Chapter Text
Gojo Satoru decides, somewhere between the third failed ignition attempt and the thin curl of smoke rising from beneath the hood of his car, that the universe has finally developed a personal grudge against him.
The road stretches empty in both directions. In the afternoon heat, cicadas scream from somewhere beyond the trees, loud enough to feel deliberate. His phone has one bar of service, and his brand new expensive, imported, and apparently suicidal car makes a low clicking sound every time he turns the key. For a long moment, Gojo sits behind the wheel in complete silence before calling Megumi.
“I’m going to die here,” he announces as soon as the line connects.
There is a pause before he hears Megumi’s voice. “You’re on holiday.”
“Against my will, and now I’m stranded.”
“You bought a brand new car.”
“It betrayed me.”
There is a longer pause this time, and Gojo can hear something rustle faintly on the other end, followed by Megumi’s tired sigh. “Call a mechanic.”
Gojo sinks lower in the driver’s seat. “There’s nothing out here except trees, heat, and whatever insect is currently screaming at me.”
“Probably cicadas.”
“Megumi, I need comfort, not a biology lesson.”
“You need roadside assistance.”
Gojo tips his head back against the seat and stares through the windshield. The sky above the road is painfully blue, wide and empty in a way that makes everything feel further away than it should.
“You could call her,” Megumi says after a moment.
Gojo’s fingers tighten once around the phone and, for a few seconds, the cicadas seem louder. “Wow,” he scoffs dramatically. “Betrayed by my car and my son in the same afternoon. I’m collecting emotional damages.”
“I’m not your son.”
“You’re being cruel to me during a crisis. That’s very son-like.”
Megumi sighs again, more to himself and less annoyed. “You left Tokyo so you wouldn’t call her.”
Gojo looks away from his own reflection. A thin trail of smoke curls lazily from the front of the car, disappearing into the heat before it can become anything dramatic enough to justify how pathetic he feels sitting there. “I left Tokyo because I’m on holiday.”
“You bought a car and drove six hours to sulk somewhere with bad reception.”
Gojo opens his mouth, then closes it again and for a moment, neither of them says anything. The silence sits between them, familiar and uncomfortable, stretched thin by distance and one bar of service. “Call a mechanic, Gojo.” Megumi’s voice is soft, almost pitiful.
Gojo lets out a breath through his nose. “Fine. But if I’m murdered by a rural mechanic with a wrench, I want you to avenge me.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“No, say you will. I need your word, Megumi.”
“You’re wasting your battery.” The line goes dead a second later and Gojo stares at the screen for a long moment. The phone battery blinks at him accusingly: five percent and one bar of service. No missed calls from her which is good because he obviously does not want any. He had driven six hours out of Tokyo for the peace and quiet, not because the silence in his apartment had started sounding too much like her absence.
The car clicks again beneath him, useless and faint. Gojo looks at the smoking hood, and with a dramatic sigh, Gojo opens the car door and steps out into the heat. It hits him immediately, clinging to the back of his neck. The road shimmers faintly in the distance, empty except for trees, and the kind of quiet that is both comforting and yet, unsettling all the same. The nearest mechanic, according to the map app struggling to load on his screen, is either seven minutes away or located somewhere in the middle of a blue-grey blur that was either the ocean or forest.
Gojo considers, very briefly, opening the hood and pretending he knows what he is looking at. This confidence lasts for exactly three seconds.
The inside consists of metal, wires, and several parts that should definitely not be smoking. He leans closer, squints through the heat rising from the engine, and decides with the full authority of a man who has never fixed anything in his life that the car is probably upset.
“Valid,” he mutters. Gojo holds his phone above his head, moving it in different directions and angles for a sliver of reception. The logical version of him knows that reception is not something he can physically lure down from the sky, but unfortunately he is desperate. The cicadas continue their shrill chorus and sweat gathers at the back of his neck in a way that feels both uncomfortable and targeted.
The map app loads in pieces: first, a pale stretch of road, then a blur of green that might be forest. Then, after a long pause, a small town appears nearby, clustered around one main street like it has been placed there by accident. There is a bakery, a post office, and a petrol station. A pharmacy that, based on the grainy thumbnail, looks like it has been there since the invention of medicine. And beside all of them, marked with a tiny red pin, is Geto Auto Repairs.
