Chapter Text
The morning didn’t arrive so much as it invaded, a slow, grey leaching of the dark. Geto hadn’t slept. Sleep was for people who hadn’t had their soul flayed open in the quiet. He’d existed in a shallow, vibrating limbo, hyper aware of every shift of weight on the mattress beside him, every sigh, every rustle of sheet. He’d spent hours staring at the back of Gojo’s head, at the vulnerable dip of his cervical spine, wanting, with a sudden, shocking clarity, to press his thumb into it until something gave.
His phone glowed: 30 minutes until the alarm. A mechanical reprieve. He threw his head back against the pillow, the impact a dull thud in the silent room. Get up. Shower. Leave. Pretend. The thoughts were logic, but they had no weight. They were paper boats against a tidal pull.
As he lay there frowning at the high, shadowed ceiling, the urge returned. It wasn’t a thought. It was a full body command, a neural scream. It bypassed all reason, all self preservation… he needed to see his face. The turned back was a denial, an obscenity. After the confession of tangled limbs and shared, shuddering breath, he didn’t get to fucking hide.
Moving with a slowness that felt predatory, Geto shifted onto his side. His hand rose, hovering over Gojo’s shoulder. He didn’t stroke. He placed his palm flat against the muscle and pushed, firm, insistent.
“Mmrph… ngh…”
The sound was a sleep thickened grunt of protest, a wet, animal noise from the back of Gojo’s throat. It was profoundly human, undignified. It sent a jolt through Geto that was pure electricity.
'I did that. I pulled that sound from him.'
Gojo resisted for a second, a stubborn dead weight, then yielded with a sigh, rolling heavily onto his back. His arm flopped out, palm upturned on the sheet between them.
And there he was.
Geto’s heart didn’t skip a beat. It stopped. A full, dizzying cessation of rhythm, a vacuum in his chest where the organ should have been. For one terrifying, endless second, everything was still.
Then it slammed back to life, a frantic, bruising hammer against his ribs.
The pale dawn light fell across Gojo’s face like a thief, stealing its usual imperviousness. His hair was a chaotic white spray across the pillow. His lips, slightly parted, looked soft, used. A faint crease from the sheet marked his cheek. He was utterly, devastatingly unguarded.
The obsession was a silent, screaming loop in Geto’s skull.
'I could kill him right now. My hand on his throat, right there in the hollow. He’d wake up. His eyes would fly open. He’d look at me. Really look. And I’d have all of him, every scrap of his attention for the last three seconds of his life.'
'Or I could put my mouth on that pulse in his neck. To bite, to taste his warm skin and the copper underneath. To leave a mark so deep his family would see it and know something had claimed him.'
'He’s breathing. I can see his chest move. In, out. So fragile. A ribcage is just kindling, I could break it with my knees.'
The thoughts weren’t metaphors, they were physical impulses that tingled in his hands, his jaw. They were the flip side of a different, equally terrifying urge: to trace the arch of his eyebrow with a fingertip. To see if his eyelashes felt like spun glass. To count his breaths until they matched his own.
This was the rot, it was the unbearable need to act, to make the internal screaming external, to leave a permanent scar on the reality of Gojo Satoru, whether it was a bruise, a break, or a brand. To prove he had been here, in this bed, and he had been real, and he had been his to alter.
He stared, unblinking, memorizing the landscape of this vulnerable, sleeping stranger who was also the axis of his world. The faint flutter of a dream under a closed eyelid. The perfect, stupid slope of his nose. The way his lower lip looked almost bruised from how he’d been biting it in his sleep- or had Geto done that? Had he, in the chaos of the night, done that and not remembered?
He didn’t touch. The not touching was its own kind of violence, it was the tension of a drawn bowstring, the moment before the strike or the release. It was more intimate than any contact, it was total, ravenous focus. He was consuming him with his eyes, devouring his peace, stealing this private, unperformed version of him and locking it in the haunted vault of his mind.
He would carry this image- the defenseless sleep, the grunt of protest, the terrifying beauty of him- onto the train. He would carry it forever. It was a weapon and a wound, and it belonged only to him.
The shriek of the alarm didn’t just break the silence- it tore through the cathedral of Geto’s obsessive focus like a chainsaw. He jolted so hard his spine cracked against the headboard, a full body recoil of pure, exposed guilt. His heart, already a frantic, shameful drum from his thirty minute vigil, now seized before hammering against his ribs like it wanted out.
'Thirty minutes.'
The number echoed, a death knell in his skull.
'Thirty minutes of uninterrupted, predatory staring. Thirty minutes of mentally tracing the path of a hypothetical knife, of wondering how much pressure it would take to leave a bruise that matched the one on his soul, of imagining the exact sound a rib would make… what kind of sick fuck does that?'
The self loathing was instant, corrosive, rising in his throat like bile. He was disgusting. A voyeur to someone else’s peace, feeding his own sickness.
He lunged for his phone, fumbling, his fingers stupid and clumsy. He killed the alarm. The sudden silence was worse. It screamed of what he’d just been doing. He manufactured a loud, groaning yawn, stretching his arms above his head until his shoulders popped, a pathetic pantomime of being rudely awakened. The performance felt as thin as rice paper.
Naturally, Gojo hadn’t moved. He was a dead weight in the sheets, a monument to his own oblivious privilege. The world could end, and he’d sleep through the apocalypse if it inconvenienced him. Geto’s jaw clenched so tight his teeth ached, he reached over, not with a shake, but with a sharp, punishing dig of his fingers into the meat of Gojo’s shoulder.
“Up. Now.”
“Go ‘way…” Gojo slurred, his voice muffled and wet. He twisted, trying to bury himself deeper. “S’a mistake. Cancel it.”
