Chapter Text
Gojo was gone.
He had been there one moment, arguing in Kento’s ear, a pitch he never seemed to get used to whenever he got upset, and now he isn’t. Yet Kento finds himself in the same decrepit building as before, except this time the walls were not crumbling, they had simply been tagged over and reeked faintly of piss.
There had been no people either but here there’s at least two homeless people staring at him from the pitch blackness beyond, their eyes unfriendly and wary.
There is no point in asking where he is: this is Sapporo, south of Teine. But none of the cursed energy from before seems to be present, save for the rancid stench of fury about three paces ahead of him. The cloud of wariness thickens and Kento suppresses his own curdle of panic. He refuses to call out to Gojo so instead he feels the wall next to him, shuffles back until he finds a door where there should be a wall.
No matter.
It’s still daylight. The mountain air still pricks at his lungs.
Everything looks the same but it isn’t the same. He takes off his glasses and wipes the smudges clean but the eerie sense that something is wrong remains.
So he takes out his phone and he has no reception. “Wonderful.” Kento sighs, aggravated. “It must be the air, there probably isn’t any reception until I get closer to the city.”
Surely, that’s it. He should be relieved by the absence of Gojo, one less argument for him to handle, one less headache by the end of the day, but the closer he travels to the city centre, the eeriness balloons until it has taken up residence in his chest, encapsulating his heart. It thumps in a heavy beat, slow to catch on, just like him.
But stepping foot in the city does not erase that feeling. Instead it pencils it in with every step that feels curved, every breath that feels wintered in his mouth when it’s the midst of summer. The city does not look the same. It is as though there’s a pebble in his shoe as he hobbles along, like you can’t quite focus, distracted by that discomfiting feeling whilst the world blurs around you. This world is not his world.
When he checks his phone again the reception is still dead.
“Excuse me.” Kento asks the first woman he sees, a kind face in a city of busybodies, a toddler tugging at her hand.
Her eyes sweep over him, decides to trust him in his suit with a weapon hidden beneath his suit jacket, security strapped against his spine. Does he ask her? What year is it? That would be preposterous. After all, there must be an explanation for all of this.
“Yes?”
He’s taken too long and her friendliness turns confused. Her child begins to tug at her hand, ‘mommy, mommy, you promised—’
“Could I use your phone?” He holds up his own and her face grows ever more confused. Not a good sign. “Mine appears to have no reception.”
“Are you from around here?” She asks as she digs around her purse. Keys click against her manicured nails. “I’ve never seen a phone like that before. Must be a Tokyo thing.”
“No.” Kento says, voice tight. “And yes.”
What else is he meant to say when she hands him a flip phone that by today’s standards, his standards, looks a little too good to be ten years old. He still tries, fruitlessly, to punch Yaga’s cellphone number in.
The number you have called is out of service. Please check the number and try again.
He doesn’t try again. His hand feels clammy when he hands the phone back to her and thanks her for her time, letting her hurry along with her toddler.
‘Who was that man, mommy?’
No one, Kento thinks with an icy chill, no one in this world.
☙
The ride to the tech is disquieting. Ten years may have passed but money is the same everywhere. For once Kento is actually thankful that although modern society brought many advancements, Japan is as conservative as ever. It means he always carries cash on him.
Years. It's been years.
A quick glimpse at the woman’s phone had told him what he had already feared to be true. Ten years between now and then. As though his future is a past he is meant to contend with.
Summer of 2008, about three days shy of his birthday, an eighteen-year-old propped up in school benches, cramming for a life he never got to live just yet. Kento can’t meet him, but he remembers the sweltering heat, the way his peers couldn’t wait for summer break whereas Kento had been desperate for the routine of the masses, knowing what he had left behind.
But he isn’t eighteen now.
He is a twenty-eight-year-old man. Even the timeline doesn’t make sense: it was autumn when he left and it is summer now. The curse, whatever it was, doesn’t appear to be consistent with the dates.
Stepping into central Tokyo makes him wish it was autumn instead. The heat cloys, settles between the ridge of his shoulders, weapon glued to his back. At times like these, he wishes he had Gojo’s talent for teleportation.
Gojo.
Would he be here?
Kento never spoke to him again until his return, his number stored in a phone not quite like this one, but he hadn’t changed it.
