Work Text:
The text comes from an unknown number. It contains an address, and a time roughly three hours from now. The instant he reads it, the sucker in his mouth cracks.
That’s him.
There’s no other information, but also no question. His phone isn’t really used for anything but mission communication and, yes, frankly, porn, as well as, okay, the occasional hookup to dispel his boredom. He doesn’t even get much of anything from Shoko or Utahime that isn’t some complaint or random task. His phone for the majority of its life has been a Suguru communication device and so he knows that it’s him, even if all those old chat logs are long gone now, extracted and analyzed and discarded when they yielded only gigabytes upon gigabytes of selfies and photos of baked goods, and nothing to indicate Getou Suguru’s location.
Which Gojo now has. In fact, the love hotel at this particular address has a pretty good dessert menu. His fingers hover over the keyboard.
What are you doing? he could ask. What do you want?
Instead of any of that, Gojo types back, 00:07. It’s a time some minutes later than proposed, just to poke fun, just to see what might happen, which turns out to be nothing. The text goes, and the checkmark that signals its delivery goes unanswered.
Maybe that means yes? He goes anyway, just in case, and reserves a room under Getou, where he flops onto the bed and unwraps another sucker that rattles against his teeth, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. The more he thinks about it, the more unlikely this seems. How could it really be him, after so long, here?
Not a big deal if it isn’t him. He can just kill whoever dared to waste his time. But if it is…
If it is…
This is an alright place for discreet conversation, even if the tapping of his heel doesn’t make a very satisfying noise on the worn carpet, and when the room’s door finally opens at six minutes after midnight, Gojo jumps up in bed, heart pounding. His mouth opens.
“Suguru —”
The lights go out.
The darkness startles more than impairs — Gojo has all those eyes, and also this part of Shibuya never really gets fully dark at night — the bars of light intersecting the room illuminate black hair and black clothes and the flash of an opening mouth and that is all the warning Gojo gets before the sucker is pried out from between his teeth and he is kissed, and kissed again, with a nibble and the squish of a hot tongue, and it is him, it smells just like him, the heady sweetness of his cigarette brand, his old room and bed, his abandoned jacket Gojo keeps in the very back of his own closet, and all Gojo’s questions and comments flee him immediately, leaving just a single thought.
He came back.
Well, one single thought, and maybe something else. Suguru breathes jaggedly into Gojo’s mouth, and his hand drifts, low, and Gojo decides to stop thinking.
:::
Years of silence and now this: breathless greeting and desperate wordless alignment. They find their way with touches and hissed inhales as music blares outside their window — Suguru rips off the white bandages over Gojo’s eyes, and Gojo yanks Suguru’s hair free of its tie. It’s easy, despite all the time that’s passed, or maybe because of it — years to smooth the broken-glass edges of their abrupt parting, years to suffuse their dragging grips with a thousand unsent texts. Suguru is a stranger with hair past his shoulders and new muscles and the knowledge of what it does to Gojo’s entire body when a finger drags along the scar on Gojo’s throat that’s so faded no one else even notices it. The criss-crossed hatchings Gojo’s nails leave on Suguru’s back are stark pink in the morning light, and for a moment he indulges the mental image of Suguru waking, drawing his shirt over his shoulder blades with a wince and an annoyed grimace.
Here’s another mental image: staying in bed. Pressing his face into the curve of Suguru’s bicep, the one that shivered when Suguru held him down. Listening to Suguru’s breathing until he gets bored and decides to rub the sleep out of Suguru’s eyes, forcibly. Staying, in general, a little longer here, a domain put together not by jujutsu, but something far more esoteric: four gray walls and sexual tension that is, to be honest, already fading, and leaving behind something hungrier.
To shatter this would take only a few awkward morning niceties. Gojo gathers his clothes and wraps up his blindfold while the air fills with the cawing of ravens picking over last night’s partying. He surveys the room for any last possessions and, with a burst of inspiration, takes Suguru’s hair tie, which he slips over his own wrist.
For the next week, he attends class and acts as if nothing has happened. He picks at the errant black hairs still knotted in the hair tie. Goes through twice as many suckers as usual as he browses through his silent phone. He finds what he’s looking for, but still waits, until the weekend, to send it: an address, and a time roughly three hours from now. For a long minute, there’s no response.
And then, finally, just four numbers: 00:07.
:::
So much the same, and so much different. The main thing is that, though they once talked all the time — chatting, muttering, needling, laughing, thinking aloud — now they say nothing, not even when Suguru arrives to find Gojo polishing off a mini-parfait. Their greeting is simply a mashed kiss, eyes shut, sticky with strawberry syrup that smears all over Gojo’s hotel yukata as Suguru unknots the belt and sets it aside. Suguru’s hair is tied up again, as usual; Gojo sees his eyes rest on the stolen hair tie, and then simply look away, without comment.