“The trip. The train. Today." Geto bit out, each word a piece of gravel. “Or did you burn all your brain cells last night?”
“Burn you.” Gojo mumbled incoherently, swatting behind himself like at a fly. “Lemme sleep… or I’ll end you.”
“Fine.”
The anger was a welcome replacement for the shame. Geto shoved himself upright, the sheets tangling around his legs. He needed space. Air. To not be in this bed that smelled like them, that held the shape of their silent war. He planted his feet on the floor.
The movement was barely complete when a hand snaked out from the warm chaos of blankets. It wasn’t a grab, it was a capture. Sleep clumsy fingers knotted in the worn fabric of his shirt at the small of his back, yanking hard. The collar pulled taut against his windpipe for a startling second.
“The hell’re you doin’?” Gojo’s voice was a sleep ravaged scrape.
Geto looked back. Gojo had barely managed to lift his head, his face creased and flushed from the pillow. One eye was half open, a sliver of clouded, unfocused blue staring without seeing. He looked ruined, beautiful and stupid and infuriatingly vulnerable.
“Getting the fuck up.” Geto snarled, trying to pry the fingers loose. They were hot and surprisingly strong, clinging like limpets.
“Let go.”
“Too early. S’still dark.” A statement of profound, childish injustice.
“It’s dawn. We’re leaving in forty minutes. Let. Go.”
Gojo’s response was a long, drawn out, guttural groan of pure, unadulterated protest. It was a sound from the depths of his being, raw and unbecoming. He didn’t release his grip, instead, he pulled, a steady, insistent drag, using his own dead weight to try and reel Geto back into the gravitational field of the bed.
“Just… five more minutes. C’mere. Stop movin’. You’re makin’ it cold.”
Geto’s resistance bled out of him in a sudden, shocking rush. The energy required to fight this- the whining, the tactile need, the sheer, absurd vulnerability of the mighty Gojo Satoru brought low by the need for five more minutes of warmth- was more than he possessed. The shame of his staring session had hollowed him, left him a shell.
With a defeated sound that was almost a growl, he stopped fighting. He let himself be pulled backward, collapsing not into a lie down, but into a slumped sitting position against the headboard. Gojo’s fist remained, a hot, possessive anchor in the fabric of his shirt, a wrinkled knot pressed against his spine.
“Five minutes." Geto ground out, staring blankly at the opposite wall. He refused to look down, to acknowledge the head of white hair now dangerously close to his hip, the even puffs of breath he could feel through the thin cotton.
“Not a second more. Then I’m dragging you out by your hair. I mean it.”
A low, sleep- rasped chuckle vibrated against his spine. “Y’always mean it…” Gojo slurred, his voice a thick, warm haze. “Then you don’t do shit.”
He nuzzled closer, his forehead a heavy, insistent weight. Then came the sniff- a long, deep, dragging inhale that pulled the cotton of Geto’s shirt taut against his skin. It was obscenely intimate, a primal check in.
Geto’s entire body locked. A fresh wave of heat- shame, anger, something… else- flooded his neck.
“Mmm. Still smell like my stuff…” Gojo murmured, the words blurred but dripping with a drowsy, proprietary satisfaction. “All over you. Like you marinated in it. The fuck’s wrong with you?”
“I didn’t-” Geto started, the defense automatic and weak.
“You did.” Gojo cut him off, his voice dropping to a sleep hoarse whisper. “Can taste it in the air. My room. My bed… you.”
He said it like listing possessions. His hand, still fisted in Geto’s shirt, gave a weak, tugging squeeze. “S’weird. S’mine.”
The declaration, simple and stark in its sleepy delivery, stole the air from Geto’s lungs. It wasn’t romantic. It was territorial. A dog recognizing its own scent on a toy it had chewed on.
“Get off me." Geto breathed, but he didn’t move. He couldn’t. The weight was an anchor.
“Why? You’re warm.” Gojo rubbed his cheek against Geto’s hipbone, a slow, grinding motion that was both seeking and marking. “You’re all… tense. Like a board. What’s your problem?”
The question was a grumble, devoid of real curiosity. It was just noise, an instinct to fill the silence his closeness had created.
“You’re my problem." Geto muttered, the words escaping before he could cage them.
Gojo sighed, a long, exasperated sound that ghosted hot through the fabric.
"Yeah, yeah…”
He shifted, his free hand flopping out to land heavily on Geto’s thigh, fingers splayed. The touch was casual, absolute.
“Just… shut up for five minutes. Your brain’s always so loud: ‘He’s too close, he’s breathin' on me, he’s gonna know, he’s gonna know-’”
“Shut it.” Geto’s voice was sharp, a lash of panic. He hadn’t realized his thoughts were that transparent.
“See?” Gojo mumbled, a hint of that familiar, grating triumph in his slurry tone. “Loud.”
His thumb began to move, a slow, absent minded stroke back and forth on Geto’s thigh through the sweats. It wasn’t sexual, it was rhythmic, soothing- for himself. A self comforting gesture that used Geto’s body as its instrument, he always did that.
“Jus’ be a person. A warm… quiet person. For five minutes. Is that so hard?”
It was the hardest thing in the world. To be reduced to an object of comfort for the very person who’d turned him into a raw, exposed nerve. To sit here, violated by his own earlier obsession, now being used with such unthinking entitlement.
“I’m not your fucking teddy bear.” Geto hissed.
“Could’ve fooled me…" Gojo shot back, his words slurring together.
"You’re here, aren’t you? You let me pull you back. You’re sittin’ here. So either be the bear or get the hell out… but you won’t.” His grip tightened minutely on Geto’s shirt.