“Shit.”
He could have called him. That would have been the easier solution wouldn’t it? Would it be welcome? Kento doesn’t prefer talking to children, even ones so powerful as Gojo. He knows the man in the present: as egotistical as he is elusive.
“Probably best not to.”
He takes another metro. It’s not so easy to blend into the crowd when you stick out like a sore thumb but he tries, folds himself up all small so as to avoid sticking to another person. No one notices him.
The anticlimax leaves him feeling clammy. He’s ripped open the space-time continuum and no one bothers to give him a second glance. People go on as they always have, never questioning, self-centred and focused.
Perhaps this is how curses feel. Oddities that belong nowhere with no one but sorcerers to notice their existence.
Except neither sorcerers come for him. Kento rocks along the sway of cursed energy, bouncing off his own tolerance, which grows more limited by the minute. Another hour, perhaps, until he can be at the Tech. Another hour until he can find a way back to his timeline.
Soon, he promises.
☙
“Has everything changed?”
The curtain does not feel the same. It presses heavily against the palm of Kento’s hand, as though it is trying to decide whether he belongs here or not. Did it oust him when Kento resigned? Retired. A sixteen-year-old boy carrying a resignation letter with trembling hands. Stripped of his grade and feeling the humiliation of his failure, his giving up, sink into his shoes. Every step had felt heavier than the last until he’d reached the outside.
It had been the lightest he had felt in months.
Faintly, he remembers passing Gojo. His voice, whatever he had said, is lost to the static of a ten-year-old memory. Kento only remembers not saying anything back.
“Hey.”
Kento startles from his thoughts and turns. A ghost stands in front of him on the other side of the barrier.
“What are you doing here?”
This couldn’t be the same Gojo. He is as far-removed from Kento’s Gojo as he is from the Gojo in Kento’s memories. Has he ever been so young? It is discomfiting to look upon his face. His eyes are still round, the blue so penetrating without the blindfold that hides it in the future, peering over his sunglasses. The sunlight that catches on the rim, casts a wide glow over cheeks that are too soft for his age, an eighteen-year-old as young as freshly fallen snow.
But that is not what is causing the discomfort.
It’s the hollows beneath his eyes that don’t crinkle in amusement, but remain flat. It’s the harsh lines beside his mouth, the suspicion in every crease. Hands in his pockets when the palms used to face him, open like his smile was.
This is not a Gojo Kento has ever known.
It makes him uncomfortable.
Is he in the right timeline? Or has Kento stumbled upon an alternate reality? The latter poses further problems. Will this Gojo even accept him?
“Hello.” Kento tries, throat dry. The heat swirls around his head, his temples damp, and it makes everything twice as hard as it has to be. Gojo keeps staring at him, unblinking, but he hasn’t made an effort to attack Kento yet. “I’m—”
“Nanami.” Gojo says suddenly. “You’re Nanami.”
Out of all answers, that is not the one that Kento expected. “How’d you know?”
Gojo still doesn’t move, the hostility of his stance doesn’t ease. Instead comes his cryptic reply, “There has only ever been one of you.”
This time when Kento presses against the barrier, it easily falls around him like water until he stands toe to toe with Gojo, who has yet to move. When Kento moves left, Gojo sways along with him, like a blade of grass carried on the wind. He is as effortlessly invasive as he always was, though this time it’s not annoyance that Kento feels, but concern.
“I suppose you have questions.” Kento begins but Gojo only shakes his head, rolls his eyes derisively. “I’m not interested. I think you have more questions than I do.” He finally steps away enough for Kento to count the minute height difference between them, three centimetres to his advantage. It’s only adding to how young he is.
Kento has no idea how to respond to him. Every answer is met with indifference and Kento feels as though he’s done him wrong somehow, although he can’t imagine what that is. He would have been gone four months, disappeared right before the year’s ceremony, refused to start his final year.
Did four months do this?
Gojo had seemed fine after Geto.
Hadn’t he?
“Is Geto-san—”
“No.” Gojo’s voice is a spiteful, wretched thing. “Is he there in your world?”
No, Kento thinks, you killed him.
“I suppose—” he keeps his voice level, “I better talk to Yaga-san, then.”
