a little dry. “Curses won’t fight themselves.”
Getou watched him. He wanted to say he’d go back out there, even if he knew he wasn't particularly needed. He knew he wasn’t even near ready.
“You need a break,” Gojo allowed him, “after everything that’s gone on.” He was bending down, rifling for his socks, the buttons of his spine a pretty and pale protrusion. “They’re fretting over you,” he’d said.
Getou couldn’t even think of what to say. He didn’t even know Gojo had private conversations about him with the higher-ups – and if this was about his, his mental state, Gojo still had never once acknowledged Getou’s issues to his face, even after he gave up hiding it. Even though he’d wanted him to.
Before Getou could open his mouth to object Gojo had said decisively, dismissively, “don’t worry. I told them you wouldn’t do anything reckless.”
Reckless? Getou’s brow creased. Sensing this, twisting round, Gojo reached out – for his earlobe, probably – and Getou stopped him by the wrist ungently, and held on.
And yet, rather than question that particular language choice like he’d wanted to, what came out instead was, his voice pathetically small, “you’re not staying?”
Gojo regarded him for a moment, expression unreadable. And then he’d smiled, all easy. “’Course,” he’d said, and swung his legs back into the bed, as if he wasn’t just searching for his shoes. After a moment Getou wrapped him up, the starch of his sweater chafing his cheek. Tangled their legs, two naked, two clothed. Couldn’t work out why it felt so stilted, so wrong; hated that it did, that he felt that way.
Eventually, though, they melted. He listened to Gojo’s breathing, steady, manual, and allowed the familiar tiredness to douse his insides again, bones calcifying to lead.
“What about your heat?” he whispered.
“Oh,” Gojo replied, “I’ll be fine.”
And rather than question that, Getou fell asleep. Hours into the night, he’d woken up to Gojo quietly leaving.
❦
His constant use of reverse cursed technique had burnt off the effects of his birth control. Set it alight like chemical, until there was nothing, or so it went. That was what Gojo told him, factually, like remarking on the day’s weather patterns, after Getou had completed the numb journey from his childhood home to his dorm room, soaked through to the bone with storm rain and fresh, still unmanufactured guilt.
Thirty seconds into Getou’s mute descent into hyperventilation, Gojo was still talking, and had the gall to ask accusingly, “and just where were you, anyway?”
Black pepper freckled his peripherals. Was he fainting? Never had he felt so instantly de-animated, his soul shucked straight from his bones, leaving him stripped bare and wavering on dumb feet. You’re sick, was his first thought towards Gojo, and it shouldn’t have been. It really shouldn’t have been.
Shakily, he sat down on the edge of the bed, fingers fumbling for the edge, for something tangible, lest he fall. This he did unassisted. Clothes wet from his march up the hill, which suddenly seemed so irrelevant.
"I don't know why you act like this is a bad thing.” Through his spotting vision he noticed that Gojo’s arms were folded defensively. He said, with indigence, “you're making me sad."
A million possible answers erupted and died in his brain, like accelerated flowers. Because we're still in school. Because we're not even bonded. Because your family would kill me. Because how can we - we can't possibly -
It was no use. Because you don't love me, seemed the only pertinent survivor.
Instead he asked, his voice coming out disused, “who knows?”
“That’s your first thought?” Gojo’s mouth was a sneering, malignant curl. “Who knows?”
Getou wanted to strangle him. He was allowed to think this, because it was an impossibility. And maybe Gojo could read his mind after all because he relented, rolling his neck as if to pop it. Resetting his shoulders, gathering himself.
“Shoko, she did the test. Yaga, obviously.”
“Obviously?”
Gojo scowled. “My family, too.”
“What?”
“You know, like, sixty percent of the higher-ups consist of clan members, don’t you? Once Yaga found out it was only a matter of time before they –”
“Found out. You mean when you told him.”
“I had to. He’s my boss.” His voice, even at that point, was still so matter-of-fact. His default register. He shifted his weight to one foot, bringing a hand to his hip. “Really, Getou.”
“Your family.” Getou’s head refused to wrap around this, no matter which way he tried. “You – you wouldn’t even let me mark you in case they –”
“Are you really still hung up on that?” Inexplicably, infuriatingly, Gojo’s voice took on a coy edge when he said, “I didn’t know you wanted me that bad.”
Getou really started to think about hitting him, then, his blood spiking, fists balling. Distantly, he knew he couldn’t, because Gojo had Infinity on; he recognised its hum, its alien magnetism. Despite his bravado it was probably an innate response to Getou’s anger, though this didn’t make sense, as Gojo had never bothered to defend himself against Getou with Infinity even in his wildest rages, their nastiest spars. Not out of trust, but because he’d never wanted to give Getou the satisfaction of thinking he could actually do damage.
Weirdly, it's what made him realise that Gojo wasn’t lying. Maybe he was imagining it; maybe he was applying whimsy, myth, where it was not applicable. But it felt like Gojo no longer just had himself to protect.
Getou’s fists softened. His shoulders, spine, neck, too, gravity suddenly an unbearable weight. It felt days, not hours, since he’d felt the gravel of his mother’s driveway underfoot. Since he saw the frame of her, fingers moving lace through the double glazing, obscuring her small frame.
“I don’t want to talk about them,” Gojo said, voice giving way to something softer. He stepped closer; Getou detected the release of his technique as he entered the space between Getou’s knees. “I want to talk about us. I thought you wanted this. You said… you said he’d be the strongest.”
Something inside Getou buckled. Instantly, he wanted to cry. Even the curses within his ribs that had earlier controlled him seemed stunned to silence, which is how he knew he was truly alone.
Inexplicably, he thought of Haibara. How his death felt a decade ago. It was maybe because of that that he, in an act of self-betrayal, moved his hands to find the small of Gojo’s back, and clung. The strongest, he thought. Did he really ever say that?
“The truth is he wouldn’t have to be.” Gojo’s fingers threaded through his crown, as tender as he knew how. The room softened to blue, and sighed. Gojo said, quietly, “I’d still be proud of him, ‘cause he’d be ours.”
He was cruel, Getou decided. Cruel in how he pushed and pulled, in how he pawed at Getou disinterestedly like yarn. Cruel in how he knew, always knew, exactly what Getou wanted to hear; he just chose half the time not to say it.
Then again, Getou had never told Gojo of his childhood. There was no way that Gojo could know that Getou would replay those words in his head over and over, manipulating the register into something more like his own mother’s, something self-directed. The result was foreign and nonsensical, an absurd fiction even to his own imagination. It still made the tears flow, unstoppably, where he pressed his cheek against Gojo’s flat stomach, and there was no way that Gojo could have known why, not even in his omnipotence, real or otherwise.
Gojo let him sob. Getou cried until his throat felt like poached meat, swollen through with saltwater. He cried for every time he'd buried his face into his childhood pillow and tried in vain to let the tears come; the nights he allowed himself to feel tortured, before only ever feeling theatrical and pathetic with the effort it took. He cried like he'd always wanted to: a thousand tears for every night he couldn’t cry one. He cried for his boy self, for the quantity of self-reproach he'd harboured within so small a frame, and it felt like dislodging a splinter from the inner walls of his heart, that same purge, that same relief.
Gojo, for all his default indifference, held him steadfastly, diligently, until he had nothing left to expel, at which point he reached lightly for Getou’s earlobe. There, he said with his thumbtip. All done.
With cheek against Gojo's stomach, it befell him. Not what it would look like: only that, with certainty, the course of his life had changed. He could only cling. He wasn't one to run. He'd never had the strength.
“You should get an undercut again,” Gojo said, for no reason, once Getou had finally finished snivelling. Fingers rubbing at his nape idly. “I liked that last time.”
Getou blinked, Gojo’s cotton shirt soaked through. He’d never said. “Maybe I will.”
The room returned to quiet. Gojo’s voice was contemplative, distant, fingers moving through hair. He was probably looking at the skirting board, there where it was chipping, a bad paint job. He sounded like he was.
“You should,” he said.
❦
Gojo always used to claim he remembered being born. He doesn’t know why it sometimes sprang to him, the conversation they had at the time.
“Bullshit, Gojo.” He used his familial name a lot, back then, embroidery to his every sentence. He was hoping for Gojo to take notice; to finally permit him to use his given name.
“It’s not bullshit. Maybe you don’t remember yours, but I’m telling you, I remember mine. I don’t need you to believe me.” He was always like this. Letting you know he didn’t need your buy-in.
Getou turned to him. They were fresh to one another, still a tad unsure. Two beta fishes, tanks adjacent, heads bumping the glass in interest. “What did you see, then?”