"You never do.”
The devastating, accuracy of it left Geto hollow. Gojo, even half unconscious, held the map to his pathetic contradictions. He knew the exits Geto wouldn’t take.
Silence fell again, thicker now. Gojo’s breathing deepened, his body growing heavier against Geto’s side. The thumb on his thigh stilled. He was drifting again, winning by default simply by opting out of the fight, by trusting- knowing- Geto would stay put.
Geto sat in the early light, a statue of tense surrender. The dynamic was a closed loop: Gojo took, instinctively, carelessly. Geto allowed it, seething, shameful, and somehow, perversely, needing the proof that he could be needed, even as a tool, even in silence.
The five minutes ended not with a sound, but with a shift in the light- a precise, internal clock in Geto’s head that ticked down to zero. The warmth against his side, the weight on his thigh, the even puffs of breath, all of it had become a single, oppressive pressure.
Time was up.
Geto moved. He didn’t sigh, didn’t announce it, didn’t offer a warning. He simply braced his hands on the mattress and pushed himself upright in one stiff, decisive motion.
The consequence was immediate. Gojo’s head, which had been a heavy, trusting weight against his hip, slid sideways with the motion. It dropped onto the mattress with a soft, dull thump, the white hair fanning out across the sheets. The hand that had been resting on Geto’s thigh fell away, fingers curling into emptiness.
A grunt of disoriented protest- “Hey- the fuck?"- slurred out from the pillow, thick with interrupted sleep.
Geto didn’t look back. He didn’t see the confused, sleep creased face, the clouded eyes blinking open. He didn’t acknowledge the loss of contact, the sudden cold patch on his shirt where Gojo’s head had been. He just swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up. The floor was cold under his feet.
Behind him, he heard the rustle of sheets, a muffled curse. “Suguru… what the hell man…”
Geto didn’t turn. He walked straight to his duffel bag, the path a direct line away from the bed. His back was a wall. The intimacy of the last five minutes- the sharing of warmth, the sleepy claims, the terrible compliance- was already being treated as a historical event. Something that happened to someone else. He unzipped the bag with a sound like tearing fabric, his movements sharp, functional, devoid of any lingering softness.
The message was clear, and it was brutal in its simplicity: Time’s up. The warmth is revoked. The permission is withdrawn. He didn’t offer an explanation or endure a complaint. He just removed himself, physically and utterly, leaving Gojo in the tangled, suddenly cold sheets, the echo of his own heartbeat the only thing left where he had been.
The car was a vault of silent, conditioned air. The kind of silence that wasn’t peaceful, but pressurized- sanitized and expensive, like the interior of a luxury hearse. Gojo’s father’s chauffeur drove with a gloved, impersonal precision, the partition between the front and back seats a wall of polished walnut and smoked glass. They were sealed in, a specimen jar containing the two of them.
Geto stared out the window at the sleeping town blurring past. He was calculating, his mind a cold, frantic machine trying to process the raw data of the morning. The variables were all wrong. The thirty minute stare… that was insanity. The compliance of letting Gojo use him as a pillowthat… was weakness. The way his own heart had stopped, then hammered, at the sight of Gojo’s vulnerable sleep-face… that was a catastrophic system failure. He was reverseengineering the disaster, trying to find the point of origin. Was it when he’d sprayed the cologne? Was it when Gojo breathed him in? Was it years ago?
He could feel Gojo beside him, a live wire of restless energy contained in leather seats. He wasn’t looking out the window. He was vibrating, his knee bouncing a silent, frantic rhythm against the buttery upholstery. He’d been scrolling on his phone, the glow painting his face in lurid shifts of blue and white.
A sharp jab in Geto’s ribs.
Geto didn’t startle. He just let the pain bloom, a familiar, grounding punctuation to his thoughts. He slowly turned his head.
Gojo was holding his phone screen two inches from Geto’s face. On it was a clumsily photoshopped picture of one of their classmates, with the head of a weeping balloon animal superimposed on his shoulders.
“Look.” Gojo said, his voice too loud in the sealed quiet. A performance for an audience of one, or maybe for the silent chauffeur behind the partition.
"It’s him. It’s literally him. I’m gonna send it to the group chat. He’ll cry. For real.”
Geto looked at the stupid picture. He looked at Gojo’s thumb, poised over the send button. He looked at the eager, hollow brightness in Gojo’s eyes, which were fixed not on the phone, but on Geto’s reaction. This was the script. Geto was supposed to scoff, maybe mutter ‘idiot’ or ‘don’t,’ and Gojo would cackle and send it anyway, and they would have participated in a shared, cruel moment. A normal moment.
But Geto said nothing. He just stared through the phone, through Gojo’s expectant grin, his mind still orbiting the dark star of the morning’s obsession. His silence stretched a second too long.
The grin on Gojo’s face faltered, curdling at the edges. The eager light in his eyes guttered out, replaced by something confused, then swiftly, defensively annoyed. He lowered the phone. He didn’t send the picture.
“Helloo?” He waved a hand in front of Geto’s face, his voice taking on a mocking, singsong edge.
"You there? Did your brain finally finish bufferin'?"
Geto blinked, refocusing on the present. On Gojo’s face, which was now a mask of impatient irritation. But beneath it, in the too wide set of his eyes, Geto saw it: the lost child look. The one that appeared when the world failed to reflect back the version of himself he was broadcasting. Gojo needed the reaction. He needed the pushback, the engagement, the proof that he could move Geto, even if it was just to annoyance. His whole existence was a series of provocations waiting for a response. And Geto’s silence was the ultimate negation.
“I saw it.” Geto said, his voice toneless.