Gojo nods again. It is dispassionate and devoid of any curiosity that Kento was sure he would have held a year ago. He was bracing himself for questions in the train, questions that don’t come, because Gojo is stepping away from him.
The distance of it feels wrong. He doesn’t think he has ever seen Gojo so alone, in neither past nor present. He is the type of person to draw a crowd, but here he is carrying himself along.
“Do what you want.”
“What are you going to do?”
He can’t help it. He already feels discomfited by being in the wrong timeline, but Gojo makes him feel like he’s in the wrong universe too. He had expected him to stay, but Gojo doesn’t seem interested enough to stick around.
That summer-sticky feeling remains, as though he wants to peel his skin off with how uncomfortable this situation feels.
Gojo frowns at him. “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”
Then he pops out of existence.
☙
“I see.”
Yaga seems to be taking the news better than Kento was anticipating, but the look on his face does not inspire confidence. It seems as though he is yet deciding what danger Kento’s existence poses to this world and is reluctant to help until he figures it out.
Pragmatic, if unnerving.
“Do I exist in this world?”
Yaga’s brows crease. “What do you mean?”
“I am simply wondering what kind of timeline I was sent to.”
One where Gojo, bright and vibrant, has been reduced to the smoke that rises after a fire has gone out, not even the lingering embers left.
“It is July fourth, 2008.” Yaga starts slowly. “The you from this timeline left us on March twenty-second earlier this year.”
Kento starts. “I see.”
That lines up with his own memories. He left right before the start of the new year, his final year, but he started making preparations as early as January of that year. Perhaps that is a coincidence, not everything has to be the total opposite of his world.
“When did I first come to you with my decision?”
“I think it was February.”
That lines up too. Cold sweat prickles his neck.
“And Geto-san?” Kento asks. “Did he commit mass-murder in September of 2007?”
It is Yaga who starts this time. “Unfortunately.”
“Is he dead?”
“Unfortunately not.”
They both sit in silence for a while. The dates line up. Kento did talk to Yaga in February of that year, how he wanted to resign, to live another life far away from this one. He had never mentioned Yu, but Yaga had pried anyway.
I’m not scared of dying.
What was a fear of death compared to a fear of living? The continuous stream of bright-faced sorcerers whose future got snuffed out. Why bother trying at all?
Yu’s fate wasn’t singular nor was it special. That’s what made it hard.
I don’t want to live like that.
He had never agreed with Geto’s methods, but he had understood. Who would want to see every sorcerer die for the masses who would never understand the sacrifice?
“I see.” Kento says, again. “It seems likely that this is not an alternate reality then, but my own.”
Yaga hums. “So I suppose asking you about the future—”
“No.” Kento interrupts him. “It will either change nothing or it will change everything, making the point of telling you moot.”
Kento has no intention of making things worse for everyone in the future.
“But you have returned as a sorcerer.” Yaga says, nodding at the cursed tool strapped to Kento’s back. “That is already an outcome I did not expect.”
“I suppose.”
Did they think of him as a coward? Or simply as the type of person unwilling to change his mind?
“What made you change your mind?”
“Wanting to be useful.” Kento takes a deep breath.
In the end, he wonders if that was the better choice after all.
☙
“I think it is best that we set some ground rules.” Yaga tells him after a lengthy discussion on how Kento is feeling (“fine”), where he is allowed to go (“Just be discreet.”), and whether he has any idea on how to get back (“No.”).
They had agreed that the higher-ups did not need to be informed at this stage. Kento is not too sure of how that will work out in the future, but at this point he is an unknown in this world and they should not care about his presence.
“That is fine.”
As though he has any other choice. Yaga is not quite suspicious of him, but he is also not eager to deal with another problem. Kento is not opposed to any rules, he just wishes that the man would also be willing to extend help as well.
Perhaps Gojo is a safer bet, even if Kento is reluctant to call on the help of a teenager.
“First, you are not to interact with your past self.” Yaga says, as though he wasn’t eager for Kento to spill details on the future first.
“Agreed.”
“Shoko will examine you to determine if the curse’s effects are leaving any residuals in this world.”
Aka, is this situation going to be bad for us and will I need to inform the higher-ups after all.
“You are to report any anomalies to either me or Gojo.”
Kento frowns. “You want me to report to Gojo?”
