Work Text:
Watching the barriers descend over Tokyo, Nanami Kento thinks of the time after Haibara had died. He remembers it often, guiding and forming his path all at once like the gravity of the moon, but this time he really recalls it.
Haibara’s body had been bisected, essentially; the legs he’d run tirelessly on if it meant saving another life, ending another curse, had melted under the corrosive spewing of the local deity. Local deity. Maybe the village had been blessed under its influence, Kento would never know, but they hadn’t been, fighting their way out from under it, a frantic phone call as Haibara spat his last breaths up alongside blood, bile, his inner workings.
I heard you shit yourself when you die, Haibara had said, a little morbidly, one day over lunch. They’d caught wind that day of a mission gone wrong that one of the older sorcerers working out of Jujutsu High hadn’t come back from, and the thought of death and shuffling from the mortal coil had pervaded conversations and lessons alike, consciously or unconsciously. I wonder if it always smells like that in the morgue.
In the moment, focused on using one arm to call for backup and the other to hold Haibara tight as he could, letting him choke out his insides onto his uniform, Kento hadn’t remembered that conversation. But afterwards, with Suguru next to that metal table, he’d thought of it suddenly. It almost made him laugh, the thought that Haibara had been so cruelly been spared this human embarrassment through the evisceration of the majority of anything digestive inside him. It had almost made him cry.
Suguru had said sorcery was a marathon, that the end of the race was a mountain to climb of corpses like Haibara’s, Haibara who had sparkled with life like a murder victim’s family always says they did in the obituary, in the prying eye of the documentary lens. He had said that, and it had stuck with Kento even after what happened in the village — the higher ups called it a massacre, Suguru had called it a rescue, Kento thought privately it was something in between — and even after his graduation, his split from jujutsu in general. Running away, he’d called it in moments of honesty, alone in the office at night after everyone else had gone home or out into the world he didn’t quite fit into. But it had been a sprint, a clear end, a burst of energy spent on a lifetime at a more manageable pace.
He remembers that, Suguru’s voice, the irrational anger in him at the thought of Gojo finishing the mission too late to accomplish anything worthwhile, those years of dreck all to avoid the unavoidable, the mountain at the end of the marathon, and the barriers come down. Someone with Suguru’s face, Suguru’s voice, stitches across Suguru’s forehead, had spoken to him, to every sorcerer in Japan in all likelihood. Kento isn’t sure if it had been his real body, manifested through a technique he isn’t familiar with but could understand in theory, or if it had been some shared dream among anyone with cursed energy. Maybe even those without; he’d heard rumors of another Zen’in failure that was sure to cause the same havoc for the clan as the first Zen’in failure in his lifetime had. He’s sure she wouldn’t be left out of this — the Culling Games.
He thinks of Suguru, the family he’d quietly amassed; when he came to speak to Kento, it had been the twins from the village and Suda, who at the time he’d incorrectly assumed to be something of an executive assistant-babysitter hybrid. The girls hadn’t taken to Kento whatsoever; Suguru seemed to take this as a positive, laughing at them calling him boring. He thinks of Suguru’s vision, a world where sorcerers reigned, where those without cursed energy (monkeys, he wouldn’t stop reminding Kento) were eradicated, and he thinks of how this imposter in Suguru’s body had so perverted that goal. He pictures again the mountain Suguru had talked about, pictures it growing taller and taller before him, stuffed with bodies he doesn’t know from Adam but that he has more in common with that his neighbors, the one or two friends he’s managed to make and keep even returned to sorcery.
He sighs, perched on the remnants of someone’s balcony in the wreck that had been Tokyo, before Halloween, before the incident. Kento had sensed it, the change in the air, the sudden vacuum of power. Something had happened to Gojo. Something irreversible. He’d waited a little, camped out in one of the neighborhoods he’d worked since leaving his salary behind, returning to sorcery in an inauspicious and inconspicuous grey area between evil curse user and virtuous Jujutsu High employee. It paid the bills, and well; people were willing to pay a lot more for someone who could work both sides of the moral scale depending on where the money was. This wait had likely saved his life, stopped him from being caught up in what looked from a distance like a Domain Expansion unlike anything he’d ever seen.
That user had seemed to vanish from the scene; Kento imagines he would have dominated had he stuck around, but chaos was all that reigned in the aftermath of a scene that bore the smudged and grasping fingerprints of a failed Jujutsu High intervention. Gojo had been here, Kento knew immediately on entering the burnt out subway station; even after the damage of the Domain Expansion Gojo’s residuals had lingered.
Kento thinks he had been on his way out of the train station, back towards another ward he thought he could lie low in until the lay of the land was discoverable, when the dream had happened, when he’d seen Suguru’s face for the first time in the years since the meeting with him, Nanako, Mimiko, Suda like some sort of resurrected nightmare.
Now, on the burnt out terrace of someone who is in all likelihood dead, he sighs and adjusts his harness, pulled tight over the business clothes he’d never learned to stop wearing, and thinks of the refrain he’d first sung to Gojo the night of his graduation, the night of his departure from sorcery and do-gooding and the marathon he’d never signed up for except by virtue of what he’d been born with, maybe on his Danish side.
“Sorcerers are shit,” he says aloud, watching as the inky solidities enclose swaths of the city, others in the distance wrapped around wards he’d thought might have been safe or at least excluded. Suguru is dead, Kento knows this, but his body is out there calling for these games; the least Kento can do is carry on his will. And if that means taking out the weak, the ones who could never have helped Haibara, well.
That could just be a side benefit.
//
November 1st nets Kento seven points, an elderly couple who’d begged him to do it and a sorcerer he’d bet had been no higher than grade three on the old scale. He’d toyed with the sorcerer a little, just to keep things interesting, had broken into an apartment and showered the blood off him. He thinks looking unconfrontational, non-violent and willing to talk, might give him an edge on others he might come across — but he doesn’t, really. Come across others. Even when he’s foraging, carefully, for something edible in the first abandoned supermarket he sees, the place is mostly empty.
“Kogane,” he murmurs, and his designated assistant appears — wearing a little tie, he’d been somewhat disgruntled to notice, “show me the Colony 1 leaderboard.”
He doesn’t know any names, not yet at least; he’s sure more people will declare and enter the games, but in the meantime he scans them. Most people in this colony have nothing yet, hiding out and waiting for the herd theoretically within this section of the barrier to thin, but there are a few sorcerers around his level, single-digit kills.