He readies a scoff. His mother’s face, he’d surely say. Or the arms of the nurse that unrooted him, her blue scrubs tacky with gelatine. Something generic like that.
“Bright lights,” Gojo said instead, blithely, “and curses.”
It had made young Getou pause. “You saw curses?”
“On the ceiling,” Gojo clarified. “Crawling around like so many spiders. My mother’s fear, her pain.” As he said it, he reached across to skitter his fingertips across Getou’s ribs like the scattering of arachnids. His face became red with the embarrassment of being suddenly so close to him; of the controversial, forbidden nature of the conversation. He was still so new. Still unused to being able to speak so freely.
“I used to see them on my bedroom ceiling,” Getou blurted. “When I was a child. Almost every night. In my closet, beneath by bed, and behind the curtain.” He hadn’t told anyone that since his mother forbade it. It took everything in him not to bring a hand to his mouth as if to stopper the words retrospectively, guilt a reflex. A cork to spilled wine. He swore he tasted dishsoap.
“Well, yeah. Every child does.” Getou’s tone was pragmatic, statement so obvious it was nearly accompanied by the roll of eyes. “Natural product of nightmares,” he explained.
And it was so easy for him to say. That is what struck Getou, at the time. That, and how he wished, and wished, he’d known this as a child. How simple things would have been, if someone had only said those two words. Two words that could have changed the entire course of his life, had they only been spoken to him sooner. Well, yeah.
It was like the keys of your prison cage laying just out of reach. Had only they fallen a centimetre closer, he could have reached through the bars and freed himself.
The memory was bitter as a peach pit. Bitter enough to bring him to tears. That’s what he’d thought about on the bus to his neighbourhood. That pair of imaginary keys. Of Gojo, only a second old, eyes blinking against artificial lights, of course unafraid, of course knowing exactly who he was.
Some mornings, Getou still did a doubletake at his own reflection. That’s how he knows he was stolen from. And he would never get it back, his childhood; it would never be dropped on his doorstep, packaged in twine, new and improved, ready for a do-over with an apology note sitting atop. But that hadn’t been the point.
“What were you doing in your old neighbourhood?”
He didn’t ask how Gojo knew he was there. He exhaled, a bleak nicotine cloud; Gojo hadn’t chastised him for smoking in this moment, not after the week they’d had. “Visiting my parents.”
“Have you told them?” He meant by the phone – Gojo still thought they called every week. “Are they happy?”
Sincerity remained rare as a double rainbow on him. “So happy,” he said. It seemed to make Gojo smile.
❦
It would be a lie for Getou to claim that did not know what he intended to do that day in his old neighbourhood. Still, he’d die before telling Gojo the details of that particular lapse in judgement. For it was, he resolutely told himself, when his reflection in the chrome at 4am became unbearable and unknown and his hands looked like someone else’s, nothing more than a lapse in judgement.
The truth is, Gojo held a grudge like a mother’s hand. The truth is, for all his feigned apathy, his untouchable core, if Gojo had known the extent of Getou’s childhood he’d have killed his parents first and long ago. Getou's not even sure he would’ve bothered to make it look like an accident.
Because if Getou’s love was a pale star, Gojo’s, if you could call it that, was spilled gasoline. Dormant. All it took was a match. It could come from anywhere. What burned would be a merciless fire, one to eat the world. There weren't those kinds of half-measures, with Gojo. There weren't those kinds of exceptions.
Days passed, and they remained in the bed. Since that evening Getou had barely left it, and Gojo had, for the first time in a long time, barely left him.
“What are you thinking?”
In the twilight like this his irises, so inorganically blue, took on a strange sort of shimmer. Getou had always thought of it as floating underwater and regarding its surface from beneath: that strange, shifting warp, all fluid atoms, dappled light breaking through the tension from a dimension somewhere unknown, somewhere unreachable. He’d studied them enough.
It was like that. Looking from within water. It was beautiful; it was mesmerising. So much so that you forgot that it was also suffocating; that it was also a sentence.
“Nothing,” Getou told him. He’d been holding his breath going on four years.
Gojo only considered him a second more before replacing his head on Getou’s shoulder. The weight of him there, though entirely vital, felt acute. Like a pocket of stones.
❦
The weeks peeled back. Summer ripened to autumn, a final attempt at a heatwave swelling. To be cleared for mission Shoko compromised that she’d write away a potential psychoanalysis assessment if he just promised her to get outside each day. To her credit, she joined him sometimes on the tennis courts in the afternoons, boxed cigarettes in the pocket of her jeans, to vent about exams, or the inadequacy of her health professor. And he was grateful, the way her mouth moved emphatically around her filter while Getou’s own stub slowly burned to nothing between his fingers. Because sure, she’d lightly ask about his readiness to get back to work, to which he’d reply that yes, he felt ready as he’d ever be, but that was as far as she’d go to broach anything personal. She never probed about Gojo’s pregnancy. Kept it in her pocket like all other things confidential between doctor and patient.
It was a quieter period, which was just how it went sometimes. It meant that the corridors interweaving classrooms and dorms had their thickets flattened by Gojo’s daily tread. Here, beyond campus gates, where the browning leaves whispered above traversed concrete and the consistent chug of traffic mooed, Getou could forget about all of that for a while.
He was alone one day. Hunger gnawed him suddenly, having forgotten to grab breakfast that morning or carry change for the streetside vendors. Luckily, a tree bough laden with the last of summer’s figs swayed plumply before him on his route home, its fringes protruding between the bars of a preschool like ladies’ fingers, bejewelled. From the pavement he retrieved a couple of the highest ones, to leave the lowest within kid-reach.
Thick warmth radiated from the asphalt, bringing with it the smell of cooked tar. It wasn’t quite hot enough for heatwaves, though, which could only mean that his vision was churning. Nausea accompanied, persistent, like a nettle sting. The fruit was overripe when he brought it to his mouth.
Ugh, gross.
Oh, what now?
Getou almost turned, but instead went icebucket still.
You know every time you eat those you’re eating a dead wasp, right?
What do you mean?
He didn’t know why it was coming to him in that moment, Haibara’s voice, nor why it rang with such crystalline clarity. It was a previous conversation that he’d only witnessed, not partaken in; Kento selecting fresh fruit in the cafeteria, Haibara trying to freak him out, playing on his abjection to germs, to insects. His cheeks had been the colour of mirth, of figflesh.
A fig’s just an inverted flower, you know that, right? So the wasp has to crawl right inside to get to the nectar. Lays its eggs in the meanwhile, on the inside. Makes home for a while. But it can’t escape. Listen, evolution is crazy. I learned this from Ieiri’s biology books.
You’re such a dork.
No, serious. It’s this clever little trap where the fruit has engineered, like, this one-way route. The wasp tries to escape but is literally de-winged in the attempt. The fig has to ensure pollination one way or another, and that’s how.
He’d grinned, triumphant, to see Kento’s mouth purse. Getou remembered that, too, right before he’d said, matter-of-factly, it’s a killing fruit.
Getou looked down, reality rebuilding. In almost an acid-trip visage he saw the fruit in his hand to be swimming to the hilt with larvae. The flesh in his mouth turned to mulch, crawling with angry, desperate life, and he spat, and heaved, and kept heaving, until the contents of his stomach lay complete and glittering on the pavement.
❦
Getou’s mother never told him the story of his own birth. It remained a blank in his timeline. He knew not whether it was at home or in a hospital. He wasn’t so unwise to deny she perhaps felt great pain, but there are those that say birth is beautiful. He knew it could also be the case that it is prolonged, and bloody.
He knows now that she refused to talk about it because she did not want to reinforce to him, or better yet, to herself, that he came from her. It was easier to leave open the option that he’d been dropped on her doorstep by some abstractedly malevolent deliveryman. Maybe it was his being cynical, but he’d always felt he was not a product of the act of love, or even sex, but acquired the same way anyone becomes burdened with the devil’s luck. By sinning, in this life or a past. His mother never hid her penitence, her self-blame.
Is that what this was? A product of his wrongdoings? Was it really a coincidence, that Gojo’s announcement coincided with what was about to be his greatest act of sin? Was this to be his punishment? A permanent reminder? A cycle repeating? He thought of scattered wings. Of thorned fruit, of Gojo’s beckoning hand. He’d always thought of Gojo bargaining with Gods. Could it be that he was tasked? He thought back to his first rut, Gojo’s hand in his hair: had he planned this, too, so far back as then?
He mentally dammed the overflow sharpish, knowing it could only be nonsense. Those days he spiralled too easy. Either way, he thought the new conditions would foster closer proximity between them. It didn’t. In those first few weeks when routine re-emerged, he was almost able to forget that it, the pregnancy, was happening to them, and not to someone else. That the conversation they’d had was some badly played-out passage from a book he’d read long ago. The tears he’d wept a scene from a soap opera.