Yaga simply raises an eyebrow at him. “Is there a problem with that?”
The first two rules are easy enough to follow, but reporting to Gojo seems excessive. Yaga, after all, is the newly-appointed principal of the school. Hell, Kento would have accepted the interference of the higher-ups. But reporting to a teenager seems odd.
“Gojo is eighteen.” Kento says. “Should that not be reason enough?”
“He’s the strongest.” Yaga says gruffly. “I don’t like it any better than you do, but he is our best bet in getting you out of this situation. His technique may be helpful in getting you home.”
Helpful how? In determining whether a curse’s energy still clings to his person? Gojo had already seemed prickly when Kento first met him with zero interest in further conversation. Should this additional task be laid squarely on his shoulders? It seems Yaga misunderstands him: Kento doesn’t have an issue with Gojo’s position of power, he has an issue with putting too much responsibility on a child.
“I don’t see how we should task a teenager with an additional workload.”
Yaga ignores him. “He will also accompany you to make sure there are no disturbances.”
Kento smiles wryly. “So a guard dog then.”
“If that’s what you want to call it.”
Annoying, but necessary. He just wonders how Gojo will take the news.
He finds out the answer as he’s sitting in front of Ieiri-kun, her small hands pressed up against his chest, fingers padding against his heart beat. She, too, looks too young, too odd to be doing this.
Is the whole of Jujutsu society being held up by children?
The door slams open and there he is.
“Why do I have to watch you?”
Kento hums. “Close the door, please.”
The warm gush of air floods in, disturbing the flow of the air conditioning. Although Gojo sulks, he does as he’s told. He slinks forward until he sits right next to him, his long legs trailing over the floor when the small stool can’t accommodate him.
“Why?” He asks again, as if the shorter question is going to provide him with an answer.
Kento doesn’t have one for him. Instead he feels Ieiri’s nails tap along his midriff, feels out the source of his cursed energy, until she finally sighs. “Time-warp curse, is it?”
“I’m not sure.” Kento is not at all feeling reassured by her lack of knowledge. Perhaps she’s too young, doesn’t know how to fix him. And if she doesn’t, who will? “I found myself in the exact same location as I was in my time. I don’t recall seeing a curse.”
“Don’t ignore me!”
They both ignore him.
“There’s threads of its energy on your person.” Ieiri says. “It wound tight around you, but let go the second you left that timeline.”
“But if the curse is no longer here, then why am I still here.”
“Beats me.” Ieiri shrugs. Kento’s confidence in safely getting home plummets. “If it’s messing with time, it would make sense there’s a time limit. That would explain the lingering cursed energy.”
“But why did it send me here?”
Gojo, sick of being ignored, pipes up. “You’re both idiots.”
Kento sucks in a breath. Patience, he’s young. “It would be nice if you could support that statement, Gojo-kun.”
“Gojo-kun?” The kid has the audacity to frown. “I’m just Gojo to you, Nanami.”
“That’s Nanami-san to you.” Kento replies. “I’m about ten years older than you.”
“Fine. If you want to be that way, Nanami.”
Kento has to keep reminding himself that this is a child and he is not going to argue with one. It is going to prove difficult. “Thank you for your time, Ieiri-kun.”
He starts getting up but he’s stopped by a hand tugging at the hem of his jacket.
“I wasn’t finished.”
Kento isn’t sure how to feel about such a child-like gesture, even if Gojo doesn’t see it that way.
“You said it’s a curse that messes around with time. Every person’s existence is tied to time, so what if it tried to end yours?”
Kento’s body goes cold. “What do you mean?”
“Well.” Gojo takes the tone of someone who explains things to a simpleton. “Humans are always scared of running out of time. Death. Being forgotten after death. That sort of thing..” He holds up a finger. “It would have tried to send you back to before you were born.”
“It could have just killed me.”
“You know curses don’t work like that, Nanamin.”
He flinches at the nickname. “Don’t call me that.”
There’s a flash of a kind face, sweet smile, endless courage. The spirit that currently lacks in Gojo, even if they are closer in age than Kento is now. Kento doesn’t need more reminders of how young Gojo is. He tries to ignore that horrible sense of deja-vu, a longing for a home that may be lost forever, and looks at Gojo straight. Gojo’s annoyance bleeds through in the crease between his brows, the downturn of his mouth, and it proves he and Itadori-kun are nothing alike. They are only young, that’s all.