Gojo taps it and the reviews load slowly, one at a time.
Geto-san is an angel. Fixed my ute and gave my son a lift home from football. Five stars.
He blinks, and another review loads beneath it.
Most reliable and handsome man in town. Five stars.
Gojo frowns as he lowers his phone slightly, and a third one appears.
If Geto-san says he can fix it, he definitely can. Don’t even bother going anywhere else.
Without ever having met him, Geto-san has begun to irritate him. It's not because Gojo has anything against competent people (after all, he is a famously competent person himself). But rather, there is something deeply suspicious about any man described by strangers with that level of affection. Being reliable is one thing, but reliable, handsome and angelic?
“So this is a cult.” Gojo muses. No mechanic needs that much public devotion.
With a sigh dramatic enough to deserve witnesses, Gojo starts his unnecessary and humiliating walk into the town. The heat presses down with quiet persistence and dust clings to the polished edges of his shoes. The trees on either side of the road move faintly in the wind, their leaves whispering in a language he does not trust. By the time the first buildings appear, low and sun-faded beyond the bend, Gojo has decided several things:
The countryside is far too hot.
His car is dead to him emotionally.
And if he sees one more person refer to this mechanic as reliable, kind, handsome, angelic, or any other unnecessary compliment, Gojo is going to become unreasonable on purpose.
The town is small enough to make Tokyo feel imaginary. A main street runs past weathered shopfronts and flower boxes, past bicycles leaning lazily outside the bakery and an old vending machine humming beside the post office. There is a sleepy softness to everything, a sense that time here has not stopped exactly, but has grown bored of hurrying.
Gojo hates it immediately.
The petrol station sits at the edge of the main street, its sign faded from years of sun. Inside, the air smells faintly of cold drinks, and something fried from the small warmer near the counter. An older woman looks up from behind the register as the bell above the door gives a tired jingle.
She takes him in at once: the sunglasses, the city clothes, the shoes now carrying a thin coat of roadside dust. Her expression softens with the unmistakable delight of someone who has just been given a story to tell later.
“Car trouble?” she asks.
Gojo glances down at himself, and then back to her. “Is it that obvious?”
“The shoes,” she nods towards them. “No one walks in shoes like that unless something’s gone wrong.”
Gojo explains as much as he can without sounding like he has been personally defeated by an engine. The car, the smoke, the one bar of service that abandoned him at every crucial moment. She listens with the patient sympathy of someone who has heard this exact story a hundred times before, only usually from people wearing more sensible shoes. When he finally asks whether there is a mechanic nearby, her face brightens. It is a full, immediate transformation, as though he has accidentally mentioned a favourite grandson, a local saint, or the only person in town with functional common sense.
“Oh, Geto-san,” she says warmly, already reaching for the phone beside the register. “He’ll sort you out. Best mechanic we’ve got.”
“How many mechanics do you have?”
“One.”
Gojo smiles, leaning against the counter. “Then that feels like a small sample size.”
She laughs, completely unbothered. “Even if we had ten, Geto-san would still be the best.”
Of course. Gojo looks out through the front window, where the town sits quiet and golden in the afternoon light, and feels his irritation settle into something sharper, more specific. He has not even met this man yet, and already the town has placed him on a pedestal.
“Geto-san? Sorry to bother you, dear.” Gojo watches her face, the way her expression softens as she listens to the person on the other side of the line. “No, nothing serious. There’s a young man here whose car’s broken down on the highway.”
Young man. Gojo’s mouth twitches as he decides to let that one pass.
“He said there was smoke.” Gojo can hear a voice on the other end but it’s too low to make out clearly. The woman glances at him. “White hair, sunglasses. He’s very tall.”
There’s another pause before her smile widens, and for some reason, Gojo feels oddly offended.
“Yes, exactly. Looks very expensive.”
Gojo bristles. “Excuse me, ma'am."
She waves a hand at him, still listening. “He’s at the petrol station now. His phone has no signal, poor thing.”
“I’m not a poor thing.”