“Wow. Riveting commentary.” Gojo tossed his phone onto the seat between them, landing with a soft thud.
He slumped back, crossing his arms, his body language a sulky, exaggerated withdrawal. He stared straight ahead at the partition.
“What’s the damage this mornin'? You’ve been, like, a zombie since you got in the car. More than usual.”
'My damage is you…' Geto thought.
'My damage is the fact that I know the exact pattern of your eyelashes. My damage is that I can still feel your ankles against mine under a train table that doesn’t exist yet. My damage is that I wanted to break your ribs this morning just to hear the sound it made, and I also wanted to never let you wake up.'
“Just tired.” Geto said, the lie automatic and thin.
“Bullshit.” Gojo turned his head, his gaze a physical scrape.
"You’re never ‘just’ anything. What is it? Spill.”
The command was brittle. It was the same tone from the dark room: Tell me. Give me the why. But here, in the sterile fishbowl of the car, it was naked need dressed up as irritation.
“There’s nothing to spill." Geto said, looking back out the window. The town was giving way to more industrial outskirts.
"It’s too early for your theatrics.”
“My theatrics? You’re the one doing a whole silent, tragic hero bit. It’s embarrassin'.” Gojo kicked Geto’s shoe. Not a playful tap. A sharp, angry nudge.
“Stop it. It’s… pissin' me off.”
'Good.' a vicious part of Geto’s mind whispered.
'Let it piss you off. Let it matter. Let me be something other than a warm body in your bed.'
“Then look out your own window." Geto replied, his voice still calm, still dead.
It was the worst thing he could do. Refusal to engage was the one weapon Gojo had no defense against.
He saw Gojo stiffen in his peripheral vision. Saw his hands, which had been loosely clasped, curl into fists on his thighs. The lost child look was gone, burned away by a hotter, more familiar fire- frustration verging on rage. This was their dialectic: Gojo would poke and prod, a careless god tinkering with his favorite toy. Geto would absorb it, cold and silent, until the god grew furious that the toy wouldn’t break or laugh or react correctly. And in that fury, in that hot, messy reaction, something almost real would flicker.
Gojo didn’t speak again. He grabbed his phone once more, jamming his earbuds in, turning the volume up so loud Geto could hear the tinny hiss of distortion. He stared out his window with militant focus, his jaw clenched.
The silence returned, but it was different now. It was charged, alive with the current of Gojo’s thwarted will. Geto could feel the heat of his anger radiating from the other side of the seat. He could smell the sharp, clean scent of him, mixed with the faint, sugary residue of his breakfast.
And in the quiet of the speeding car, Geto’s calculations finally settled on a terrible, final sum. This was it. Not friendship, not hatred. A savage, symbiotic loop of provocation and resistance, of need so twisted it could only express itself as a form of mutual torture. Gojo needed to be seen, to be felt, and Geto was the only one whose refusal to properly see him registered as a kind of perverse attention. And Geto… Geto needed the proof that he could affect the unaffectable, that he could be the splinter in the god’s finger, the only creature capable of drawing forth something that wasn’t a smirk or a slur. Even if what he drew forth was rage. Even if it was pain.
The thought that started slowly setting in was a quiet poison, seeping into the cracks of his anger.
'Maybe I’m the one who’s too much.'
The car’s engine was a low purr, the world outside a muted watercolor of grey dawn. But inside Geto’s head, it was a screaming collage of disconnected moments, a frantic search for a genesis that kept dissolving into smoke. He tried to pin it down, to find the exact day, the specific hour when the air between them had curdled into this… this thing. But it was like trying to grab oil.
Was it that night at his own house, years ago? They’d been watching some dumb movie, shoulders touching on the couch. A side character had been a little too flamboyant, and Gojo had snorted, rolling his eyes.
"Ugh, that’s so gross. Can’t stand that shit.”
He’d said it with such casual, effortless disdain, like swatting a fly. Geto had frozen, a coldness spreading from the point of contact where their arms met, all the way to his fingertips. He’d said nothing. He’d just picked up his drink and taken a slow, deliberate sip, pretending the words hadn’t just laid a minefield in the space between them. Was that the seed? The moment he learned that a part of him- the part that noticed the exact blue of Gojo’s eyes in the TV glow, the part that catalogued his every laugh- was something Gojo could dismiss as gross?
Or was it later, when he’d accidentally overheard the tail end of a phone call? Gojo in his pristine kitchen, his back turned, the phone clenched in his hand. His father’s voice, even through the receiver, was a distorted crackle of fury.
"...careless, Satoru. It looks careless. With that boy. People will talk. We do not associate with…”
The rest was lost, but the meaning was etched in the rigid line of Gojo’s spine, in the white knuckled grip. That boy. Geto had become a problem to be managed, a potential smudge on the gleaming Gojo name. Was that when the coldness in his own chest had first truly hardened into a weapon?
Maybe it was the drunken confession. His own fault. Too much cheap liquor, the dizzying, dangerous freedom of Gojo’s undivided attention in a dark corner of a party. Secrets had spilled out of him like blood from a wound- not the big one, never the big one about his… feelings, but others. Fears. Insecurities. The deep, rotting belief that he was fundamentally wrong. Gojo had listened, uncharacteristically quiet, his gaze so intense it felt like a physical weight. And in the morning, it was never mentioned. But something had shifted. Gojo had seen the fucked up machinery inside him, and instead of walking away, he’d just… started poking at the gears with a sharper stick. Was that the trigger?