He avoided Gojo, it was true. But then again Gojo did little to find him. He told himself he was pleased for it. Maybe, a little, it disappointed him.
He picked up low-level missions. Took his time returning, blaming cancelled trains. He sparred alone and listlessly, unsupplemented, his muscles screaming for better care. He thought about texting Kento but never knew what to say. He watched smoke chug from the infirmary window like it was a steelworks but felt too sheepish to knock on, like a beggar with an upturned bowl. He’d been trying to cut back. That Gojo had almost certainly hidden his shit, helped. He felt more dazed than ever. Sometimes he saw the things in his room were rearranged and thought he was imagining it.
Another sleepless night. As part of his new nighttime ritual he spent at least an hour feigning sleep in case Gojo came in, which he scarcely did. Suddenly, his phone shrieked.
“This dickhead refused me cigarettes.” He knew immediately that Ieiri was drunk. “Can you bring some?”
Her words were brandy soaked. Dripping in defeat, delusion. She dropped him a pin and he took a taxi from the school gates without a second thought, even though she was only three blocks away.
He found her perching on the hood of someone’s car. He was glad he’d been quick; her cheeks were stained and vulnerable, eyes ringed, leather jacket looking two times too big. He joined her in the cold, rather than trying to coax her away, although he didn’t know what they were doing, nor how she got here, nor why she’d emptied the contents of a paper-bagged bottle entirely to herself, the neck of it still clutched in her hand like choked game.
He did ask. And when she mumbled Haibara’s name in response, he didn’t need to push further.
“There’s no relief,” she lamented, “is there?”
“Time,” he responded, not believing it. “Or so people keep telling me.”
She said, “I’m thinking of leaving.” She was drunk, but the words still injected him, a wasp sting.
“Don’t you fucking dare.”
“At least if I’d been omega I could’ve just let my family marry me off to some well to-do family in the suburbs. ‘S why they wanted me to get my medical degree, by the way. To be desirable to someone’s alpha son.” She gestured at nothing. “None of that matters, now.”
“I sometimes wish you were an omega,” he said, without thinking.
There was a pause. She snorted, though didn’t seem offended. “What a weird thing to say.”
“I don’t – I didn’t mean like that.”
She exhaled. It must be her sixth cigarette. Getou felt instantly guilty. “I know what you mean,” she said, patting his thigh good-naturedly, which made him feel worse. “I know what you mean.”
He swiped his hands over his face, suddenly feeling like the one who was wrecked. And after a minute she told him gently, almost soberly, “you know the easiest way isn’t always the best, don’t you?”
“So people keep telling me,” he said again.
Ieiri nudged his shoulder. “If things were different I’d marry you in a heartbeat, y’know. Don’t think they come much better than you.”
He really was crumbling. A sheepish percentage of him wanted, wretchedly, to ask if she thought her family would find him to be a suitable alpha son for their daughter, but after finding no way of doing so without sounding too imploring or pathetic he pushed it down. He’d only upset himself, anyway. “Don’t say that shit,” he said instead, seriously.
Then, at risk of crying, he rested his head on her shoulder. She allowed it. Reached behind him and began scratching at his nape, her voice still snotty.
“You know you have a birthmark, here?” He’d in fact never had that pointed out to him before. Maybe that’s the sort of thing he and Gojo would do in a different life. Lay about in clean sheets and map each other’s freckles. It’s best to let the thought go quickly, like a bee from the window.
She went on. “My sobo used to say a mark just here’s where the stork carried you down to your mama in its beak when you were born.” She laughed to herself, like it was a funny joke. “You never heard that?”
“No,” he said, thickly. “I didn’t know.”
“See, what did I say?” Her nails were blunt and painfully lovely. “Straight from heaven.”
At that he did cry. She spared him, and didn’t ask why.
They walked home. He took Ieiri to her dorm, saw to it that she was bedded down, sickness finally having shackled her. When he neared his own corridor he stilled against the panelling. His door, though he’d left it latched, was ajar.
As an alpha his sense of smell had always been better than Gojo’s. Annoyingly the fact remained redundant against his Six Eyes, but he still stood obscured by the door, hoping to remain undetected while he scoped. It didn’t matter anyway. Gojo had been here, that was for certain, but was since gone. A quick turn about his rooms, searching for him, probably, before taking off somewhere else.
His inbox was empty. Not a text nor a call. He clearly hadn’t cared that much.
❦
He was the creature, calcified and shelled, that sought sanctuary on the underside of a rough and rocky surface, where the harsher waves couldn't reach. He didn't know how to flee, not even when it'd save him. Only to latch. He didn't know how to be alone again.
Just sometimes, though, Getou had thoughts about leaving.
To carve the shape of his escape into the bracken. Commit a footprint, bare, to the impressionable forest bed. He’d heard of enigmas, a fairytale; still, he sometimes would convince himself of the howls at night, carried on the breeze, deep from within the shaggy face of the mountain. He wondered if he’d be followed. He knew, that despite the yawning proximity between them, Gojo had watch of him. So would he track him? Drag him back by his hair? Getou was weaker now, or maybe always had been, or maybe would allow himself to be. Would he go pliant? Would Gojo finally sequester him here, wrist-to-radiator, and tell him how it’s for his own good? His thoughts degraded, dredged in dirt: hadn’t he already done that?
Or would his escape go permitted? Would he find his momentum aborted, knee-deep in the shrub and panting, when he realised he’d gone unfollowed? Would he be embarrassed by his own theatre? Trudge to the nearest tarmac stretch, thumb erected in defeat, until some pitying stranger hitched him home, his stomach grumbling in time for scheduled dinner?
He knew the more likely option, which is what halted him from enacting this stupid fiction. Still, it was harmless to fantasize. Insomnia found him standing on the woods’ edge one night, staring into its open maw, feeling strangely calmed by the frog noise and the shush of the leaves, which seemed to curl like fingers.
“You sleep walking now?”
Gojo was someway behind him, clad in house shoes and a too-big sweater. It’d been a while since seeing him around. Getou looked at him. In the moonlight, he was pale blue, and beautiful. There was no use doubting it. He was hugging himself, brows knitted, and he was painfully, eternally beautiful.
“It’s freezing,” Gojo told him. It meant come with me and be quick about it.
Getou made towards him. In fairness, Gojo waited, and matched his pace on the trudge back to his open window. He ignored that Getou’s feet were bare. In the bed, where he actually chose to stay, he let Getou curl around him. Brought him forward by the hand, which he rested on his stomach, ignoring Getou’s split second of hesitation. They stayed, curled like commas, straight through until morning.
❦
Winter sealed in autumn rot, like resin. He was handed that day’s mission description by an apathetic beta window who, like most of the staff on campus, used to avoid him before realising that Getou was too mentally handicapped to live up to his status as alpha.
Gojo caught him taking too long in pressing the wrinkles from his uniform. He’d been hovering more since the night he found Getou barefoot, his weight creaking the doorframe. Getou saw him already dressed.
"I'm coming, too,” Gojo said.
What? "What?"
He was still doing this? In the early days of their youth Gojo would insist they mission together, always. In a way, Getou always thought he was just using the opportunity to show off, or to coach him. Now, it only felt like keeping tabs, his presence in general aligning closer to surveillance than anything else. "I'm fine on my own," Getou said.
The report had said a village. Lowly, nestled somewhere in the foothills, inland where it tended to be a little scrubby, a little wild. Grade Two, easy pickings. I didn’t make sense for them to go together. The student body had been axed at the knees, with Kento still on compassionate leave, and he’d do better to make himself available.
Gojo's tone was gratingly matter-of-fact. "You know they get it wrong sometimes."
He was always doing this, too. Reminding him of Haibara's death, as if part of Getou didn't hold unfounded and unreasonable resentment towards Gojo not only for managing to miss it, but for having not somehow prevented it.
As if Getou didn't still think about it every single minute.
He gritted his teeth. Besides, should Gojo really be putting himself in danger, anymore? Is that a thing he – they - should worry about now? His migraine was thickening, a landslide of black sludge packed behind his eyes. Trying to dissuade Gojo from any one of his ideas was like trying to chip a limpet from a hull with a bendy straw. It didn’t have to make sense.
"Fine," he only said, fight long gone from him anyway. His knuckles were still jammy from the last mission: too slow to the draw he'd been forced to physically defend himself. He was getting sloppy. Cursed residue had stuck to the blades of his eyebrows even after two washes.
Pointlessly, he balled his battered hands away from Gojo's eyes. Got ahead of him in the hallway, so that he wasn’t the one following Gojo to the car.