The woman continues to ignore him with the effortless skill of someone who has raised children, grandchildren, and probably several adults who should have known better.
“He says the car is back near the turnoff. Yes, I’ll tell him.” She hangs up and gives Gojo a pleased look. “He’s on his way.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
The bell above the door jingles before Gojo can ask any further questions. A boy around Megumi’s age steps inside carrying a cardboard box against his hip, his pink hair damp with sweat and his school shirt half untucked. He kicks the door closed behind him with one sneaker and looks up with a smile so bright it’s almost blinding.
“Obaasan, I brought the drinks from the storeroom.” His eyes land on Gojo, and he zeroes in on his sunglasses. Then, very briefly, on his shoes. “Hi.”
Gojo lifts a hand to give him a small wave. “Hello.”
The boy looks delighted by him, which is already concerning. “Are you the guy with the fancy broken car?”
Gojo’s smile freezes. “Unfortunately.”
The woman behind the counter takes the box from him. “Yuuji, Geto-san is coming to help him.”
At the mechanic’s name, the boy’s whole face lights up and Gojo watches it happen in real time.
“Oh, Geto-san? Then you’ll be fine,” Yuuji says, as if this is a law of nature. “He’s amazing with cars.”
Gojo slowly raises an eyebrow. “Amazing, huh?”
Yuuji beams. “Geto-san’s garage is just down the road,” he says. “I can show you.”
Gojo looks through the front window at the street outside. The afternoon light sits heavy over the town, turning the road gold and the shopfront windows bright enough to hurt. “How far is ‘just down the road’?”
“Five minutes?”
Somehow, the uncertainty reassures Gojo less.
Still, it is either follow the cheerful teenager to the world’s most beloved mechanic or remain in the petrol station long enough for the woman behind the counter to start calling him poor thing again. Gojo chooses the option with slightly more dignity. “Lead the way,” he says.
Yuuji brightens and pushes the door open with his shoulder, sending the bell above it into another tired jingle. Gojo steps outside after him and immediately feels the heat, thick and bright and waiting.
The town feels even smaller from the footpath. The main street is barely a street at all, just a slow stretch of road lined with a bakery, a post office, a narrow florist, and a faded blue vending machine humming beside a noticeboard. A dog sleeps in a patch of shade outside the bakery, completely unconcerned with Gojo’s suffering.
“Everyone here knows each other?” Gojo asks.
“Pretty much,” Yuuji says. “It’s nice.”
Gojo is not sure nice is the word he would use. Small towns, in his experience, have a way of making privacy feel like a group activity. Already, the woman in the bakery window has spotted Yuuji and lifted a hand in greeting. Her gaze slides to Gojo a second later, curious and bright.
Gojo lowers his sunglasses. “No,” he says under his breath. Yuuji waves back cheerfully. Within seconds, the bakery woman disappears from the window and returns with another woman beside her. Both of them look directly at Gojo. “Oh, this is awful.”
Yuuji follows his gaze and laughs. “You’re probably local news now.”
They continue down the footpath, past the bakery and the post office, while Yuuji talks with the easy enthusiasm of someone who has never had reason to be embarrassed by sincerity. Geto-san fixed the delivery van last month. Geto-san helped his grandfather when his scooter broke down. Geto-san once repaired the bakery oven before the morning rush, which Yuuji describes with the kind of awe usually reserved for miracles. Gojo listens with growing suspicion. “He sounds very impressive,” he says eventually.
“He is,” Yuuji says, without hesitation. “You’ll like him.”
“I doubt that.”
“Everyone likes Geto-san.”
“Yes,” Gojo muses. “I’ve noticed.”
Yuuji either misses the sarcasm or decides to ignore it. “He’s really calm. Like, annoyingly calm sometimes. But in a good way.”
Of course he is. By the time they reach the end of the street, Gojo has built an entire image of Geto Suguru in his head: sensible, dependable, probably middle-aged, possibly wearing steel-capped boots and the self-satisfied expression of a man who has never once been personally victimised by an imported engine.
At the corner, Yuuji points ahead. “There it is.”