The top of the board has thirty-five points. Christ, Kento thinks, that’s an angry fucking guy. He spends that first night locked into an office in that supermarket; he hears people coming and going once in a while, looking for the same thing he had been, but no one tries to bother him. Maybe no one senses him — energy signatures are all over the place, jumbled together like trying to listen for the voice of someone you only kind of know in a crowd. In the morning, after a surprisingly significant amount of sleep, he stretches out his spine and starts moving.
November 2nd starts more productive. A couple of sorcerers, older, weak, beg him to ally with them; as far as Kento is concerned, anyone who isn’t a threat is an enemy, crowding the field, lengthening the time before he has a chance to leave this killing. Senseless, he tells himself as he strikes. Suguru wouldn’t want this… except it sounds like Suguru had, last year, tried to kill some young special grade at Jujutsu High. So really it makes as much sense as anything else.
He comes across three others on November 2nd, one a man who doesn’t seem to be a sorcerer at all, just leapt at the chance to enter the barrier and get some misguided rage out. Kento puts him down easily, doesn’t give him the chance to fight, leans on his spine with one foot and wipes blood from his wrist as the guy’s life leaches out beneath him. Petty, a little, but Kento figures he’s allowed, given the situation.
The other two are children. Sisters, one older than the other, parents in all likelihood dead in the Domain Expansion. Kento sees them, but he doesn’t think they see him. They seem absorbed in each other, hands clutched tight together, voices low in each other's ears as they scurry between buildings. Kento watches from a window, several floors up in a blown-out office building, no glass between him and the autumn afternoon. These two he spares; their only weakness is being children in a world that expects more out of them. He doesn’t attack, but he doesn’t help them either, lets them go their way and makes his own toward… something. He isn’t sure what.
“Kogane,” he asks, quiet and stretched out in an apartment that looks to be one in several hundred in a building where the lights have all burnt out, “show me the leaderboard.”
Its eyes shine in the light from the moon outside; whoever owns this apartment will have to replace the curtains, if society survives whatever this is.
That train of thought ends abruptly; there’s someone with forty-seven points. It has to be the person he’d noted yesterday, he thinks; Kento himself is around fifth, lots below him with small counts. Today he remembers the name — Higuruma Hiromi. Kento doesn’t recognize him, not a player he’s seen around in the jujutsu world that he can recall. Not an offshoot of Jujutsu High, not a member of a clan Kento knows. I should find him, Kento thinks. That’s the competition. He could explain why Kento hasn’t seen many people milling around, moving through the city; the chances of being killed are higher with someone like that out there. Kento could probably engage him, he thinks, if push comes to shove, but it would be better overall to wait, observe him.
In the morning, Kento decides, he’ll have a destination: Higuruma Hiromi.
//
November 3rd is almost frustratingly bright and breezy, leaves skittering over the streets where there are parks nearby, distracting and making Kento feel jumpy. It doesn’t stop him from accumulating ten more points throughout the day, however; two separate sorcerers.
The first one clearly hadn’t figured their technique out completely, though Kento thinks they may eventually have been powerful; their energy is potent, probably would have been enough to defeat a less experienced, less disciplined sorcerer. Kento, unfortunately, is neither; back when he’d been registered, he’d made first grade with relative ease. He didn’t, still doesn’t, have delusions of anything higher than that but first is higher than the vast majority of living sorcerers still.
The second is tough. He’s not particularly strong, not particularly clever, but he is young and he is stubborn. He’s not wearing a uniform, so either not affiliated with a school or graduated. Kento isn’t sure which would be worse, but he knows the three clans and the small branches trying to be like the three clans sometimes teach their inheritors at home so it’s not out of the realm of possibility. He’s younger, certainly, than Kento would have aggressed otherwise, but the kid is insistent, catches Kento out feeling his way around residuals he doesn’t recognize, looking for power, concentration, the smell of blood.
The kid doesn’t last long. Kento has made a life out of watching and waiting and striking just as often as needed; here it’s once. He doesn’t die right away, stretched on the ground like a damp piece of laundry, and Kento crouches next to him.
“You seem like an argumentative little shit,” is the opener he goes with. The kid is death rattling loud enough that Kento is worried he’ll bring cursed spirits down on them, but he has the strength to spit a mouthful of blood onto the concrete. It barely misses Kento’s shoe, just slightly shining in the afternoon light even with all the trekking around the city he’s done. “I don’t suppose you’ve fought anyone else like me?”
“Like you?” The kid tries to snort, gets what sounds like a throatful of whatever it is that makes a man alive, lungs laboring around his last few breaths. “The fuck you mean?”
“Strong.” Kento wipes his tool on the kid’s shirt, where he’d nearly cut him in half, and the kid gasps. He hadn’t meant to be cruel, really, hadn’t even wanted to fight someone this young if he could help it, but now that he’s here it’s like he can’t help it. “Anyone like that?”
“Fuck you.” Kento is almost impressed that the kid is still talking, that he can bear the pain he must be feeling and still have energy to backtalk, but he doesn’t have the time nor the patience to waste. He presses just a little harder on the tool, watches the blood ooze out just a little faster, and the kid sputters. “Think I’d tell you if I had?”
“So no, then.” Kento steps back, slides the tool into his harness, sighs. “You know, I wouldn’t have fought you if you hadn’t tried your luck.”
“Someone—” the kid starts, but Kento is already moving away and only the sounds of increasingly frantic gasps reach him past that. It’s confirmation of what he already knows; people likely to start a fight with Higuruma don’t win that fight. All the more reason, he thinks, to approach carefully.
In order to approach at all, though, he has to have some sense of where he is. The sun is high in the sky, and Kento is cognizant of how big the colonies are, the barriers around him like a cylinder cutting off his view of everything but the sky above him, the field of vision around him, occasional glance down long streets cutting off in a sheet of black. But he doesn’t tire — this is nothing to a day in the office, nothing fresh on any side of his cubicle, the smell of money and people chasing it heavy in the air. Now, at least, his body feels the tension of movement rather than the stiffness of mental gymnastics, stress, frustration. His senses seem clearer, more attuned, with a goal in mind; in the late afternoon he encounters a sorcerer, middle-aged, beautiful, and says he’ll leave her be if she can tell him anything about the man on the top of the leaderboard.
She’s smart. She sticks to facts, it seems, says she heard he’s set up in Ikebukuro. She doesn’t know where, exactly, doesn’t even seem to remember his name even though it’s readily accessible. He hasn’t stuck in her craw the way he’s stuck in Kento’s — a goal, a destination, an eye of the storm in a sense at the center of the games. She doesn’t want to fight him, he can tell; she shows him her point total, nothing, says she hadn’t realized she could leave and has been wandering, hiding, trying to stay out of reach of anyone out for blood in hope that the rule about point accumulation having a timer would change in the meantime. Maybe you’d like to team up, she suggests, which Kento could have seen coming a kilometer away. Maybe we could figure out a way out of here.