Or was it simpler, more brutal? Was it just the physicality of it all? The way Gojo’s touches had evolved- or had they always been this way? The arm slung over his shoulders that lingered a beat too long, the playful shoves that were a little too hard, the way he’d ruffle Geto’s hair with a possessiveness that felt like a claim. Was it affection, or was it a test? A way to see how much Geto would tolerate, to map the boundaries of his control?
Or had it started the first time Gojo hurt him on purpose? Not in a fight, but in one of those quiet, cruel moments, a remark designed to land on a bruise he shouldn’t have known about, a withheld kindness, a turned back at the exact moment Geto needed someone to look. Was the whole thing just an elaborate, years long experiment in how to break something without technically snapping it in two?
'Fuck.'
He couldn’t tell. The timeline was a ruin. Every possible origin point bled into the next, a circular argument with no beginning and no end. He was lost in the labyrinth of it, the reverie so total he didn’t feel the car glide to a stop. He didn’t see the bustling station, the streams of students.
A sharp, impatient sigh cut through the fog in his head. Then a finger, jabbing his thigh.
“Yo, we're here.” Gojo’s voice was flat, stripped of its earlier performative annoyance. It was just tired.
He was already halfway out of the car, holding the door open, his silhouette backlit by the harsh station lights. His sunglasses were back on, hiding his eyes, but the line of his mouth was thin, pressed into something that wasn’t quite anger. It was the look of someone who’d been talking to a wall.
Geto blinked, the present moment rushing back in with the slam of a car door from a nearby vehicle. The chauffeur stood impassively by the trunk, holding Gojo’s expensive bag. The air smelled of diesel and rain.
He had been so lost in dissecting the disease, he’d forgotten he was still sitting. He moved mechanically, grabbing his own duffel, sliding out of the leather seat. His body felt stiff, unreal.
Gojo didn’t wait for him. He was already walking toward the station entrance, a proud, solitary figure cutting through the crowd. But after a few steps, he paused. He didn’t turn around. He just stood there, waiting, his head tilted slightly as if listening for footsteps.
It was the smallest of gestures. A concession. A habit. Where you go, I go. Even when they were drowning in silence, even when the history between them was a tangled knot of thorns, the gravitational pull remained.
Geto shouldered his bag, the weight of it, and of everything else, settling back onto his bones. He took a step forward, then another, falling into step behind the boy who was his oldest friend, his greatest wound, and the only map he had for a world that made no sense at all. The origin point didn’t matter, they were already here, in the aftermath, and the path ahead was the only one they knew how to walk- together, and utterly, devastatingly alone.
The station concourse was a jarring splash of noise and light after the sealed tomb of the car. They walked side by side, while Geto’s mind was a scratched record, stuck on a loop of
'When did it start… when did it start… when did I start?'
He saw them before Gojo did. A small island of comparative calm. Shoko, leaning against a closed ticket booth with the practiced slouch of someone who’d rather be anywhere else, a cigarette sending up a defiant gray ribbon in the no smoking zone. Beside her, Utahime hopped from foot to foot, scanning the crowd with wide, anxious eyes.
Geto felt a muscle in his jaw unclench. This was external. This was real.
As they neared, Shoko’s dark, unimpressed eyes tracked them, a scientist observing a familiar, volatile compound. Geto nodded at the cigarette.
"You’re gonna scorch your taste buds. Not ideal for a future cutter of people.”
Shoko inhaled slowly, the ember flaring. She exhaled a stream of smoke that blurred her expression for a second.
"My hands are fine. My patience for this circus is what’s wearing thin.” The faintest, driest smirk. Her version of a laugh.
Utahime whirled, spotting them. “Oh, you’re here! I was having a heart attack! Gojo, tell me you have your form. Please.”
“Chill, Utahime." Gojo said, and his voice slid effortlessly into its usual lazy, teasing cadence.
He reached out and flicked the ‘I ♡ Kyoto’ pin on her bag. “You stress so much you’re gonna age like milk. And yeah, I got it. My dad’s people handled it. It’s all very official and boring.”
“Stop that!” she swatted at his hand, but the tension in her shoulders eased. This was normal. This was the script.
Shoko’s gaze, however, didn’t leave Geto and Gojo. It was a probing, clinical thing. She stubbed her cigarette out on the sole of her shoe.
“You two come together?” she asked, her tone flat. The question hung in the air, seemingly for both, but her eyes were on Geto, the quieter variable.
Geto opened his mouth, the simple affirmation ready.
But Gojo answered. He didn’t turn from Utahime, but his voice lifted, clear and casual, as if commenting on the weather.
“Yeah. Suguru stayed over last night. My place was closer.”
The sentence was deceptively simple. Suguru stayed over, it was a statement of fact, but in the context of their… everything, it was a loaded grenade rolled into the center of the group. It forced the private into the public. It was a claim, but one wrapped in a bland, almost protective coating. My place was closer. An excuse, a reason that sounded like consideration but felt like a brand.
Geto felt the air leave his lungs. The casualness of it was the fucked up part. The way Gojo could take the cataclysm of their shared night and distill it into a sleepover logistics report. It wasn’t rude. It was erasure. And it was a thousand times worse.
Shoko’s eyebrows lifted a millimeter. Her sharp eyes darted from Gojo’s carefully nonchalant profile to Geto’s frozen face. She saw it. The disconnect. The way Gojo’s words were a cage, and Geto was the animal inside, silent and seething.
“Hm.” Shoko said, a neutral sound packed with meaning.
Gojo finally glanced over, his sunglasses hiding his eyes. He offered Geto a small, lopsided smile that didn’t reach the rest of his face.
"He’s a shitty guest, though. Uses all the fancy shampoo. Leaves the cap off the toothpaste. A monster.”
The teasing was a layer of normalcy sprayed over the truth. It was a dare: play along... keep the secret... perform.