Partly shaded by a line of trees, a low building stands with its wide doors thrown open to the afternoon. A faded sign hangs above the entrance: Geto Auto Repairs. The letters are worn at the edges. A dusty ute sits parked out front, its bonnet open. Somewhere inside, metal clinks softly, followed by the low murmur of a radio. Gojo stops beneath the sign and looks up at it. He is still thinking of something appropriately cutting to say when a voice comes from inside the garage, smooth and amused.
“Yuuji, if you’ve brought me another stray, I’m charging you this time.” Gojo turns towards the sound just as Geto Suguru appears within his line of vision.
Unfortunately, Gojo has a very brief, very private moment of regret.
It’s obviously not because he has misjudged the situation. In fact, he is excellent at judging situations. It is one of his many talents.
But because the man who appears from inside the garage is not the middle-aged, self-important country mechanic Gojo has been imagining for the last twenty minutes.
He is tall. That is Gojo’s first problem.
His second problem is the dark hair tied loosely at the back of his neck, with a few strands slipping free around his face like they have been placed there with deliberate cruelty. His sleeves are pushed up to his elbows, his hands marked faintly with grease, and he carries a rag in one hand as though he has stepped out of a lifestyle magazine for people who make terrible decisions near engines.
Gojo can’t help but stare. Only for a second. A completely normal amount of time to stare at a stranger.
Geto’s gaze moves from Yuuji to Gojo, calm and assessing. Then his mouth curves slightly, not quite a smile, but close enough to be annoying. “You must be the expensive-looking one.”
Gojo immediately decides he hates him. Geto’s voice is smooth, warm around the edges, and far too amused for someone wearing work boots. Gojo finds this irritating. Deeply irritating. Historically irritating.
Yuuji grins beside him. “This is Gojo-san. His car broke down near the turnoff.”
“Temporarily stopped cooperating,” Gojo corrects.
Geto’s eyes flick to him. “Cars usually do that when something is wrong.”
“Incredible. I can see why the town worships you.”
Yuuji makes a small choking sound beside him. Geto only looks amused. “Worship is a strong word.”
“Not from what I’ve seen.”
That almost-smile remains in place, calm and infuriating, before Geto turns his attention to the problem Gojo has dragged into town with him. “Smoke from the hood?”
“Yes.”
“Clicking when you turned the key?”
“Yes.”
“Any warning lights?”
Gojo opens his mouth, then closes it again. There had been a light; possibly several. One of them had been red, which, in hindsight, may have been relevant.
Within minutes, Geto has the tow truck ready. It is old, sun-faded, and annoyingly functional. Gojo is forced into the passenger seat while Geto drives them back towards the turnoff, one hand relaxed on the wheel, the other resting near the gearshift.
The radio plays softly between them. Outside the window, the town slips away into trees and heat and late afternoon gold.
Gojo tries very hard not to look at Geto’s hands.
This is difficult, because Geto keeps using them. To steer, to shift gears, to tap against the wheel when he is thinking. It is excessive, really. Almost unnecessary.
When they reach the car, Geto steps out first and lifts the hood. Gojo stands beside him with his arms folded, watching as Geto leans over the engine, quiet and focused. The teasing expression fades from his face, replaced by something sharper.
Competence, Gojo realises with great resentment, looks very good on him.
Geto checks something near the battery, then something deeper in the engine. He asks Gojo to turn the key once, then immediately tells him to stop. A few minutes later, Geto lowers the hood halfway and looks at him over it.
“It’s fixable, but not today.” Geto wipes his hands on the rag tucked into his back pocket. “I’ll need to order a part. Tomorrow afternoon at the earliest.”
Gojo stares at him. Behind them, his expensive, imported, traitorous car sits uselessly on the side of the road, looking far too pleased with itself for an object without a face.
“There’s an inn above the bakery,” Geto says.
“Of course there is.”
“The owner’s nice.”
“I’m sure she thinks you’re wonderful.”
“She does,” Geto says, without a trace of shame. He’s calm and faintly amused, the late sun catching in the loose strands of hair around his face.
And Gojo, who has driven four hours out of Tokyo for silence, distance, and the chance to avoid wanting anything complicated, realises with slow and terrible certainty that the universe has not developed a personal grudge against him.
It has developed a sense of humour.