“If you want to find me again,” Kento explains, hand wrapped around his tool where it’s propped against his hip, “if you even think of taking advantage of me keeping my word, you’ll have to face me or someone worse. Understand?”
She does; he sees it in the way she blanches. She runs, then, off to some other building, some other shelter. Kento starts toward Ikebukuro.
It gets easier to follow the residuals as he enters the neighborhood; there’s definitely someone strong here, strong as Kento — maybe stronger, he’s not so vain as to think he’s the top of the colony. Factually, he’s not. Higuruma has fifty-two points by now, substantially more than Kento, not that he’s been going out of his way to score. Lay low, he keeps telling himself; lay low and don’t be stupid and don’t draw attention to yourself before you do what you came to do.
He’s in sight of the theater, only a little structurally damaged, when the energy signature draws his spine straight like a string tugged at the nape of his neck, raises the hair there too in something like fight or fight made flesh. It’s instinct, he knows, the one he’s honed from an adolescence spent in conflict, adulthood in tedious busywork of whatever kind. Even sorcery is boring these days, most of the time. Higuruma should give him a good fight at least, even if it ends up being his last. What’s the worst thing that happens? Kento used to tell himself in the mirror in the morning, pulling his tie tight enough that it felt like a noose. I die today and don’t have to go back to work tomorrow.
He doesn’t draw his tool as he approaches the theater. The woman he’d met before hadn’t been specific on what building Higuruma is in but it’s obvious, drawing closer. It smells a little like blood — Kento is used to it after years of working with the kind of curses that don’t mind leaving a little mess behind, but he imagines someone more fragile might gag. The theater itself isn’t ostentatious; maybe the type to mostly host plays, an independent movie screening or two a month. Kento had enjoyed this kind of place before the Domain Expansion, an indulgence he allowed himself once in a while. He wonders what has become of the people who used to work in the building, bring life to stories on the stage within, but he’s already at the entrance before he lets that train of thought drop. The fact that he’s already made it this far feels like sheer luck, the reward of determination; from here, he can rely on nothing but strength and skill. He pushes open a door.
//
The first thing Kento notices on entry is that it’s dim but not dark in the theater; there must be some kind of emergency light system on, a backup generator somewhere finally having the chance to do its job. Strangely, it puts him more on edge; without his sight he tends to find his other senses heightened, his best work often done on nights in the countryside with Tokyo a blur in the distance. Nevertheless, he moves forward, getting the lay of the land with a healthy dose of caution.
He’s in an entryway, a hall of sorts that sweeps out to either side, circling the auditorium through a row of secondary doors like the outer ring of a target. There are posters on the walls, some for films, others for live productions. Kento thinks he might have seen one of the plays before, though not here; the muted walls and thick carpet are unfamiliar to him. A few kiosks sit in alcoves along the walls — ticketing, coat check, he thinks he catches sight of a bar further down the hallway. Not a bad place to set up, Kento thinks, especially if there’s additional resources nearby. Or if Higuruma is the type to be like a spider, waiting for his nourishment to come to him.
Kento cracks open a second door.
If he’d hoped not to be noticed, he lets go of that immediately as he sweeps the scene. Chairs normally stacked in neat rows are jumbled throughout the auditorium in piles, stretching like dunes across a concrete floor lined with carpeting to muffle patron footsteps. It delineates the former arrangement of the room like the chalk outline of a body when it's been taken from the crime scene. The stage, of course, draws his attention immediately — not just because it’s designed that way, but because it’s the only spot in the building that’s showed any signs of movement.
For a moment, he thinks he might be imagining things, that whoever this man at the top of the leaderboard is had gotten to him before he even realized he was in combat. But he doesn’t feel any pain, no change in his body, and so he accepts what he sees: a man in a suit in a bathtub, toe of one foot tapping to a rhythm Kento can’t hear. His arms rest along the sides, and as Kento watches, half-dumbfounded, nerve endings pulled tight in that same feeling prickling the back of his neck, his head tips back so it hits the lip, eyes catching Kento’s like a light zapping a moth.
“You seem strong.” He isn't shouting, but his voice carries easily to Kento, across the room with ease like an actor’s might. “I’m still getting the hang of feeling out energy but yours is easy to read.”
Kento doesn’t even know how to take this, but something about the man, framed by water, dark suit and dark hair and eyes that look dark even across the room, swallowing the emergency lighting, draws him into the auditorium, letting the door swing closed behind him. Higuruma’s cursed energy signature is… Kento’s first thought is strange, then familiar because he realizes it’s not like anything he’s ever felt from anyone but himself. It’s almost intimate, like meeting someone with a similar, specific tattoo; the tight control over it, the muted tone, the feeling of something murkier underneath. Kento thinks his heartbeat actually quickens, just a little, like a warning sign he doesn’t need.
“Coming from you, that’s almost a curse in itself.” He adjusts one of the chairs not flipped over, settles himself on it to keep some distance. He figures as fast as Higuruma might be, he’s at a disadvantage weighed down by water, confined to the bathtub. “Someone with as many points as you must see anyone strong as a target.”
Higuruma laughs, just a little, brief and adult. “I wouldn’t have gotten here with that kind of attitude,” he says. He looks relaxed, though Kento’s sure he could be missing the finer details from this distance. He wouldn’t know if he carries tension in his spine, or if his smile is put on. “Are you one of the Heians?”
“Heians.” It almost sounds foreign on his tongue. “No.”
Higuruma nods. “Makes sense,” he agrees, accepts Kento’s answer as the truth. “They’re all spoiling for a fight, from what I’ve seen.” From what I’ve killed goes unspoken. Kento knows with his total he’s gotten sorcerers and not alike, the way he has. He crosses an ankle over a knee. “So, then, are you here to kill me?”
“If you make me.”
Higuruma laughs again. “Just so you know,” he says, “I'm worth the same five as anyone else. Well,” he adds, on second thought, sobering, “not quite anyone else.”
“Right.” Kento nods. The handle of his tool is still under his palm, ready to draw. “Surely there are easier points to earn than the one at the top of the colony.”
“Am I?” Higuruma sits up at that, water splashing around him, leans forward to set his elbows on his knees, pulled up like a child. “That’s something.”
“Is it easy for you?” Kento’s not sure why he asks. “Killing.”
Higuruma shrugs, settling his chin onto the peak of that jumble of limbs. “There are some people justice can’t reach,” he explains. “Seems like a lot of those people are inside the wall with us.” He gestures, one long and circling finger, to encompass the barrier, the colony, around them. “Then why are you here?”