“Even if it tried to do that, it failed. Why?”
Gojo lets out an aggravated sigh. “Clearly someone else noticed it and interrupted the activation of its cursed technique, seeing as you didn’t.”
Gojo.
Of course. The only person quick enough to interrupt the technique of special grade before it comes to fruition. Yet not quick enough to stop him from being sent here. If Gojo knows there was a curse, does that mean he knows what happened to Kento?
Or would he assume the curse killed him.
Would he assume Kento is lost to time?
It’s discomfiting to be thought of as dead.
“I see.” He says, feeling doubly weird looking at this Gojo now. “So how would I get back?”
“There’s probably a countdown.” Ieiri replies before Gojo can open his mouth. “But it’s anyone’s guess what happens when it runs out.”
Kento isn’t prepared for Gojo’s wide, unnerving grin. “Or you could die too.”
☙
He could just die.
He turns that sentence over in his head in one empty dorm room allotted to him for his stay. He has nowhere else to go and Gojo, fed up with waiting on him, decided he was going to start his babysitting journey later.
Kento is left with not even a phone to contact him with and only the stern reminder that he needed to be here within one hour. As though twenty-eight-year-old Kento is the flight risk, when he has nowhere else to go.
He could die.
Does it bother him?
He went back to being a Jujutsu sorcerer for the sole purpose of helping others. When he met Itadori-kun, that resolve was solidified, tangible proof that he could do good for people. Be the mentor that he missed when he was young. But if he dies by the end of this trip, a lone death no one in the future will know about, would that have made it worth it?
He paces around the room.
He’s done good, hasn’t he? Kento hadn’t expected to reckon with his life so early in his life, a mere two years since he restarted his career as a sorcerer. Surely, at the very least, his contribution to the parade of curses was considerable. Even if Gojo ended up doing the most. He always does.
He’s shook from his musings when he glances at the wall beside the bed, eye caught on a scribble that breaks up the otherwise monotone wall.
He leans in closer and finds it:
Bet you didn’t see this coming!
It isn’t his handwriting. But why would it be? This isn’t his room. Is it?
Isn’t it?
He traces the wall with his fingertips, moves over the scratchy kanji, breathing coming quicker. “Of course.” He murmurs, taken aback anyway at the complete lack of decorum. “Of course they’d put me here.”
It makes sense, doesn’t it? After his departure three months ago, this room would sit empty. Seniors and juniors share a floor so Gojo would never be too far away. It’s simply bizarre to be sitting in a space that made him so unhappy as though Yaga thought he’d be happy to return to it.
Though, is he unhappy?
He moves his hand away from the wall. He is nose-blind to the traces of his own cursed energy and Yu’s, however long it may have been, has long eroded. Yet he left a memory for Kento he had never known about until now.
“Ah.”
Countless hours they had spent together in this room. Yu who was only the other door down, would barge in after missions and too-long hours in class, and pestered Kento about coming with him, the seniors had invited them. When Kento declined, he remained here.
I’m not leaving you by yourself, Kento!
Yu was like that.
Other times, there was Gojo. Yu would have been dragged away by Geto and Kento, not wanting to begrudge him a good time, remained with his books and his silence. In his stead, not always but sometimes, Gojo would slam the door open to demand where Yu would only ask.
Sometimes, Kento would give in. Most of the time he did not.
And when Yu had died and Geto had gone, it was still Gojo all the same.
Kento traces the wall for more messages, because if Yu was able to sneak one past him, then he doesn’t think Gojo would have missed it with his all seeing eyes.
There it is.
Sourpuss.
Considerably worse than Yu’s encouragement, he finds Gojo’s scrawl some twenty centimetres below. Emboldened by his need to leave a mark for Kento to find, one that he never did uncover, not even in the present. Gojo had never said anything about it to him, but why would he? If it had taken Kento this long to find the note there, then perhaps the message was right.
Kento leans back to look again at the messages side by side: two boys, both eager for acknowledgement, and one of them was dead. Kento wasn’t even sure if the other liked him, if he ever had.
“Hey, you ready?”
The knock on his door almost has him fall backwards.