As it happened, Gojo had been partially right to enter with caution. The mission was more damned than either of them could have imagined from the lacklustre briefing that even Gojo's pallor dropped a shade, despite his claims that it was the normal sickness. And it hadn’t been due to the curse itself, which had been an easy dispatch. It was all they unearthed in the aftermath that had the two of them stalled for something to say to each other.
The inlands are like this, sometimes, Gojo’d explained, dryly. Ritualistic. Clan dynamics. I wouldn’t think too hard about it.
Getou chose to feel patronised by his advice. Such that rather than making back for school they found themselves underground, Getou having followed his nose.
In the cells, Getou was deploying a curse. Something goofy; a poorly improvised attempt to assuage the girls – twins, he suspected – with some shadowplay. The way that Gojo eyed it was critical. Getou knew that he itched, inherently, to stamp it out, like an ant underfoot. He was already tapping his foot impatiently, twitchy.
"I said leave them," Gojo said again, when Getou asked him to repeat himself. He was without a scratch. Massaging between his eyes, a mimicked habit he'd picked up from Getou, even though Getou knew he didn't feel pain there, or anywhere. He’d wanted to get out of here from the moment the objective was reached. It was Getou who’d insisted there was something else going on, something worth investigating. "It's not for us to interfere," Gojo told him now.
The bars, for the fact they caged two girls as hapless as orphaned lambs, were thicker than Getou’s wrist. Getou had wanted to fight for the key; Gojo had instead used diplomacy, dissuading the villagers who’d imprisoned them from any notion that they were cause of the village’s ills. It had taken time. Getou doesn’t remember it. He only remembers red. Remembers reaching, for his own stability, through the bars, to offer a finger to a small fist. Gojo in the meanwhile had bartered for their conformity, a reluctant act, one driven only by a begrudging susceptibility to Getou's desperation.
"Isn't it?" Getou said now. “Isn’t it our job to interfere?”
"What would you do?" A laugh. "Adopt them?" The girls stared up at them, three eyes unblinking, sparrow-like and bruised as old fruit. Their shoulder-tips were sharp angles, jumping at Gojo’s harsh tones.
"They have no one else."
Gojo had already turned his back. "They have a whole village," he said callously.
Getou hurried after him haplessly. "Who would treat them like this?" He was trying to raise his voice, but there seemed to be a sound threshold he couldn’t break. He ended up bleating, voice still wrecked from disuse and tobacco. It was like shouting in a dream, fruitless.
And for a second, when Gojo whipped around, he thought he saw his eyes flash from blue to red. Emergency lights. The sight would’ve frightened an invocation straight out of somebody more pious. "You have a child.” Within the tunnel walls he snatched Getou’s limp and wretched hand and forced it against his own flat belly. “This is your child. Did you forget? Leave them."
He doesn’t remember following Gojo to the surface. Only that he did. To the driver that was boredly waiting for them, some way down the mountain, after Gojo had doled out a few dazzling smiles and sardonic waves to a village audience who only stared at them in contempt and confusion. Only that he did.
He doesn’t remember making it back to campus, either. Only that, on the plastic seats outside Yaga’s office, an empty space between them, the sick feeling of having made an irrevocable mistake that overtook Getou’s very soul was an unquenchable, terminal thing. A permanent fixture; a new king to his demons. Unshiftable, a big ugly barnacle on his humanity. It put his curses to shame. It put any malice, any ill intention he’d ever held towards his parents, to shame.
In that moment he saw himself as a worthy host for all he harboured. For all that his mother had failed to purge from him. He had walked away. And while it mattered that he’d left those girls as good as dead, it mattered more that he’d let who'd done that to them live.
While he contemplated this, truly damned, beside him Gojo kicked his feet out and blew air from between his lips like a bored train passenger awaiting the announcement of a delay.
Feeling ignored, Gojo reached for Getou’s earlobe. When Getou did not react, he finally bristled.
"Suguru,” he sighed. “It's no good sulking. We can't save everyone all the time. Clans like that have their own laws. Their own ecosystems." His foot tapped once again, impatiently. "You wouldn't understand."
Getou didn’t know what to tell Yaga when he eventually called them in for mission report. He knew Gojo certainly didn’t; that he’d likely breeze his usual, soulless testimony, easy dispatch, zero casualties, nothing further to report, can I go now?
"You saw an abused child and you walked away.” To the space between his shoes Getou said, disconnectedly, and altogether too daringly, “how is that supposed to fill me with faith?"
In the silence that followed, as his own words dawned on him, a sort of survival instinct animated him to get to his feet and leave. Gojo’s hand around his wrist was sudden, a locked jaw.
“Faith?” he asked, like he misheard. They both knew he had not misheard.
“As a parent,” Getou clarified, unable to hide from his voice how badly he needed to cry.
Gojo was on his feet. Using the leverage to yank Getou closer.
"I would stop at nothing," he said, hissed, right into his face, "to see the two of you safe. People, sorcerers, systems, societies, I would raze them easy as breathing." And Getou wrenched his hand away, as if burnt. The blue in his eyes was so cold, so colossal, like collapsing glaciers. In that moment fear almost rooted him.
"You wouldn't understand," Gojo said again, his tone suddenly bored, like the roll of eyes, and on being released Getou left the room, curse-sickness lassoing his guts, constricting with suddenness.
❦
Sleep did not find him, and nor did Gojo. After hours of staring at the ceiling Getou stole from campus and walked six or seven bus stops to a 7/11 where he purchased a pack of straights. He smoked each one to his fingertips on the chilly walk back, the awakening rookeries calling out to him quizzically, and arrived at the foot of the hill just as dawn was beginning to bleed the sky of its interim bleakness. He tossed the carton in the direction of the trash.
Kento was standing by their stop.
“Nanami,” he called, voice ashy and sleep-sapped. It had been months since he’d seen him on campus, having been sent back to his father’s after the events of the summer. Now, Getou’s gaze staggered confusedly over the suitcases, strongbags, and cardboard boxes that crowded about his underclassman’s feet, cluttering up the pavement. “You’re leaving,” he realised, and he felt instantly drained, as if punctured, fast deflating.
Kento’s cheeks were drawn, his face waxy, claylike, eye sockets two thumbed-out hollows. “Do you think I’m a coward?” His voice was rueful, too quiet: Getou got closer, like approaching an animal that’d been trapped too long to remember how to flee.
I think you’re sane, he wanted to say honestly. He felt watched, and so he didn’t. He knew Kento understood that.
“It was this or –” Kento sighed and looked to the laden sky, briefly, as if it held answers, or an autocue. “I don’t know.” His voice was high. “Something stupid beyond feasible correction.”
Getou’s heart kicked in answering. “Diplomatic,” he could only land on.
“You know me,” Kento returned. There was no mirth.
“Nanami.” Getou scrubbed at his nose. He cried so easily these days, his throat already threatening to spasm. There was no use convincing him to stay, nor did Getou even want that for him; it still made him sick, to see that he was leaving, and that he was doing it alone. “He was an amazing sorcerer,” he offered finally, uselessly, because they both understood this to be the reason for Kento’s departure.
Kento, who was already somewhere else. That was evident now. “Yes,” he agreed impassively, and Getou recognised the undoubtable presence of anger, pure and fundamental, just under his skin’s surface. It glowed within him like a hostile ember. Like only a whisper of breeze could spark it up to tall flame; like this was the reason he was compelled to create distance. “I always thought so, too.”
He looked off into campus while Getou struggled with knowing what to say. Sighed with forced light-heartedness. Getou knew he was looking for the outline of Gojo who, since the funeral, he had purposefully and, with some credit to Gojo’s absence, successfully managed to avoid.
“I didn’t get a chance to, but. Tell him –” his jaw was set, the words forced through, gritty. “Tell him I’m very happy for his news. I’d like to say I’m surprised how he could plan to juggle fatherhood with being the strongest sorcerer in the world but, well, there’s nothing he can’t seem to do, is there?”
Don’t leave me, Getou thought, sudden and desperate. He almost said it. Instead he only burned at Kento’s words, guilt at his own affiliation.
The bus arrived. Getou helped Kento wordlessly with his few possessions. He couldn’t imagine that Kento wanted to keep his own uniform and so he could only assume that it was Haibara’s jacket he saw poking through the open lid of one of the boxes, covering, presumably, more of his belongings therein.
“I never believed them, by the way.” Getou tore his gaze away from the limp navy sleeve, instead meeting Kento with a puzzled look. “That they had reason to worry,” Kento clarified, in response. “That you’d do something impulsive, go out and fuck something up. I know you were bad for a while, but.” He waved a hand. Doesn’t it go for us all? his gesture said, and you’d think so, Getou wanted to respond. You’d think so.