Why indeed. Kento shrugs. “I needed somewhere to go,” he explains. “Get the lay of the land. If we’re meant to cull each other in here I supposed I might as well see the one most likely to do it.”
“I’m flattered, really. But the points just seem to come my way. I haven’t been able to do all this for long—” He mimes something and Kento doesn’t need to identify it to understand it. Sorcery. “—but it seems I’m something of a natural.”
“I was born a natural,” Kento explains. “Had a technique since I was six. Nightmares as a toddler my parents didn’t understand, that kind of thing.”
Higuruma’s head tilts. He maybe cocks an eyebrow; Kento can’t quite see that level of detail. “You’ve always been able to see this?”
Kento nods. He thinks back home his mother probably still has the drawing of a curse born from schoolyard bullying that had gotten him sent from kindergarten to the principal’s office. “Makes it easy to choose a career, at least,” he lies, but it’s easy to say and he’s not sure how else to fill the silence.
“Come a little closer,” Higuruma says, gesturing with one bent finger, “if you don’t mind. Promise not to kill you right away.” Kento doesn’t think he winks or grins. Nevertheless he stands, sidesteps a few stray seats and moves slowly through the redefined aisles until he reaches the raised edge of the stage and perches there, facing Higuruma and his bathtub. Up close he’s striking, lights and darks pulled together into sharp edges made clearer by the water, a nose that draws the gaze up to those eyes like the center of a hurricane, quiet and dangerous.
“You don’t seem worried that I’ll do the same to you,” he offers, and Higuruma smiles. Up close, it’s not a nice smile, nothing warm in it, but Kento likes something about it anyway.
“Well,” Higuruma says, “I do have the most points in the colony.”
//
It’s akin to an alliance, or maybe it’s just the inertia of adulthood. Higuruma seems fairly content to use the theater as a base of sorts, the centerpiece to which he returns. It feels like unnecessary risk to Kento, but Higuruma comes back with more points than Kento for three days in a row.
Kento starts to feel competitive about it, starts seeking out a fight or two, but doesn’t trouble himself too much. Maybe it’s the kind of necessary isolation and constant alertness the games force them into, but more often than not when one or the other of them isn’t scavenging for food or garnering points or securing the area, they talk.
Higuruma is damn fond of that bathtub, for reasons Kento can understand more deeply than he’d like to admit. His adult rebellion had been leaving salarywork for sorcery, a flip turn back to what he’d run from years before with a twist away from the harsh light of the established bureaucracy. He hadn’t planned on announcing it to anyone, besides his paper-pushing boss who hadn’t even had the tact to look disappointed that he was quitting, but after all he’d called Suguru, somehow got through the labyrinthine game of telephone among assistants at his — establishment — to tell him shyly that he would work in jujutsu again.
Amazing, Suguru had said, and sounded like he meant it. Kento, will you go back to the school?
The school where Suguru’s life had been driven off the rails, beaten into submission by a structure that couldn’t contain him in the end, the school where Haibara had been allowed to die when they cohabited with a force of nature, the school which had let Kento go without a word in the night like a ghost. No, Kento had said, and Suguru had invited him for dinner at his group’s estate on the spot.
So. Higuruma chose a bathtub. Kento can’t begrudge him, but he wonders.
“What is it about the bath?” he asks, stretched on his back across the wood of the stage, letting it discipline his spine. Time blends together a bit, in this room without natural light beyond what filters in from the hallway through the doors around them, but he thinks it’s the afternoon, November 7th, maybe. One hundred and nineteen points between them. “I understand the impulse for change, but the specifics are lost on me.”
Higuruma shrugs. It’s a waste of his energy to keep refilling the thing, Kento thinks, but there’s something to it as well; spending time on something unnecessary. “My therapist would say it’s a womb thing,” he replies. Kento doesn’t believe for an instant that he actually has a therapist, but he lets the quip slide. “I guess it’s the only way to keep my clothes clean. I can borrow from other people but it isn’t the same.”
Kento understands this too, the comfort of familiarity. He’s been breaking into the same apartment over and over, where someone apparently fit and tall had lived, stealing his clothing piece by piece without ever feeling any better about it. The shirt and trousers he’d been wearing when all this started are somewhere near the barrier, covered in other people’s blood, lying in a dumpster. His tie survives, thankfully, bound around his hand more often than not. “Womb thing,” he repeats, thoughtfully. Therapist or no, this is interesting, personal. Maybe. “Mother issues?”
Higuruma dangles an arm out of the tub. Kento is close enough that at the angle, the speed at which the weight of gravity pulls it down, a few escaping drops of water hit his leg on the way down. “More like wondering whether I did the right thing coming out.”
“You seem like you’re doing fine to me,” Kento says, before he realizes just how fucked up his barometer for success is, but Higuruma is already barking out a laugh.
“Never better,” he agrees. His face follows his arm over the edge of the tub, looking down to meet Kento’s eyes. His head is dry, never goes in the water with his body, never so vulnerable as all that. “I want so badly to shift the balance of society that sometimes I wonder if I’ve done it in the wrong direction without realizing it.”
“It’s impossible for most individual people to influence society,” Kento says, remembering the individual he’d known who’d been the exception to that, “and trying gets you attention. Gets you in trouble.” Whatever had happened to Gojo. Whatever had wiped his residuals so thoroughly from the map that Kento couldn’t feel them anymore when he’d felt him in the corners of his mind for as long as he’d known what cursed energy was.
Higuruma’s eyes are so dark; Kento really has to watch them to figure out what’s going on behind them. “Maybe,” he agrees. He points to Kento’s tool, casual and flat against his chest. “Are there a lot of people like us?”
Kento shakes his head. The back of his skull grinds against the wood, hair falls over his forehead. He needs a trim, he realizes; if only he’d known when he’d left it go a bit too long that the world was about to go to shit. “More now,” he explains. “People like you, new to their powers. I’m not sure exactly what happened when the games started but I felt a lot more people then. Like… turning on a light at a surprise party. All of a sudden like that.”
Higuruma cocks his head. “Is it vain to ask if I feel like anything special?”
It is vain, maybe, but Kento understands it still. He closes his eyes, really focuses on Higuruma — the way he had when he’d approached him for the first time in the theater. It’s that same feeling, unfamiliar familiarity. “Not special, maybe,” Kento admits, candidly, “but you remind me of my own.” He opens his eyes again, locking with Higuruma’s without having to seek him out. “Maybe it’s part of the reason I didn’t want to fight you when we met.”