“Are you done already?” His voice sounds odd, unlike him.
Gojo doesn’t come in this time. Instead Kento sees the shadow through the slit beneath the door, unmoving, foreboding. As though Gojo too doesn’t want to step foot in this space again, now that that chapter has closed.
You could die too.
If he is, then he may as well make the most of it.
☙
“I saw your message.” Kento tells him over dinner, watching the steam rise from his bowl of ramen. They’re in a restaurant downtown, a small corner shop tucked away beneath the train tracks of Shibuya. Kento used to come here with Yu back in the day, he’s not sure if he ever asked Gojo.
Because he’s fairly sure the answer was no, he decided to take him out. He did not feel like lingering in the school’s cafeteria, uncomfortable knowing he is right back where he started, wondering if there are more cryptic messages left in a past all too recent now.
“What message?”
Gojo eats more than Kento would have thought: a bowl of ramen, a side of karaage and a large portion of rice. He shovels the rice in his mouth and Kento resists the urge to pick his mouth clean off the grains stuck there.
Kento smiles, faintly amused. “Sourpuss.”
Gojo stares at him. Frown again whilst he picks at the remainder of his rice. “I left that message months ago.”
You didn’t notice? His hunched shoulders say.
Kento feels his smile drop. “When was that?”
“Back when Suguru was still—” Gojo hesitates and instead shoves a piece of chicken into his mouth.
Kento understands. Suguru left in September of 2007, almost a year ago now. That message must be over a year old now.
It’s a long time for a boy like that. It feels like yesterday to Kento.
“Well.” Kento pries apart his chopsticks and snags the egg between them. Always his favourite: the egg. Always the first thing he chooses to eat. “I suppose that’s fortunate for you. I don’t think I would have appreciated it back then.”
“That was the point.”
This conversation is going nowhere. Gojo is cleaning his plate so fast whilst Kento has barely started on his meal, doesn’t want to talk to him if his hunched shoulders are any indication. He used to be so talkative but all his clever comebacks seem to have dried up during their conversation with Ieiri-kun.
So Kento hums, “You’re like that in the future too.”
That seems to catch Gojo’s attention when the chopsticks finally clatter back onto his plate. “We know each other then?”
“Of course we do.” Kento says though he doesn’t say the rest: we’re not close.
You annoy me.
We don’t like each other very much.
“I thought you’d quit.”
“I’ll come back.” Kento says. “I always do.”
Gojo frowns at him again, no smile to be found on that youthful face of his. Kento can scarce believe this is his past. The Gojo he knew and the Gojo he knows now could not be more different than this sullen boy sitting next to him, waiting for the first opportunity to go.
He looks as though he wants to ask him something, then blinks as he thinks better of it, the thought slipping away from his face. Instead, he drawls, feigning disinterest, “What am I like in the future?”
Arrogant. Egotistical. Walking to the beat of his own drum. Annoying.
Joyful. Smiling. All powerful. Intimidating.
“You left me a drawing of a penis.” Kento offers. He keeps his face carefully neutral.
Gojo stares at him, face halfway to incredulous, mouth twitching. Lips wrapped around his teeth before he kisses them. “That’s stupid.”
Kento finally huffs out a laugh. “That’s what I thought too. I guess you haven’t changed much as you grew older.”
Gojo’s face, so conflicting in its own way, half a laugh until he forbids himself from feeling it, turns moody again. “I doubt that.”
The feeling in that sentence makes Kento regret his choice of words. “Gojo-kun that’s not—”
“I told you to stop calling me Gojo-kun.” Gojo shoves his chair back, his chopsticks clattering to his plate. When he looks down at Kento now, the height difference tracks with the future, but more so is the ominous pressure in the pit of his stomach in the face of Gojo’s anger. The opposition of a smile, hemlock in the white of his teeth, that glint when his mouth pulls.
All that cursed energy a focal point in the rigid line of his shoulders.
He may be eighteen, but he is still the strongest.
“Thanks for dinner.” He forces it out of his throat. “I’ll see you back at the Tech.”
As he stalks off, the ominous atmosphere lessens, until Kento is left alone with more than half of his meal and an empty seat beside him.
The uncomfortable feeling that he has done something wrong remains.
He just hasn’t the faintest idea on how to fix it.