Instead, Getou only carefully placed the bags at his feet, Kento dragging a hand through his hair. He said, without looking up, “how long has Gojo been saying that?”
There was no world, of course, in which anyone but Gojo had been saying that. No one else, at least, who had planted the seed. But having said too much Kento only shrugged apologetically. It didn’t matter. Getou told himself it didn’t matter.
His friend disappeared with a muted wave. It was without ceremony. Sudden. Irrevocable. In the same way that Haibara had left them.
In his wake unravelled a reel of bitter feelings that almost had Getou staggered. Feelings like bloodthirsty claws, feelings surrounding the thanklessness of this sick fucking enterprise, and astride that, the confirmation of what he’d suspected for a while: that Gojo had been worrying over him, questioning his stability, his longevity at Jujutsu Tech. That he’d been disseminating his suspicions, tactfully, like whispers on the breeze; spinning up concern, it seemed, until he’d felt compelled to act on it himself. Because wasn’t that what he’d done? Taken matters into his own hands, to block Getou from whatever imminent fall he’d perceived with such certainty? In a bitterness so vile, a hatred so ugly, he could allow himself to believe these things. He could. Insofar, he hadn’t.
Yet beneath all this cowered a particular pang, overshadowed. A sharp-toothed, selfish sting that Getou was watching go the only person who might’ve stood beside him if it ever came to battle. Something stupid beyond feasible correction, Kento had said. I know, Getou would go back and say, letting relief overtake him. Wisely or not: I know about that.
He didn’t know that he had the strength to fight the side alone.
❦
His feet took him to the cafeteria. Floating on a numbness that he put down to the nicotine.
Campus was quiet. In a less foggier headspace the unnatural silence would’ve rang bells, even if he was used to people avoiding him of late. Still, he paid it no particular mind as he traversed the courtyard in the vague direction of the only figure in the vicinity which was, of course, Gojo. Gojo, who had been sitting dormant, an unmoved emperor, the whole while their second and final junior had departed from their lives irrevocably.
Nanami’s gone, Getou wanted to yell. He’s gone and I don’t know who knows. He’s gone and you didn’t even notice. Or you did, and you just don’t care.
Instead, seeing Gojo’s face for the first time since the previous evening only brought back a rolling flush of anger, of memories, that he’d been trying to screw the lid on all night. Memories that filled his mouth and lungs like hoards of clamouring flies.
On approach he said rigidly, “did you give Yaga the report yesterday?”
Gojo didn’t bother looking up from his bowl, elbows on the tabletop, shoulders bowed. He was still mad. “I didn’t see him.”
“You didn’t?” It would be Getou, as always, who'd get this in the neck; expectations had been high since his prolonged hiatus.
“Well.” Gojo scraped out the porcelain. It was his fourth portion of dessert, it seemed, a stack of crockery growing beside him. He must’ve asked for it specifically. He offered through a mouthful of whipped cream, “he isn’t here.”
“Here?” Sleeplessness reduced Getou to a walking echo.
“On campus. None of them are.” Gojo didn’t seem perturbed by this fact, yet Getou suspected he was fronting. His Six Eyes had quarried this information; Getou realised that, beyond this, he did not in fact know what was going on, nor exactly where all their superiors were.
He was talking again, tone indifferent. “Board meeting, I’m guessing.” Emergency one, Getou inferred, if that was the case. His heartrate kicked up a little, knee growing restless with unease. His brain darted between Kento, to yesterday’s mission, to the sickly sour hole he still felt in the lining of his chest, curse-burned.
To two scrappy girls, sparrow-like and forsaken and shrinking from him in learned anticipation.
That one, especially.
“D’you think it’s about –”
“Don’t get excited,” Gojo cut him off. “Even if they did get wind, they don’t give a shit about some lost cause cult-voodoo village, you know. Don’t think it’s just me that’s giving you grief.” He tossed his cutlery, leaning back. His gaze tracked the woodgrain, sniffing, and Getou didn’t even contemplate it anymore, the way that Gojo’s always seemed to read his mind. “It’s about me, most likely,” he finished.
If they’d been gone since yesterday, they were way off site. Kyoto’s where the board HQ resided. Where the Gojo Clan residence was, too.
Getou stared at his upside-down reflection on Gojo’s discarded spoon. His image distorted when the spoon clattered in its place: Gojo slamming an empty glass down on the tabletop to trap a drowsy bluebottle, searching for sugar.
His chairlegs scraped back, bored of Getou’s irresponsiveness.
“You?” Getou repeated quietly, belatedly.
“Me, us, whatever.” He stood, and jabbed an accusatory finger in the air at nothing. “I meant what I said, you know? I’d kill anyone that threatened our family. I’m not fucking around.”
Getou couldn’t understand anything anymore. He said helplessly, incredulously, his brain a heap of useless fraying wires, “why are you saying that?”
Pink bloomed, indignant, across Gojo’s nosebridge; it was unusual to see. He said, cryptically, almost self-consciously, “I just have a bad feeling.”
A silence settled between them. Gojo fingered the tablecloth.
“I’m going back to my room,” he announced, turning his back, “if you want to come.”
The blinds moved against a noiseless breeze. Somewhere in the background a dish clattered in the kitchen – the culprit, an antsy kitchenhand, ducked her head, frightened of them. Quickly, Getou reached over and released the insect from beneath Gojo’s glass.
And not a minute more passed before Getou was following him, wordlessly.
❦
In his dreams her eyes were wide but dull as copper coins. He saw the thorax of a wasp. Its wings were missing. Snow stacked on roadsides. Snow on Gojo’s lashes. Snow underfoot, melting, melting to steam, melting to an open cavity beneath his shoes into which he plummets like dropped change between the slats of a drain. When he woke, it was to a torrent of cold sweat.
Gojo banged into the shower room that Sunday morning with a snake-like yawn. Getou had been touching his eyebags in the mirror while the water heated up; he stopped, self-conscious, and busied himself at the sink.
“Y’look like shit,” Gojo informed him, by way of greeting. He started to undress, unabashedly, pointedly, only Getou hesitated, long enough that Gojo began to watch him critically. Obviously waiting.
Slides, shorts, before finally Getou was barechested. Gojo reached out, a finger extended, and flicked the talisman he’d elected to chain about his neck that morning, fetched from his dresser alongside his pressed socks and shirt for the day.
Getou held his breath. Gojo released his: a quick snort, through the nose. Then he turned, and stepped first into the spray. The charm bumped, neglected, against the altar of Getou's ribcage, within which he imagined entities stirring, assembling, in what for once felt closer to protection than ridicule.
❦
A slow week passed. After Yaga’s unceremonious return at the start of the new week, Getou was delegated a handful of missions, but only enough to keep him acceptably busy. The requirements were low-level, practically rudimentary, and he did not complain.
The afternoon’s mission saw him downtown following a weekend memorial service. He was thankful for the solitude even if the task and the context was grim. He took his time and didn’t particularly care about collateral. No veil, either, which he didn’t bother to correct once he realised his blunder.
On clean-up, he found a singular remaining curse shrinking in an alley, cowering at his approach. It feared him; it whimpered wretchedly when he got down before it, lethargic. He didn’t need to, but he pressed two fingers between its eyes. It garbled, the pickled eyes darting frenetically, unseeingly. It took a second of concentration for the atoms of it to collapse like a felled sandcastle and reassemble, neat and sentient, into a glossy, palm-sized orb between his fingers.
He stayed crouched. Braced himself on the dumpster, palm slipping on the grime. It was small, but his fifth of the day: he was retching even before it was even past his teeth. The taste of decay. Of mould so old it’s nothing but greyish dust and spores.
Nausea swelled, and eventually ebbed. He got to his feet, feeling undignified. Brushed down his pants.
If you gotta eat shit, no point in nibbling, he recalled someone saying to him once, and it could only have been Gojo, as nobody else in his life talked with such authority on subjects they knew nothing about. Swallow it, gone and done.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” hissed. Gojo was there as if manifested, summoned like any other curse. And Getou hadn’t detected him, his senses getting lax.
“Don’t look too happy,” Gojo said, bratty. His stance in the mouth of the passage was unbothered, as if his frame wasn’t splitting the sunlight like something deified.
“What are you doing here?”
“Came to see if you needed help.” Of course it wasn’t true, the timing too convenient when Getou had been minutes away from turning in the direction of the train. Gojo picked through the street detritus towards him, backlit, hands sequestered in his pockets so as not to touch anything.
As such, Getou didn’t dignify him with a response. He didn’t even have the energy to feel embarrassment at Gojo catching him like this, not anymore.