Higuruma smiles, just a little. It makes him look younger, boyish almost, and Kento wonders when he started noticing what Higuruma looks like. He’s not tall, not Kento-tall but looks taller than he is with his long limbs. Dark hair dark eyes, hard-edged muted charm like Ted Bundy. The curve of his nose draws the eye, makes the rest of him seem more interesting than it is in isolated pieces. “Want to hear something interesting?” he asks. “I didn’t want to fight you either. And I’ve been thinking lately about how I finally think all this has let me make an impact.”
“You have more points still,” Kento agrees, reasonable, “so I suppose I’m glad we didn’t fight after all.”
//
The fight Kento finds himself in the night of November 8th, or rather very early morning, is worse than the others — more difficult, drags on, slows him down. It’s, loosely, him versus three other sorcerers; individually, they’re no match for him, but together they pose something of a threat, and they all seem to recognize that he’s the most obvious target, the one to deal with first. Three different techniques, three different strategies, three sets of five points moving in and out of his space. Kento’s is a style that requires patience and observation, measurement and precision, and this isn’t ideal for him.
The other three don’t appear to be in a group — they all seem to have stumbled simultaneously upon each other, which Kento supposes is in his favor. Though they’re not troubling to attack each other, they’re also not coordinating, and they don’t seem to care especially if something happens to the others. No emotional charge to worry about, no additional motivation to protect or defend the others in the group.
Still — three on one. None of them seem willing to get close to Kento, sensing his strength, relying on ranged aspects of their cursed techniques to try to damage him, affect him, from afar. It’s up to him to push in, deflecting and avoiding as much as he can before closing in to strike. He’s never thought of it as a weakness of his technique, but he supposes the lack of distance isn’t ideal for this scenario. In the end, though, all three of them go down, one by one.
The first is around Kento’s age, shurikens charged with cursed energy, difficult up close in hand-to-hand combat. He leaves a mottling of bruises up Kento’s side, grazes his arm with another shuriken, just below the sleeve of the shirt he’s wearing from the same apartment.
The second’s blow darts explode in puffs of darkly fragrant steam that Kento doesn’t want to fuck around with; she gets them off quickly, and Kento has to dodge carefully, thoughtfully, wider movements and more effort. But when he closes the distance between them she has no room to maneuver, nimble but weak. Still, she gets a hit in, a kick to his thigh that makes him grateful he dispatches her quickly.
The third is the one Kento had felt most readily matched with, slinging a rope imbued with cursed energy that, based on the objects around them catching collateral damage, slices through anything it meets. The rope is a physical object, though, stretched in three-dimensional space, which means that any time it closes in on Kento there’s a perfect spot along its length for a ratio, and he slices further and further down the length, until he’s in front of her, tool raised, blood from some debris that hit the side of his head streaming down his face. By then he doesn’t have the energy to keep the fight alive, kills her without a second thought, without a second chance, and as her body falls he lets his own hands drop to his knees, panting and sweating and bleeding.
He has a strange thought, then, half-formed and shaped by exhaustion he’s sure but slowly rising to the front of his mind. He thinks he wants to get back to the theater, back to the place he’s started to think of as home base. He hasn’t been back to his own apartment since the games started, nor to any of his regular haunts, but every day since he met Higuruma he’s gone back to the theater.
He doesn’t question it, in the end, can’t spare the stamina and starts back as soon as he gets his breathing under control. He stops first in the hallway, in one of the bathrooms dotting the circumference of the auditorium, tries to wash the dried blood from his arm and face to understand the damage. Luckily neither cut is bad; the one on his bicep is broader, the one at his scalp bled more but isn’t deep. The pants he stole from his current closet — linen, grey, stained now with someone else’s blood — tear easily enough to bind his arm. He thinks his head will have to stay open for now; it really isn’t a bad cut, isn’t even bleeding anymore. Bruises are forming around it, matching the ones he can see already on his side when he tugs up the hem of his shirt, the ones he feels spread across his vastus lateralis, his rectus femoris, every step he takes.
He doesn’t bother saying anything as he pushes through one of the doors into the auditorium, weaves his way down the remade aisles. Higuruma isn’t always sitting in the bathtub, even when both of them are there, but he is right now, stays still as he watches Kento drag himself toward him. Kento isn’t even sure what he wants, what he’s aiming for, but he moves toward the stage like there’s a magnet pulling him there, pausing with one foot on the stairs up to where the platform raises.
Higuruma’s eyes are dark, strange, his mouth set in a thin line like he sees something he doesn’t like. Kento’s breathing sounds loud in his ears, his heart thudding — leftover adrenaline, maybe, a second wind on the high of his win, his fifteen points, three inferior sorcerers off the map the way the game intends. He waits for Higuruma to speak first, like he’s expecting a grade, a commentary on his performance.
What he says in the end isn’t really anything Kento expected. “Looks like it was a good fight.” Kento nods, still like he’s waiting, frozen in place by something he doesn’t understand. “Maybe you should try the bathtub.”
Kento wants to laugh, wants to explain that he just killed three people and the last thing he wants to do about it is climb into lukewarm water with another grown man and more elbows and knees than there’s room for. But it isn’t really the last thing he wants to do, he thinks. Part of him wants to get in, wants to settle into the water with his legs on either side of Higuruma’s, hands on the lip of the tub on either side of his head, wants to tell him all about how he’d earned fifteen more points and how alive and strong he’d felt against those sorcerers — at least one reincarnated, he thinks. “Maybe I should,” he says, finally, and Higuruma grins.
//
He shucks his shoes and socks but leaves his other clothes on — Higuruma does, shoes and everything, and Kento finds it simple to strike a balance between his own preferences regarding wet feet and bathtub etiquette in this theater. He watches Higuruma watch him, unmoving, head tipped back against the lip the way it usually is.
Kento climbs in slowly, arranges himself in the water — warm, rising slightly as he enters — just as he’d pictured a moment ago. Higuruma lets him, adjusts to give him space, lets Kento put a weapon each that had pulled at the core of cursed energy and forced it to follow his will on either side of his head. He doesn’t know what to do with his face, Kento realizes when he’s looming over Higuruma, so he schools it, holding neutral over the rim of the tub.
Higuruma reaches up, one hand dripping water onto Kento’s shirt, and smooths his fingers over the skin below the cut at Kento’s scalp. He presses on a bruise, just a little, probably not on purpose but even if it is it doesn’t matter. Kento doesn’t wince. “Is it strange to say you look good like this?” Higuruma asks. Kento supposes he means marked up, tired enough to be in his clothes in a bathtub.
“After everything that’s happened this last week, I don’t think I’d say it’s strange.”
“Then,” Higuruma says, and drops his hand, makes a little splash with the weight of it, “you look good. Tell me about the fight.”