Geto’s mind screamed. It screamed about the smell of the cologne, about the weight of a head on his hip, about the terrifying, silent communion of everything they'd never say but show. But his voice, when it came, was flat, a perfect mirror to Gojo’s facade.
"Your toothpaste's overpriced mint garbage. It’s like brushing with chemical ice.”
Gojo’s smile tightened, then widened into something more familiar- a bratty, triumphant grin. He turned back to Utahime.
"See? No gratitude. I open my home, my hearth, my premium dental care, and this is the thanks I get.”
Utahime rolled her eyes, buying the performance.
"You’re both impossible… can we just get on the train now?”
Shoko didn’t move for a second. Her gaze was still on them, on the invisible field of tension that warped the space between their bodies. She saw the way Gojo had answered for him. She saw the way Geto had accepted the terms of the lie, his compliance a form of violence in itself. She saw the dynamic for what it was, a shared, private psychosis where care and cruelty were the same language.
“Yeah.” Shoko finally said, slinging her bag over her shoulder, her voice a low murmur that only Geto, standing closest, might fully catch.
“Let’s go. The longer you two stand here, the more the air starts to taste like static.”
She turned toward the platform. Utahime followed, chattering about seating arrangements. Gojo fell into step just behind them, throwing one last, unreadable look over his shoulder- a glance that was a question, a challenge, and an… apology all at once.
Geto stood for a heartbeat longer, alone in the middle of the crowd. The origin point still eluded him. But Shoko was right, the air was charged, heavy with a static that was all their own making- a quiet, building scream waiting for the moment to break into sound. He took a breath that felt like swallowing glass, and followed.
The train carriage was a capsule of recycled air and low grade humanity, a six hour sentence. Geto had braced for open warfare: for the relentless, tactile siege of Gojo’s presence, a familiar if exhausting barrage of pokes, shoves, shared headphones forced upon him, and legs thrown over his like they were communal property. He had armored himself in a shell of cold readiness, prepared to endure, to deflect, to silently seethe.
But the assault never came. And its absence was a thousand times more… disorienting.
They were arranged in a perfect, horrible square of four: Geto and Gojo on one bench, Geto on the aisle, Gojo claimed by the window. Across from them, Shoko had immediately claimed the other window, while Utahime sat primly on the aisle, already organizing her trip materials. A table, scarred with generations of initials and gum, sat between them like a neutral zone.
For the first hour, the landscape unraveled outside Gojo’s window- a monotonous tapestry of blurred green and industrial grey. Gojo didn’t look at it. He didn’t look at his phone. He just stared, his gaze fixed on some point in the middle distance, his body unnervingly still. The usual restless energy that vibrated off him, that made the very air feel charged, was gone. He was a sculpture of himself, beautiful and eerily inert.
The silence from his side of the bench was a roaring in Geto’s ears. He tried to focus on Utahime, who was narrating the entire history of the prefecture they were passing through from a guidebook.
“…and so the castle was actually moved, stone by stone, in the 17th century, which is just incredible when you think about the logistics-”
“Sounds like a massive waste of effort." Shoko remarked without looking up from a medical textbook she’d brought, a cigarette (unlit, for now) perched behind her ear.
"Just build a new one. Or better yet, don’t. Who needs castles?”
“It’s about heritage, Shoko!”
Geto made a low sound of acknowledgment, his eyes cutting sideways again. Gojo hadn’t moved. His hands lay flat on his thighs. He hadn’t even put his headphones in. This was wrong. This was a fundamental breach in the fabric of their reality.
The controversy in Geto’s chest was a sick, churning thing. Part of him- a part that felt small and pathetic- wanted to sag with relief.
'This is it. He’s finally stopped. He’s giving you space. This is what you pretended to want.'
But the larger, more terrifying part was coiled tight with a paranoid, humming anxiety.
'Why?'
Was this the punishment for the car, for the morning’s silent treatment? Was Gojo’s ultimate weapon not provocation, but this… this vacuum? This calculated withdrawal of the very attention that defined their orbit? Or was it something else, something worse? Was he hurt? Was the weight of their unsaid things finally crushing him into quiet? The idea was absurd, and yet it sent a cold trickle of fear down Geto’s spine.
He couldn’t stop looking. Gojo’s profile was a stark, pale cut out against the dirty window. The arrogant lift of his chin was subdued. The shadows under his eyes looked like smudges of charcoal. His mouth, usually a weapon of smirks and sharp retorts, was just… a line. Neutral. Empty.
“You’re quiet, Gojo.” Utahime noted, finally glancing up from her book.
“Don’t feel sick, do you?”
Gojo’s head turned, slow, as if moving through water. He offered a smile. It was a faint, ghostly thing, utterly devoid of its usual wattage.
"Nah. Just zoning out. Miles to go before we sleep, and all that.”
His voice was softer than usual, lacking its performative edge. It was just a voice. It was horrifying.
“Since when do you quote poetry?” Shoko asked, her gaze lifting from her book to spear him with clinical interest.
Gojo shrugged, a minute, loose movement. “Since it’s six hours of nothin'. Even my vast reservoirs of entertainment have limits.”
He looked back out the window. The conversation, for him, was clearly over.
The exchange was so brief, so normal, and it left Geto feeling violently unsettled. Where was the obnoxious commentary? The dramatic sigh? The kick under the table?
As if summoned by the thought, the train hit a rough patch of track, jolting. Gojo’s knee knocked solidly against Geto’s. It was a firm, undeniable contact, the kind that in their previous life would have been an opening gambit- Gojo would have left it there, pressing, or made a joke about it. Now, he simply, and with a quiet deliberation that was somehow more intimate than any leer, shifted his leg away, re establishing the exact centimeter of space between them. It wasn’t a flinch. It was a policy.