Gojo unsheathed his hand and produced a cold soda can. Sugar always helped Getou with sickness, and yet he still eyed it with apprehension when Gojo offered it.
The thing is, Getou couldn’t work out how he simultaneously took with his right hand while giving with his left. Nor why that clarity seemed to hit him only now. Was he a total psychotic asshole simply because he couldn’t help himself, while the gentle parts of him remained true, remained trying to push through like shoots through stubborn, arid earth? Or was he only tender when he chose to be, when it was convenient? When he was trying to assemble Getou’s strings to bring him closer, keep him sweet? Getou couldn’t work out what was worse. Only that he was sick of being manipulated; sick of not knowing where to find the cracks in Gojo’s exterior in which he could tuck his fingers and finally pull him down.
Sulkily, Getou accepted the drink. His mood was now as rancid as the floor of his mouth.
“They’re not giving me any missions,” Gojo began explaining, unasked, kicking at an old milk crate. He was bored, which Getou’d learned the hard way was when to be most wary of him. “Maybe it’s ‘cause of the baby, I don’t know.”
He didn’t know when he’d started attributing the word baby to their situation. “Then should you be here?” he snapped.
Gojo blinked. He was offended, Getou realised. He felt partially bad, partially triumphant. His suspicions were right: Gojo was in the dark when the higher-ups disappeared for days. It didn’t scare Getou, who was actively trying to distance himself from the interworkings of the Jujutsu world as much as he feasibly could, but it scared Gojo. Getou saw the distracted set of his mouth, how he worried at the inside of his bottom lip.
Getou asked, emboldened, “are you avoiding them?”
“No.”
“Did you find out where they went? Why they’re not talking to us?” It had been a week and the two of them hadn’t yet spoken about it: the avoidant looks, the cancelled classes, the minimal contact their seniors had afforded them. Getou can’t say he’d been disappointed. Gojo, on the other hand, had become listless and inflamed. Slamming about the halls like a neglected understudy, Getou keeping contentedly to his shadows.
Gojo’s mouth was a line. It pained him to admit it, Getou knew it: “no.”
“But you have theories,” he pressed.
“Yes.” Gojo tapped his foot peevishly. “You forgot to veil.”
At that, Getou was done with the conversation. He shrugged, sipped on his can, and Gojo waited for him to finish before quickly divulging, “I think they’re mad at me. For the pregnancy.”
And Getou realised, then, that this was why Gojo had found him away from campus in an alleyway fifteen miles away. Even with Six Eyes he was not the only all-seeing entity at Jujutsu Tech. The halls have eyes, Gojo’d always told him. Despite himself, Getou’s ears perked.
“Mad at you?”
He waved a hand demonstratively. “Me. You. Us.”
Spit it out, Getou wanted to say, interest waning, but nausea pulled on him again until he was bent double, bracing himself on the flaking wall. Gojo paid him no consideration, and kept talking.
“Think about it. They all disappeared that weekend, and then what? This silent treatment? It’s like they’re scared of us.” He said this last part, and Getou swore he heard him come alive; there was no regret in this particular hypothesis, but there was, he thought, a glimmer of delight, or accomplishment. Gojo had always coincided reverence and fear. One the root that nourished the other, and vice versa. Despite his discomfort, his apprehensions towards the ambiguity of the situation, the possibility that their silence was a product of fear presented the most exciting outcome to Gojo, if the most unlikely to Getou.
Gojo was still talking. “I might as well have Infinity dialled to a thousand the way everyone’s avoiding me. I even tried contacting my family: nothing. I think they’re going to do something.”
“Do what?”
“Push me.”
Nobody pushes you, Getou thought. He collected himself on the sidewalk and looked again, properly. He was right; there was a fire in Gojo’s eyes, unmistakable, revelling in his conspiracies, in the prospect that he might be any sort of target. It was novel for him. He’d been waiting for this. Waiting for the moment to spill to Getou, unwatched, to what end? To plot with him? He sounded like an insane person, Getou thought, bitterly, inventing stories, making everything, as fucking always, about him.
Getou could get mad, too. As if unloosing him, his nausea suddenly dissipated, flushed out by adrenaline that suddenly had his fingers twitching with anger, with a desire for truth.
“Are we going to have this out?” he asked, and Gojo frowned.
“You know I hate when you’re vague, Suguru.”
It was the use of his name that finally uncapped his anger. How many times those three syllables had been uttered his way, only ever a device to assemble his strings. Getou wanted to cut the thread that puppeteered him even if it meant he’d never move again. He regretted, bitterly, the day he’d ever given Gojo the permission to use it.
“Why is it you always held back with me?” he demanded. “Why didn’t you let me mark you? Why have me fuck you whenever you want; why aren’t we bonded? You know there’s no one else for me but you.” He grabbed his collar, too quick for Infinity. The admission hadn’t ashamed him; if anything, he only felt, for once, like he was coming alive. Even if it was something about himself he could never understand. “So why?” he hissed. “There’s a reason. There’s a reason you could never allow us; it’s the same reason you’re afraid now. What is this giant, looming consequence? What was it you tried to avoid by going with me? What makes me so fucking bad?”
At the last part, accidental, he un-lidded something ancient. Something he’d feared would shrink him, but once voiced, only stoked him.
Gojo shoved him off, anger burning high on his cheeks. “I’m not afraid,” he said. And of course that’s the only part of Getou’s outburst he responded to. He began to smooth at his uniform, flapped. Turning, so as to hide his reddening face.
“Just answer me one thing,” Getou pushed. “Why wouldn’t they allow this?” He motioned between the two of them – three of them – because what he meant is as general as just that.
“Because we’re the strongest,” Gojo burst. “Because we’d corrupt each other, because we’d be unstoppable. Because the Jujutsu world is fucking falling apart. Haibara, Nanami, and now you –”
At that, Getou jerked. For once, he saw Gojo reconsider. Slow down, take a breath, though it pained him, being on the backfoot like this.
“I don’t know,” he conceded. “A child, at a time like this – two halves of the strongest sorcerers – who knows? Who knows what could happen? Which way it could go?”
It gave Getou pause, his chest still heaving. What did he mean? Gojo had always been the Clan's poster child, the forerunner, the champion. For the school, too, for the side, or whatever you wanted to call it: it was all, always, one and the same. The fact was, Gojo was an arrowhead, crafted from the finest and most ancient veins of quartz; centuries he'd spent cooking in the earth's layers, his arrival foretold. Jujutsu Society was the bow. That which held the right and the means to jettison him in the direction of an enduring and mutual enemy; towards something, so he'd always been told, that sought to destroy all. What did he mean, which way it could go? Surely, Getou thought, there was only one way, knowing his own shortcomings as of late weren't anything near disruptive enough to overcome prophecy. To overcome Gojo.
It didn’t matter, Getou realised, with sudden clarity. It didn't matter about any of it. It was the potential.
“You think they’d rather not find out,” he said slowly. And Gojo just nodded.
It dawned on him, then. That maybe there was truth to it. That maybe, in a way, they were scared, and it hadn’t just been part of some sick, idealistic fiction.
“You used to say it,” Gojo coaxed. He saw Getou ticking, the cogs working, the pieces falling into place. He spoke softly. “You said our child would rule the world.”
He couldn’t be right. He’d used shit like this before against him; Getou couldn’t tell if his repressed memory cell was consuming more than it was meant to or if Gojo’s recall was just better than he’d ever credited him for.
Then, recollecting, he shook his head dumbfoundedly, a burn overtaking his cheeks. “That was – that was rut talk.”
“But it’s true. Don’t you understand? They are worried,” Gojo divulged, “about which world that would be. Their side, or –”
He stopped himself. Getou looked up, then, as if struck. Gojo had said their side.
They stared at each other. At first, he thought he saw Gojo shrink, like he’d crossed a mark. But then conviction set him, his jaw hardening, eyes defiant, and slowly realisation seeped into Getou like groundwater.
Maybe his convictions were merely shadows. Was Gojo really an agent of Jujutsu Society? Or was he operating for the sake of some other cause? Did his power truly belong to their leaders, or had it always been entirely his own? Just asking himself the question, Getou felt the answer was suddenly obvious. Gojo's eyes searched Getou’s for that very understanding. He knew he’d find it there. Getou omitted it already, it seemed, despite the fact he tried to bat the idea away, like something sacrilegious, something forbidden. He could feel when Gojo saw it, because he took his hand, and squeezed it.
Something mutual transferred between them. A charge, crackling between fingertips. Gojo’s blue eyes for once uncovered, for once at his level, affirming, colluding, armoured with conviction. Getou's perspective tipped almost violently, as if the Earth had begun to rotate back on itself: if Gojo’s eyes were before him, then whose was on his shoulder?