Kento leans his weight forward a little, onto his elbows so his spine can stretch a bit. If he’s going to be talking. “There were three of them,” he begins. The grin Higuruma is still wearing widens. “I don’t think they knew each other, just all in the same place at the same time. I doubt I would have struggled against any of them on their own but all together it was a little challenging.” Having his leg in water this fresh maybe isn’t the smartest thing he’s ever done; when Kento looks down at it the bath is turning a little pink in the area around his makeshift bandage. It doesn’t hurt, though. He’s always had a reasonably quick recovery time, which certainly didn’t hurt when killing curses or taking out unwanted sorcerer pests. Or other things. And in any case, the schooling and career he’s pursued might as well have high pain tolerance as an application requirement, right alongside shallow attachments and emotional resilience.
“How unfair,” Higuruma says. His legs between Kento’s press out, just a little, adjusting himself in an uncomfortable situation, but it lines their thighs up along damp seams and Kento is becoming more and more aware of it. “But you won.”
“But I won.” Saying it out loud is like flint to tinder, starting something strange and fierce inside Kento, somewhere between his sternum and his gut. He had won, he’d defeated three different sorcerers at once and now he’s pressed into a bathtub all around the person with the most points in the colony. They’re both at the top of the leaderboard, the biggest threats in Tokyo 1. Something must change in his expression, because something changes in Higuruma’s too. “I won.”
“Did it feel good?” Higuruma asks. His eyes are dark, on Kento’s; Kento hadn’t bothered putting his glasses back on after the fight, smeared with blood, one lens shattered by whatever had cut his head. He half-wishes for them, feels exposed without them, isn’t sure whether that’s a bad thing after all. He nods anyway, slow. Some part of one of them is dripping unhurriedly into the water, raising the level in the tub more gradually than the eye can see. “Do you know I used to be a lawyer? Not ambitious enough to be a judge.” They haven’t spoken much about their past, the time before Higuruma had awakened to his abilities, reverse-engineered an entire domain expansion in days just by fighting inferior curse users. Kento listens, careful. “I know how good it can feel, to get a win that you deserve.”
“I went to school for this,” Kento explains. Their faces are very close. “This should be routine.”
“But it’s not?”
“No.” Higuruma left his mouth a little parted at the end of his question, like he could swallow Kento’s answer; Kento lets his eyes trace over it, the strongest person in the colony, soaked so Kento can see the outline of his body where his suit clings to it. His jacket is somewhere tossed to the stage. “It’s not the same.”
“Hmm.” Higuruma reaches up again, smears two fingers along Kento’s cheekbone, leaving water dripping in their wake when he pauses at the juncture with his temple. “Why, I wonder.”
It’s the kind of question that has no answer, a dozen answers, none of them worth speaking when they’re spelled out clearly in the breathing between them. “Why, indeed,” Kento says anyway. He lifts one hand, rebalances to hold his weight on his other arm, and fits his index finger to the curve of Higuruma’s nose, the shape that pulls your attention and holds it firm on him until you realize the rest is worth looking at too, spreads the extent of his hand over his face.
“Most people notice that first,” Higuruma says. “My nose.”
“Everything else isn’t bad.” Kento cocks his head. “I felt your energy signature first, in any case. If it matters. Before I even saw you.”
“How special,” Higuruma says, and he arches his back.
//
They’re already a tight fit but once they start moving, mouths connected hot and wet and something like hungry to each other, the tub feels snug. Kento doesn’t mind, doesn’t mind the warmth of bodily contact keeping the growing chill of the water away as he presses himself down further, lines his chest with Higuruma’s, feels the swirl of power between them like cotton or barbed wire around the bat of arousal.
“It makes these things more intense, doesn’t it?” Higuruma asks, when Kento is working his buttons open to free up more space for his tongue, neck, throat, Adam’s apple, collarbone shallow. He tugs at the handfuls of Kento’s stolen shirt to emphasize these things, twinned wet prints against his back. “Cursed energy.”
“Mmm.” He says it against the vibration of Higuruma’s words, tight to his vocal cords. “I’ve never known any different.”
“Lucky you.” One of Higuruma’s knees, bent between Kento’s legs, nudges forward, brushing the joint of his shin up against his inseam, his cock where it’s starting to stir half-in the water. “This will be my first time.”
“Lucky me,” Kento repeats, working Higuruma’s shirttails out from his trousers, popping the last few buttons with more dexterity than the wetness of the fabric should allow. Underneath, through the sheer of that white, he’s a little surprised; Higuruma is wiry, almost thin for a man with dozens of kills. Kento knows he doesn’t look like that, but he’s has a lifetime minus four years of fighting and cursing and killing. “The tub is a little limiting.”
“Next time I’ll get out first,” Higuruma promises, sly grin and hands at the hem of Kento’s pants, sliding under his shirt. “Come on, show me what a lifetime of this made.”
Like he’d read his thoughts. Kento sits back, stretching up, and tugs at the soaking collar, spraying water down Higuruma’s face, his neck, his front as he pulls, tosses it somewhere to sully the stage floor. With the way things look in Tokyo, whatever they accomplish in these games will be the last performance this auditorium will see, anyway.
Higuruma watches like the sight is oxygen, watches Kento fold back down, fit them together again. The luxury of having time for this, of knowing that if anyone unexpected appears they’re more than a match for them, heats the air between them, pushes their next kiss deeper, meaningful in its utter impracticality. Higuruma touches him, slow, groping at his arms, his chest, dragging his fingers down Kento’s stomach. His elbows nearly meet that leg, still between Kento’s, still rubbing him hard. “You’re like a god,” Higuruma says, punctuated with a moan with Kento’s tongue flat against his nipple.
“We are,” Kento agrees, letting his breath harden him. Higuruma’s fingers press tighter against him, snaking to his wet linen waistband, stolen and snug. Kento mouths at his other nipple, sucking until the knee between his thighs presses forward again. “We are.”
Higuruma doesn’t waste time stripping Kento fully, next time heavy in the air and the water between them as he hooks his fingerprints beneath the tie above his hips, gasping as Kento pulls at the hook and eye of his suit, reaches into the gap to grasp his cock, hard and straining under the water. Higuruma inhales, adrenaline straight to Kento’s blood, squirming under him to drive his leg against Kento, nearly fully aroused now, crazy with the mere thought of having the most dangerous man inside the walls around them between his thighs.
“Fuck,” Higuruma says, and it’s maybe the first time Kento has heard him curse, drives his grasp tighter, his mouth hotter when he kisses Higuruma again, wet and sloppy, “fuck, Nanami, harder.”