Geto’s skin burned where the touch had been and was now gone. The intentionality of the distance was a violation worse than any invasion.
The hours stretched, a torment of inaction. Shoko lit her cigarette at one point, cracking the window and earning a hissed complaint from Utahime about the rules. Gojo didn’t even comment. He just watched the smoke get snatched by the wind, his expression unreadable.
Geto tried to read. The words blurred. He was a satellite locked onto Gojo’s silent planet, monitoring every breath, every minute shift. The absence of touch was a physical ache. The absence of noise was a scream.
“Hey.” Geto heard himself say, the word abrupt, cutting across Utahime’s monologue about regional pottery.
He was looking at Gojo. He hadn’t planned to.
Gojo turned his head again. Those blue eyes, usually so bright with mockery or challenge, were flat. Lakes under a winter sky.
"Yeah?”
'Are you okay? What’s wrong? Why are you like this? Did I break you?' The questions piled up behind his teeth, sharp and desperate. He swallowed them. They tasted like weakness.
“…Want one?” Geto asked instead, gesturing loosely to the bag of senbei crackers Shoko had opened on the table.
Gojo looked at the crackers. He looked back at Geto. Another faint, hollow smile.
"Nah. Not hungry.” He turned back to the window.
Two words. Not hungry. Gojo was always hungry. He was a bottomless pit for junk food and attention. Geto felt something cold solidify in his gut. This wasn’t pique. This was something else.
Finally, with a long, weary groan of metal, the world began to slow. The blur resolved into the grimy back alleys of a city, then the platform sliding into view.
“Thank god." Utahime breathed, gathering her things with frantic relief. “I think I’ve lost circulation.”
“Told you your sitting posture was clinically concerning." Shoko said, stubbing out her final cigarette.
Geto stood, his body stiff from six hours of held in tension, of watching a ghost. He pulled down his and Gojo’s bags from the overhead rack, the action automatic. He held out Gojo’s expensive leather duffel.
Gojo took it, their fingers brushing. His skin was cool. “Thanks." he said, quietly.
Not ‘about time, slave’ or ‘finally earning your keep.’ Just… thanks.
As they stepped onto the solid ground, Geto glanced back. Gojo was adjusting the strap of his bag, his face tilted away, looking down the length of the train, his expression one of profound, detached fatigue. The relief Geto had expected to feel was nowhere to be found. In its place was a yawning, terrifying confusion. The battlefield had been emptied, leaving him alone in the sudden quiet, staring at the retreating back of the only enemy who had ever mattered, wondering if the war was over, or if this quiet was simply the prelude to a more complete annihilation.
The museum was a cathedral of preserved silence, every whisper from his classmates a sacrilege that echoed off the vaulted ceilings and glass cases. The air was cool, dry, carrying the faint, sacred smells of dust, old paper, and lemon scented polish- a fragrance meant to sanitize history.
Geto stood at the rear of the clustered group, a deliberate exile. The guide’s voice, explaining the painstaking fermentation of indigo vats in the Heian period, was a distant, scholarly hum. A sliver of his mind, the part not currently being flayed alive, grasped at the information: the vibrant, impossible blue on the reproduction textiles, the years of labor for a single bolt of cloth. It was fascinating. It was real. And it was completely, utterly drowned out by the static scream building inside his skull.
He was trapped in a formation of his own pathetic design. Up ahead, a sea of backs and nodding heads. Here at the back, his own little archipelago of dysfunction: Shoko, a monument to clinical boredom, her eyes glazed over as she traced the edge of a forbidden cigarette pack in her pocket. Utahime, her pen a frantic insect skittering across her notebook, capturing every fact as if it were a lifeline. And Gojo…
Gojo, who had been a silent, walking void all day, was now softly illuminated. He leaned a shoulder against a display case housing centuries old lacquerware- black trays inlaid with fragile gold landscapes that spoke of a world long dead. The cold glow of his phone screen painted his cheekbones, the line of his nose, in pallid blue. His thumb moved with a rapid, fluid certainty. And on his lips- not the wide, challenging smirk he wielded like a weapon, but a smaller, private, genuine thing. A slight, unconscious curl. A softness at the corners of his eyes. It was a smile of easy, effortless connection. A smile for the glow. For her.
Geto’s vision shattered, then reformed with a hyper clarity that was its own kind of madness. He could see the individual pores on Gojo’s neck, the minute chip in the screen protector, the way a single strand of white hair fell across his forehead. His heart executed a series of violent, arrhythmic convulsions against his ribs, a frantic bird beating itself to death in a cage of bone.
A wave of heat, immediate and humiliating, surged from his gut to his hairline, followed instantly by a cold, clammy sweat that beaded on his upper lip, the small of his back, the insides of his wrists. A fine, electrical tremor began deep in his core, vibrating up through his diaphragm, making his breath catch. His hands, shoved in his pockets, clenched into fists so tight the joints ached. He was a live wire, dangerously earthed in the hushed, hallowed space.
The pressure built, tectonic, volcanic. He couldn’t contain it.
He didn’t think. He moved. Two sharp, silent steps that breached the careful no man’s land Gojo had maintained all day. He didn’t touch him. He just leaned into the space beside his ear, close enough that his words would be a secret, his voice a low, venomous scrape torn from a raw throat.
“Finding the historical artifacts less compelling than your digital correspondence?”
Gojo’s thumb froze mid swipe. The smile was meticulously erased, pixel by pixel, leaving his face a smooth, blank page. He didn’t look up.
“You’re in my light.” he murmured, his voice flat.