He wondered – and it was strangely languid – who the real adversary was.
“We should go,” he said, and after a moment, Gojo let go of his hand.
❦
When they were younger, both unpresented, there was a nasty fight. Grade one, downtown, an old mortuary. Maybe they were distracting one another, trying to show off, but Gojo’s hold on infinity was unpractised. Getou only remembers that, in the aftermath, he watched as Gojo rotated a finger around the pocket of his cheek, probing at a dislodged molar before spitting it wholly, bloodily, to the ground. Like used gum. He made nothing of it. Getou, privately, balked.
Quickly, and before he could question why, Getou got down the instant Gojo went away and retrieved the tooth like an agate from the rubble. And Gojo couldn’t heal himself, back then: they’d had to walk to campus so that he could stop periodically to spit blood from the socket on the sidewalk.
Gojo never mentioned it, nor the expensive porcelain replacement that he quietly got fixed for himself in the proceeding weeks. It seemed ridiculous now. Getou never knew where the tooth went or why he took it in the first place. But it was true, that it seemed to provide him with some sort of evidence. A proof to the contrary. An artefact crucial enough to keep, and sequester privately, lest they seized it and reconditioned his mind to previous notions. Even so, at its disappearance, and at the subsequent advancements of Gojo’s power, his mind inadvertently patched over the memory like infilled earth.
Still, it sometimes poked through the floors of his mind, like a shoot; the memory of toothroots cutting into his palm. Gods don’t bleed. His body seemed to know when to remind him of that.
❦
Days blurred by. Gojo picked up the habit of meeting Getou after his missions, always off-campus, so that they could talk. This time Getou saw him first, idling by the train platform. Looking around at nothing in particular. He’d forgone a bag, was carrying sour candy and gauze, scuffing the toe of his shoe against the tile, bored. There was always something disarming, almost uncanny, to see him suspended amongst the ordinary like this. This creature of excess, unbound; how wrong it looked to see him contained by four walls, to imagine him checking departure times and dropping loose change. Watching him for a second, not for the first time, the thought crossed Getou’s mind: what do you think about? What goes on in there?
Gojo’d looked up, and waved. It made him look young. Getou was waving back, before he registered it.
On the train, Gojo left no space between them, and blotted his grazes more gently than before.
“You said they could do something,” Getou said, their heads close. He didn’t elaborate, but he never had to. “What did you mean?”
Gojo seemed to be enjoying touching him again. Daubing at his hands more than necessary. “I don’t know.”
“But they can’t hurt you,” Getou maintained. “Nobody can.”
“I know." Gojo's smirk flashed to playful. "But wouldn’t it be hilarious to see them try?”
“Stop being a sick fuck.” Despite it all Getou glowed just for looking at him.
Gojo actually stuck out his tongue and, context removed, it almost felt like their early days. Getou had to look out the window, dizzy for a second. Gojo had popping candy in his mouth, the sound of it absurd. In a ludicrous instant Getou felt like this would be the moment he’d recount to the documentary makers, fifty years from now. You were close to him. What were the signs?
“It’s not just you that you need to worry about,” Getou pointed out, breath fogging up the glass. He hesitated, even then, to breathe life into the topic. “Not anymore.”
“Don’t say that like it’s something new.” Getou observed him, covertly, through the reflection in the glass. It was novel to see him operate unwatched. His face softer. Guileless. “It never has been.”
And to Getou’s surprise, to make clear his meaning, Gojo reached down and took him by his hand. Getou looked down at where they were joined. His fingers circled closed.
“Can I ask you something?” Getou eventually asked, still looking.
Gojo squeezed his hand, sure.
He took a breath, and then released it. “Why didn’t you tell me your birth control had stopped working? Before I…”
He trailed off. He definitely didn’t imagine the feeling of Gojo going rigid at his words, even if he righted himself rather quickly. “I didn’t know,” he only said after a minute, gaze tracking the moving horizon, the softness to his brow vanished again, like a minnow flitting back to shaded seclusion.
To that question, it would be the only answer he’d ever get.
❦
Later that week they were summoned to Ieri’s office. By now, Gojo’s general agitation had reached a new peak, even setting Getou’s own teeth on edge. Their conversation downtown rattled unforgivingly about his skull like undissolving stones.
Ieiri was visibly tremulous. “I brought you both here, to, ah.”
Gojo had his arms folded and a face on him like he was front row to an offensively bad stand-up routine. In front of her were pamphlets, splayed; other benign documents and, glossy and dark, what looked like a sonograph, murky as a thumbprint, though Getou’d never seen it. In fact, surprisingly he realised that until this moment he’d still been vaguely toying with the idea that Gojo might’ve been faking this whole thing. Staring at the image threw everything into such harsh relief that he almost didn’t register what Ieiri said next.
“Discuss options,” she finished, in response to their – Gojo’s – expectant silence.
Gojo snorted like they were still someway before the punchline. “Options?”
Getou’s heart sank.
Ieiri, her skin pallid, eyes more smoke-ringed than usual, avoided looking at both of them. She swiped her hand repeatedly over her face, wiping at nothing. “In terms of – in terms of.”
Gojo waved a hand encouragingly. “Say it,” he said simply. It sounded blithe, but that was only a wrapper. They could both feel it. Gojo was fucking seething.
“Satoru.” She used his given name, placatory. “We’re talking convenience, okay? We need to get to the bottom of whether – whether this is the right time for you and Suguru to bring a child into the world. Maybe you need to consider…”
Their reality seemed to slip, like sludge, as if gravity had tripled. It felt like a horror film. “Satoru,” Getou begged, turning to him. “Don’t be mad at her.”
For a moment, Gojo didn’t remove his gaze from Ieiri, so still he seemed inorganic. Then, the elastic snapped when he omitted a singular, humourless laugh. “Why would I?” he said. “I know it’s not her.” He stood, and moved the pamphlets before them into a neat pile. Getou will never know the thoughts that formed inside his head in that moment.
“I know it’s not her,” he said again, like he was the only person in the room.
He didn’t open the door to leave. He compacted it, in a terrifying and atmosphere-shattering instant, into a splintered cube. In the aftermath, Gojo gone, the sound of it ringing, Ieiri began to cry.
Gojo disappeared a day. Within that time Getou upended his entire room to find the pills that he knew had been hidden from him. Lined his throat with a bottle of stashed sake he managed to unearth before he continued, at first in frustration and then in blind fury, to dismantle the innards of his room.
He found them tucked neatly into the bathroom light fitting just as Gojo messaged his phone. It was evening, twelve hours since he’d left the infirmary in the wake of Gojo’s warpath.
Coming home
Sorry for the drama
He stubbed out his cigarette, rolling his eyes, and threw his phone to the other side of the room. And, knocking back the remainder of his stabilisers, probably two or four too many, he unfoiled the round little tablet he’d found amongst them and swallowed that, too.
Ieiri’s words, obviously delivered in accordance with firm instruction, had confirmed Gojo’s conspiracies. And, too, Getou's own suspicions - the thoughts that had plagued him since that day in the alley, that he'd tried to put down as nonsensical.
It was obvious to him that Gojo was not the Jujutsu-sponsored prodigy he'd always played up to be. Which only begged more questions: for how long had Gojo been operating alone? Where did his thoughts truly align? Had Getou's association with him never served to bring him into Jujutsu Tech’s favour, like he thought? Had it only brought Getou against it? Painted him as part of a joint risk, a cause for close observation?
Had Gojo been able to identify, even a little, with Getou's moral struggles? Or was his true allegiance something far beyond? Something that fell off the end of the scale, into cavities darker than even Getou's mind could conjure?
Because Gojo was a rogue agent. That, if nothing else, was apparent now. They didn’t control him. They couldn’t. That was just the problem. And they had declared war.
Getou's thoughts struggled for purchase, a tennis-game of control in his mind. Did the power have to be someone else’s? Could it not, for once, be his? He was so sick of marching to someone else’s tune. This perpetual game of chess, whether Gojo played opposition to the school, his family, or the gods themselves - Getou wanted to upend the board and send the pieces flying. He wished Gojo had never called him that day in his old neighbourhood. Whatever the aftermath, he would’ve dealt with it himself.
His conclusions seemed to dull the longer he let his mind run away. The pills were not inhibiting the synthetic rut, but by then were fuzzying the come-up slightly. It wasn’t unpleasant. On the bed, his room destroyed, his blood oozy with the cocktail of liquor, dampeners and artificial hormones, he began to palm himself lazily until a half-sleep took him. Temperature climbing slowly, but climbing. Inhibitions subsiding languidly, but subsiding.