“You too,” Kento pants, right between Higuruma’s lips, sharing air like they’ve shared food and points and kills between the two of them in the days since the colony has felt like it’s shrinking around them, fewer and fewer names on the leaderboards. He grinds his hips down, bearing onto the join of bone at the peak of Higuruma’s shin. “Come on, Hiromi, fuck.”
Is it the first time he’s used his first name? Perhaps. Higuruma shakes against him, thrusting his hips into Kento’s grip, twitching so that knee rubs merciless against where Kento is hard. “Nanami,” he moans, driving those hands lower finally, under the water, slick and firm around him, “Nanami, fuck.”
Had he even mentioned his own first name? Kento doesn’t know, isn’t sure it matters in the moment, passing pretense and shoving his own waistband down his thighs, past Higuruma’s seeking fingers, til his own cock is submerged and exposed in the bathwater. Higuruma’s eyes and hands follow, starving, wide and tightening.
“People who see your nose first,” Kento pants, snapping his hips into Higuruma’s fist, chasing an orgasm underlined by the weight of lives taken, “they’re missing everything else.”
“Ah.” Higuruma is panting, bats Kento’s hand away from his cock to wrap those fingers, long and seeking, around both of them, and Kento groans at the sensation — the chill of the water, the heat of their skin together, and he bends down again to kiss whatever the reply is out of Higuruma’s mouth, wrapping his tongue around the words to pull them free and swallow them whole.
Hands free, Kento settles them on either side of Higuruma’s head again, sets his weight on them to push harder into Higuruma’s grip, friction from all sides, moving in time like synchronized swimmers. The thought almost makes Kento laugh, in the confines of the bathtub, like practicing a routine.
“What’s funny?” Higuruma asks, breathy, a grin of his own snaking across his face, and Kento supposes that up close it’s much easier to read the nuances of his facial expressions. Or maybe they’re getting familiar with each other. The idea doesn’t bother him as much as he expects it to. “I want to hear your voice.”
“Fuck,” trips out of Kento’s mouth first, because as he’s opening it Higuruma twists his wrist to smear his thumbprint across the slit at the head of Kento’s cock, sending a spark of pleasure up his spine and back down into his gut, “fuck, I was thinking… doesn’t matter, shit, I’m close.”
“Mmm,” Higuruma hums, right up against Kento’s throat where his mouth is pressed, open and breathing hard, “this is really going to ruin the water.”
//
It doesn’t stop; if anything, things escalate between them, not that either of them seem to mind or want to stop. Kento certainly doesn’t, legs spread in one of the displaced theater seats with Higuruma lowering himself onto his cock between them, breathing hard.
“Fifteen more points today,” he pants into Kento’s ear when he’s bottomed out inside of him, Higuruma’s knees wedged on either side of his hips. Kento runs his hands up Higuruma’s thighs, back down, spanning the width of them with his palms, lets him settle and adjust. They’d laughed, earlier, when Higuruma had come back from scavenging for provisions with some of the last fresh vegetables left in their colony, mixed together in a bag with lube and condoms. How ridiculous, they’d thought together, to take the time and expend the effort for that, sharing the kind of knowing, gloating laughter of people who could.
“Good work, baby,” Kento murmurs, trying not to twitch his hips. He’s not sure when the pet names started but it’s better than being alone, better than being condemned to thinking about Suguru and Gojo and everything stripped from him. Higuruma is here, at least; they’re both alive, still more than alive, wringing life out of the fog of death in the air around them, unceasing, oppressive. “Still the top of the colony.”
“You and me,” he agrees, flexing under Kento’s fingers, using the leverage of his arms around Kento’s neck to pull himself up almost to the point of Kento slipping out of him. Almost, not quite; Kento bucks up then, sinking back into that tight heat, pulling Higuruma down with him, around him, as he sinks back into the chair, the latest part of the theater’s skeleton to be defiled. “You’re so strong, fuck.”
“Mmm.” Kento lets his hands settle at Higuruma’s hips, the joins with his stomach, so he can feel each movement he’s about to make. “All the fighting paid off, I suppose.”
“Now,” Higuruma says, turns it into a moan when Kento angles himself a little differently, catching his prostate with the head of his cock, “and before. Sorcerer.”
Kento grins at that, small and private, feels Higuruma stretch up and sink back down at every point they’re connected, decides to let a little of himself go. “Would it surprise you,” he begins, stroking one palm up Higuruma’s spine to gather the back of his skull close, pressing their foreheads together, “to know there are many sorcerers stronger than me?”
Higuruma shakes his head, picks up his pace, punctuates his words with the sounds of their skin overlapping. “Doesn’t matter,” he says into Kento’s mouth, open to receive it. “You’re strong enough to keep up with me.”
“You are the mark to chase in here,” Kento agrees, kisses Higuruma for it hot and wet and fucks into him harder, the way he likes, the way he’s always chasing something. Maybe they’re punishing each other, Kento thinks, half-blind and half-stupid with lust. Maybe they’re absolving each other.
After it’s always the same — dressing quickly for a slightly less-vulnerable afterglow, stretched out on the stage or propped up in chairs somewhere in the theater. Sometimes one indulges the other, Kento in Higuruma’s lap with his legs over the arm of the seat, Higuruma’s head on the small of Kento’s back where he’s spread across the wood on his stomach. Today Higuruma is back in the bathtub, dressed but not especially happy about it when his main reason to be there at the moment is the erasure of what they’ve just done, leaning on the edge parallel to Kento, stroking one finger over the bones of his face. Kento feels like he might fall asleep like this, jawline against his arms, dry and sated and calm under the emergency lighting. They’re the emergency, he thinks, he is and Higuruma is, and he smiles.
“Baby,” Higuruma says, and Kento raises an eyebrow. “You called me that.”
“Slipped out, I guess,” Kento explains agreeably. Water slides from the tip of Higuruma’s finger down Kento’s jawline to his chin, to his arm, and Higuruma’s eyes follow it. “I’ll say something different next time if it bothers you.”
Higuruma shakes his head. “Next time, say anything you like.”
Kento watches him for a moment, watches himself reflected in the darkness of Higuruma’s irises. Higuruma would have, could have, helped Haibara, he thinks. Together they could have. The two most powerful sorcerers in Tokyo 1, special grades be damned; from what Kento’s heard, from the ripple of absence before this all started, there’s only one special grade left in Japan anyhow, the kid who’d fought Suguru. In this new world maybe the distinction of grades will fade away, replaced with truth demonstrated with power that can’t be bought or sold by ilk like the Zen’ins, a world where the strong could dominate, could cull that mountain of corpses at the end of Suguru’s marathon, shrink it down before it could be built.