“I doubt you need it to read." Geto shot back, the tremor in his voice a traitor.
He’d seen a flicker of the text. A heart. A ‘wish you were here.’ A pet name. It felt like a surgical incision, neat and deep.
Slowly, with a deliberation that was itself an insult, Gojo pressed the side button. The screen went black, a tiny death. Then, even slower, he turned his head. His eyes, when they met Geto’s, were no longer distant or vacant. They were frighteningly present, alive with a dark, focused intensity that saw everything and gave nothing back.
“You got somethin’ to say, Suguru? Or you just wanna stand there and breathe on me?” The slang was there, but stripped of its usual lazy affection. It was all hard edges.
“You’ve been a ghost.” Geto hissed, the words tight, compressed by the fury in his chest.
“For hours. And now you’re… lit up. For that.” A minute jerk of his chin toward the dead phone.
A muscle feathered in Gojo’s jaw. He looked at Geto not with anger, but with a weary, profound scrutiny, as if examining a specimen whose behavior had finally become intolerably erratic.
"It’s a phone. Not a declaration of war. You need a trigger warning?”
“Don’t." Geto snarled, the single word cracking like ice.
"Don’t pretend this is normal. You’ve been… absent. All day. Now I see the audience was just elsewhere.”
The jealousy was a live coal in his throat, burning, choking. He would not name it, ever. It was just observation. It was a critique of Gojo’s manners.
Gojo pushed off the lacquerware case, closing the final inch between them. They were almost chest to chest now, in the shadow of a thousand year old artifact. Geto could smell the clean, impersonal scent of his laundry detergent, could see the furious, confused blaze igniting in the depths of his blue irises.
“My audience?” Gojo repeated, his voice dropping to a gravelly whisper meant only for the space between their mouths.
"You wanna talk about an audience? You’ve been givin’ me a sold out show of nothin’ since you peeled yourself out of my bed. The whole ‘wounded monument’ act. You made it crystal clear my presence was an annoying noise. So I turned the volume down. To zero.”
He leaned in, his breath a hot, damp brand against Geto’s cheek.
"But now it’s a problem? Now you miss the noise? You can’t have it both ways, Suguru. You can’t tell me to shut up and then get pissed when I actually do.”
The accusation was a mirror, and the reflection was monstrous. You asked for this. You crafted this silence. This is your creation. It was true, and it was a lie, and it was the poisoned root of everything.
“I didn’t tell you to do anything, Satoru."
Geto lied, the words thin, transparent. “I just wanted to know why you’ve been… like this.”
“Like what? Quiet? Boring?” Gojo’s eyes searched his face with a frantic, hungry anger.
"Maybe the version of me that doesn’t revolve around pissin' you off is boring. Maybe that’s the real me. And maybe you can’t stand it because if I’m not constantly poking at you, then what are you? What’s your purpose?”
It was a direct, brutal strike to the foundation. Geto flinched, a full body recoil he couldn’t suppress. The obsessive monitoring, the panic at the quiet- it wasn’t just about missing the irritation. It was the terror of ontological erasure. If Gojo didn’t need to provoke him, then what was Geto? A bystander. A ghost himself.
“You’re not poking now." Geto breathed out, his anger deflating, leaving behind something raw, bloody, and horrifically exposed.
Gojo stared at him for a long, suspended moment. The furious blaze in his eyes banked, softened into something more complex, more devastated. He looked utterly wrecked.
“No,” he agreed, his voice so quiet it was almost lost in the vast, quiet room. “I’m not.”
He took a half step back, breaking the dangerous intimacy. He looked down at the dark phone in his hand, turning it over once, as if reading its blank surface. The ghost of that texting smirk tried to resurrect itself on his lips but failed, collapsing into a line of pure exhaustion.
“You wanna know what I told her?” he asked, his voice returned, now laced with a bitter, metallic irony.
"I said this place was deader than the stuff in the cases. That I’d rather be anywhere else.” He lifted his gaze, pinning Geto in place.
“Anywhere else. With anyone else.”
The words unspooled inside Geto, a slow motion detonation of meaning. It was an active, verbalized rejection of their shared reality, of the very air they were currently breathing together. Gojo was not just distracted; he was mentally evacuating, and he was telling Geto, in precise, casual detail, the coordinates of the place he’d rather be- a place where Geto did not exist.
The hot wire of feeling- not jealousy, it could not be jealousy- seared through Geto’s nervous system, so intense his vision whited out at the edges. He saw, in a flash of synaptic fire, his hand closing around Gojo’s throat. He saw the phone shattering on the marble floor, a thousand glittering pieces. He saw himself screaming until the ancient lacquerware cracked from the vibration.
He stood, paralyzed. A statue of seismic, silent fury.
Gojo watched the storm pass behind Geto’s eyes. He didn’t look satisfied. He looked hollowed out. The connection, the terrible, vital connection, had been made- not through touch, but through this mutual, precise annihilation.
Without another word, Gojo turned. He didn’t shove past Utahime, who was watching them with wide, confused eyes; he simply flowed around her, a pale specter moving into the next dim gallery of swords and armor. He didn’t look back.
Geto remained. The cool, sanctified air of the museum felt like a physical weight on his skin. The beautiful, dead things in their cases seemed to mock him with their preserved permanence. His heart continued its frantic, irregular drumming, but the heat was gone, replaced by a deep, permeating cold that settled in his marrow.
The obsession had mutated. It was no longer a hunger for attention, for a reaction. It was the horrifying understanding that the reaction had been given, and it was this: a wished for absence. A preferred elsewhere. The terror was no longer that Gojo might leave. It was the certainty that, in every way that mattered, he already had.