And as he closed his eyes, weirdly, and for the first time in his life, he longed for the taste of a curse on his tongue. Not even for the familiarity, the routine. He wanted it for the flavour.
Gojo entered sometime later, the room having turned black and soupy with night. He saw the empty pill bottle, which Getou hadn’t bothered to conceal, and tutted, brushing back Getou’s hair. He’d have felt the heat of him there, rut-fever by now burning through – he didn’t say anything, but Getou’s heightened senses picked up on how Gojo’s hormones spiked in response, a quiet but sure echo. He was sweet like whipped cream with his interest piqued. Mild succulence, sucrose, honeyed. Getou imagined snow on his lashes and his heart stirred to a kick at the sudden memory.
“Silly boy,” Gojo told him, admonishing. Getou kept his eyes closed, let his voice reach him from someplace soft and distant. Gojo’s tone was pouty, condescending. “Those are the last ones, okay?”
He meant the pills. Getou said easily, “okay.”
Gojo moved aside the clutter and began to undress for bed. He never bothered with the light; only when Getou opened his eyes and allowed them to adjust did his gaze snag on Gojo’s collar when he pulled off his shirt. At the stains there, in paint splatters. Red so dark it looked blue.
In the bed, Getou began to kiss on him immediately, Gojo allowing him to pull.
“Suguru,” he whispered, voice already brittle, breaths quickening. He was receptive, pliant, baring his throat, the gland behind his ear. Getou could smell his surprise, his contentedness. How he grew wet immediately, which for some reason surprised him. “How long’s it been?” Gojo asked him dreamily.
There was no mistaking it was blood. Getou smelled it before he even entered the room.
“You smell so good,” Gojo was telling him. “So fucking good.”
Getou knocked his thighs apart. Entering him was easy; he was wetter, even, than in pre-heat. He pushed in whole, all in one go, and only at the hilt did he whisper over Gojo’s ear, over his sweet, unfettered moans, “what the fuck did you do?”
It felt like that day in the alley: somewhat a reckoning. An undercurrent of violence had always nourished their roots. It was the nature of them; Getou’s bloodlust had started long ago, one November passed. This moment was a culmination, a keystone; he asked for his honesty, for the black recesses of his heart, for an exact measurement of the lengths he would go. He wanted to be in on it. He was ready to give in.
Gojo writhed, impatient. In the blue-dark Getou saw his teeth and realised he was smiling.
He said, “I took care of it.”
Getou stared at him. “You are fucking crazy.”
“You love me,” he countered, and this foreign, tender word, no, the truth of it, seemed to surprise them both. He saw that there was blood flecked up his jaw, too, but Getou only registered this indifferently, as if Gojo had parted his hair in a different way, or worn a new flavour of chapstick. It looked at home on his face, as a smattering of freckles brought out in the sun.
No. It was the look in his eyes, over-dilated and feral, that rang danger more than the presence of viscera. It was the smell of adrenaline released before death, of other people’s fear, that stained his fingertips. He was thoroughly alive. If a bored Gojo was a cause for concern then one entirely entertained by his own reckless games was a sharpened snare.
“I’m not even yours,” Getou told him and he felt, for the first time in his life, glad for it, because fucking him like this, loving him like this, was the equivalent of placing your wrist between the metallic teeth of an open bear trap.
“You always have been,” Gojo hissed. “You were born for me.”
Getou’s hand flew to his throat. He expected to be clawed at – which he would frankly invite, ammunition to inflict greater dominance – but instead Gojo only reached for his wrist to encourage him to press down harder.
I don’t want to hurt you, Getou’d usually say. But he watched the bizarre movement of something withdrawing from the shores of Gojo’s eyes and realised, at once, that it was the recession of control. This spurred him. What he saw, for the first time, was the core of him. It was pink and membranous and hurtable. It was a porcelain tooth.
“Say please,” Getou said, and reasoned to pull out if he didn’t and leave him cold and wretched.
“Please,” Gojo whimpered immediately, “please, Suguru, please.”
Getou complied. Gojo moaned until he couldn’t anymore. He was a fucking mess, eyes alight and frenetic, writhing on Getou’s cock, the juncture of his shoulder opulent with honey and iron-rich with blood.
In a different context Getou had dreamed of this. The give of his cartilage, the squeezed whistle of his breath under palm. It was bizarre to realise that this was the first time he’d ever had any sort of control over Gojo. It was a tonic, he realised neutrally, that he quite needed.
“Do you want me to kill you?” It was not rhetorical; there was almost wonder in it. Gojo’s body responded like an instrument; it sang for him, for his violent touch and wickedness. But Getou just wanted answers.
“Do you?” he asked again, searching. “Do you want me to?” Gojo was nodding, frantically. And Getou asked him, unable to stop himself: “how did you do it?”
His hand let up, for Gojo to rasp, “what do you think?”
He considered his face. Flushed, frantic, already gripping Getou by the wrist again, pulling it down again. “I think you didn’t bother to make it look like an accident,” Getou told him, pushing down. “I think you left your name in capital letters.”
(And maybe he was born for him, he thought. Born to do this, eventually, in time, and with love. Someone would have to.)
Gojo came all over himself, splashing hotly; it shocked them both. And once he was pliant and trembling and whimpering through the aftershocks Getou removed his hand and replaced it with his teeth. He didn’t ask permission. He tasted blood before he’d even punctured the skin and realised that there was no bargain to be made with someone who carried the devil inside him.
Yes, Gojo whispered, delirious and fucking crazy. Pulling at his hair. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
He tasted like a wild animal. Like fresh game. Getou sucked the wound, drunk on the flavour. Kissed him with blood in his mouth. Came to the thought of a pretty pearlescent scar, shaped sweetly like the arch of his top teeth, and kept on fucking to that end until Gojo’s eyes turned wet and he was begging him to stop.
❦
In the hours that passed, the year's first snowfall announced itself by pit-patting against the windowpane, fine as flour. The heat of Getou saw them through. Gojo clung to him like ivy.
A glaze of sorts had settled over Getou. But it wasn't as before. Before had been a frost. This felt more like dew. Before, he felt like the world could simply disappear him. Like he could shatter on a strong wind. Now, he almost smiled. It felt easy, to dare the world to even try.
Getou moved his hand down to rest over Gojo's stomach. He imagined what his palm would detect there. Recognition. Affection. Power, strange and magnetic. Something cosmic, inevitable; the product of stars.
“We could name him after you,” Gojo whispered, into the dark. Getou was resting on his ribcage, now, comma-curled beside his body, and he lifted his head, a question mark. There was fondness in Gojo’s eyes, in answering, almost certainly; it made Getou’s breath catch more than the statement. His mouth formed the words. “You would do that?”
“Sure,” Gojo replied, and at Getou’s frown, he laughed. “Yes,” he corrected. “Yeah. I would. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you.” And he actually laughed, but the sound was sweet. “Don’t you realise that?”
Gentle like this, genuine like this, he was almost jarring. Getou’s schoolboy heart tripped over its laces, remembering the things it used to starve for.
They would come for them, soon. He wondered if it would be before dawn, as early as that, or later. Or if they even would. Or if there was anyone left to.
Gojo might well have been clanhead, now.
“Suguru,” he said, and Getou looked up, and saw that he was happy. “Don’t you?” He wanted an answer.
It felt peaceful, to give in. To shed his misgivings like dead leaves. Maybe what he felt was Gojo's Infinity, the iron-clad barricade he'd always thought he needed. Maybe finally, and for the first time, he was soaking up its mantle, its protection. It was something he'd secretly always wanted to obtain, like a rune. Even just for an hour. It was the closest he'd ever come. Not just, he thought, because he lay sequestered in Gojo's arms.
In the darkness he blinked slow. Cementing his own holy bargain; embroidering his own pocket prayer. Let him harness that inside him which darkness nourishes. Let him wear the alpha's armour, wave the strongest sorcerer's flag. Let him parade the all colours of his new and budding clan; rewrite and repackage his youth in twine so that it may live again, and prosper. Let him make sure of that. Let him do so under the protection of Infinity, of family, of conviction. And if he needs to run, let him have the strength to. Let him run with both hands held onto.
Let him have picked the winning side. And if he will fall, let him be settled, at least, in the knowledge that he chose this; that the decision was his, and only his.
With his eyes pressed closed, he heard snowfall. He heard the contented thrum of Gojo's red heart.
Let them come, he thought finally. And against Gojo’s skin, he nodded, because he did. He did know. Gojo had been proving it since the day they met.
He’d felt so numb, recently. Maybe it was a good thing that a tear escaped and rolled out, splashing hotly onto Gojo’s soft stomach. Even if he could not name its source.
If Gojo noticed, if he felt the dampness, he didn’t say anything.
❦
Fin