“Hiromi,” Kento says, a little abruptly, and Higuruma starts, shifting the water in little ripples crisscrossing over each other, meeting and unmeeting. He pauses with his fingers at the crest of Kento’s cheekbone, hiding his mouth with his palm. “We’re going to win these games. Whatever that means, we’ll do it.”
Higuruma stares at him, that same hand frozen over Kento’s face concealing a little of his expression, but after a moment his movements resume. “You never asked,” he says slowly, “about my two extra points. As the games were starting, when no one was sure what normal was anymore, my client was found guilty. It was a complete fabrication, I know; he was an innocent, a kid roped into a sham non-profit, wrong place wrong time.” Higuruma’s eyes look far away. “Life in prison. Double murder. Uncomplicated if you’re the jury. I’d just felt this power, didn’t know how to use it or what to do with it. So I killed the judge and the prosecutor.” He grins, that sharp slit in his face pulling Kento in all over again somehow. “If there is an after this, I should turn myself in.”
Kento shakes his head, forcefully, pulls Higuruma’s gaze back to him from the middle distance. “Society is changing,” he explains, turns his head to kiss one of Higuruma’s fingertips, to tongue it up to the knuckle, to bring life back into those nightshade eyes. “Everything that only existed to hold it up will fall away. The only things left will be real, your power, my power. Hiromi,” he murmurs, along the edge of another finger, watching Higuruma like he might bolt, “you will be the law.”
Higuruma doesn’t say anything to that, just presses past Kento’s mouth to slide those fingers in, watching him all the time.
//
Amai looks like he’s going to say something else, but Itadori just waves him off. It isn’t like he can change anything about it; his mind has been made up since he saw Fushiguro again after Shibuya, since they knew Tsumiki would be forced into the games. Itadori couldn’t, still can’t, let that happen to Fushiguro when he’s really all he has left. Kugisaki is little more than a wish deep down at this point, and with Gojo sealed away it’s the two of them.
In a way, maybe through sheer compartmentalization, there’s a part of the games that has been a little fun so far. He had seen Amai, after all, for the first time in a long time; the fights against Hanyu and Haba had been energizing. There’s a lot of interesting techniques around, the kind that Panda had talked about — modern, like the higher ups couldn’t stand. Itadori doesn’t know much about the higher ups, but if people like Gojo and Hakari disagree with them he can’t say he’s on their side, even if they’re right about one or two things.
Higuruma, his one hundred points, is through the doors of the theater ahead of him, the potential of transfer. Itadori’s already planning how to ask for the points, how to avoid a confrontation, but he’s prepared for a fight too, tensing his muscles as he pushes into the building.
He hasn’t been to many places like this — more likely to see a movie or head to a sporting event than something fancier, which is exactly what this building looks like, outside and even with the muted interior which clearly had seen better days. Itadori looks around, getting the lay of the land — box office, signs for various performing spaces, one stroller abandoned and upside down in the entryway. It’s hard, still, seeing the ghosts of what was before, the reminder of what Itadori had done. He doubts that pain will ever vanish, even with the knowledge of how much greater the suffering of those around him had been. He should have done better, should have reined Sukuna in harder… thinking about what might happen if he ever gets out again, the push to get back to Fushiguro against the pull of those possibilities…
Itadori shakes his head, footfalls nearly silent against the plushness of the carpet, lit dimly by the less-common thread of electricity thrumming through the building. Enough of that kind of thinking. He’s on a mission, just like the old days, like with Fushiguro and Kugisaki, like with Ino during the time after Sukuna had appeared with the finger-bearer.
He smiles a little, thinking of Ino; there’s still a chance to make him proud. Itadori pauses at that, seeing the glint of what looks like light or movement through it past the round glass window in one of the swinging doors he’s passing, peers through it as unobtrusively as he can but can’t catch much through it. Whatever illumination there is isn’t sufficient to pass more than what looks like a jumble of chairs close to the doorway. Itadori winces; one more mark of what he’s done. He enters the auditorium, quiet as he can, but stops almost as soon as he’s inside the room.
Without the barrier between, the lighting looks brighter, illuminating the stage where, probably, opera singers and actors and ballet dancers had performed, where currently it looks like there’s a… bathtub. Of all the things Itadori had expected, this hadn’t been one. But Amai had been so sure that Higuruma had been here, he’d brought Itadori right to the building… he approaches with caution.
As he draws closer, Itadori can see more details than just the blurry shapes he’d made out through the glass, from the outer perimeter of the auditorium. Amai hadn’t told the whole truth, then; there’s not just one man, but two, sprawled on the stage. One is in the bathtub in what looks like an entire suit — Itadori’s never worn one, not even for a school uniform — wet and dark all over, dark fabric and dark hair and what look like dark eyes, peering at him from where his head is tipped back against the rim of the tub. Itadori can’t say he understands exactly what that’s all about but reserves judgment in case this is Higuruma. It probably wouldn’t be good to start a negotiation for points on the wrong foot.
The other man has his arms folded on the long edge of the bath, the furnishing between him and Itadori; what he can see is blond hair, sharp eyes, firm mouth pulled into a thin line. The men’s arms overlap on that back rim of the tub; between the clawed feet of it he can see the blond man’s legs folded lotus-style under him. It’s hard to tell but he might be wearing a suit too. At least he’s dry, Itadori thinks, then slaps himself mentally for it. Either of them could be Higuruma.
“Well,” says the man with the dark hair, and he turns fully away from Itadori, letting his head loll to the side, looking at the blond man with the kind of blind confidence that Itadori knows to expect from strong opponents at this point, “would you look at that.”
The blond man looks at Itadori for another moment, eyes serious. Itadori approaches further, not sensing immediate danger or some sort of unexpected attack. Whichever one isn’t Higuruma could be an unknown quantity, could be a leech with no points, could be the next highest in the colony, Itadori doesn’t know and it isn’t like he could ask.
Or, he thinks suddenly, maybe he could. He draws to a stop right at the raised edge of the stage, propping one foot on a stair step in case he needs a leg up to engage one or both of them. “Hi,” he says, winces a little at how childish it sounds, but he soldiers on. “I’m here to speak to Higuruma Hiromi.”
The blond man turns away from him, then, looks at the one with the dark eyes, submerged in water. The way they look at each other makes Itadori nervous, somehow, like making an enemy of one will make an enemy of both. “Take him, then,” the blond says, and the brunet one grins. Itadori doesn’t like it much at all, tenses into a not-quite-fighting stance, watches as both sets of eyes land on him again. “Darling, you know I don’t like fighting children.”