That’s so him, to just swallow up Gojo’s little injustices without so much as a narrowed eye. Gojo always thought Suguru was some kind of thick-skinned prude — he’d been unfazed by Gojo’s every previous mostly-coy invitation, back when they were both at Tech — a time rife with Gojo messing around to savor the sound of Suguru’s increasingly rare grumbling and yelling. Suguru’s face remained serene and nirvanic when Gojo refused to return to his own bed, when Gojo rolled around loudly and tugged bedsheets out from the mattress, when Gojo jammed himself into the space between Suguru’s chest and whatever book Suguru was reading at the time. The only thing Gojo ever managed to get was Suguru brushing cigarette ash off Gojo’s brows and then turning the page without even sparing a glance. Suguru was too innocent, too good for that.
And yet.
The conversation with the unnamed number in his phone is getting longer and longer. There’s no context, no emojis, no half-hearted remark on the season and the weather: just one address after another.
One in Shinjuku — a meeting weeks after the previous one, both of them thrumming with pent-up lust, so much so that Suguru in a single motion shoves Gojo belly-down and mounts and Gojo almost cries “Hurry up” and instead, blood rushing, manages to jam his mouth shut around Suguru’s forearm. It leaves an immediate circular purpling that inspires him to spend the rest of the night leaving kiss marks all along Suguru’s trembling throat.
One in Yokohama — an hour away by train, the late car empty and pelted by angry rain, followed by a hot bath already drawn and dappled with colored lights that ripple between magenta and seafoam and cerulean. The water surges up over the tub’s lip in waves, splashes across the floor; and after, Gojo is netted in dark hair that twines and coils around his neck, his ears, his water-wrinkled fingers. While Suguru dries Gojo off, Gojo spots a blaze of hot pink in the bathroom mirror that some squinting reveals is a small band-aid, with a Pikachu on it. (A female Pikachu, with the heart-shaped tail.) He smothers the question in his throat, just in time, but doesn’t manage to suppress the urge to rip it off, soliciting a scolding that he doesn’t get.
One in Ikebukuro — where Gojo orders a honey toast to the room and kicks Suguru until he puts on a yukata and answers the knock at the door. There’s an orchid on top and neither know whether it’s edible or not, and Suguru’s mouth stays firmly shut when Gojo tries to force it in. After that, the orchid remains on the plate, spoon-bruised and soggy with melted ice cream and bread crumbs, until Suguru pinches it in thumb and forefinger. He mops up the last of the cream and fruit syrup and an shorn mint leaf, and he holds it up. When Gojo opens his mouth, Suguru presses the flower into the dip of Gojo’s stuck-out tongue, and Gojo swallows, without chewing.
It’s crisp, like a thinly-sliced radish. It tastes only like the things it’s smeared with. Gojo licks Suguru’s fingertips, and Suguru snorts, and pushes him back with a fingernail prodded onto the center of Gojo’s forehead.
That is the longest it takes, to make himself leave first. He tarries over his coat zippers, reties the laces on his shoes, closes his eyes and unburies fully the memory of Suguru’s silhouette shrinking, lost right before his eyes to the crowds of Tokyo. Back and alone in his apartment, Gojo finds himself wracked and clenching his stomach over the bowl of his apartment’s toilet, disgorging a colorful acidic slurry within which he counts one, two, three petals, damp but still perfectly formed. Before, it would be the kind of thing Gojo would take a photo of and send a text about, just to get a rise out of him, maybe something like, “Did you seriously just send me a picture of your own vomit?”
“What do you think?” Gojo would reply. “Prettier than yours, huh? Maybe I should take up curse-eating.”
His fingers hover over the keyboard.
Then he punches in an address, this time in Osaka, three hours away. There’s a curse there, newly assigned to him. He considers, briefly, and then adds in the date and time that corresponds roughly with how long it will take before he stops dragging his feet and exorcises whatever it is that’s out there killing things. He hits send.
Come, he wills. All the way there. For me.
Later that week, after he’s washed off the blood, there’s a knock on the door. He smiles, and for another night completely forgets that he ever had any doubt.
:::
Roppongi. Akiba. Ginza. Shibuya again. Asakusa. Ikebukuro again. Yokohama again. They are starting to have favorites, and time is passing, and sometimes, nowadays, well, more often than not, really, he lingers longer than he should. Wakes up to arrange Suguru’s arm back around him before setting another alarm an hour out. Texts another address almost as soon as he kicks off his shoes in the entryway of his cold apartment.
It’s starting to get cold, cold enough to venture a ryokan in Hakone for Gojo’s birthday, where they soak in a private spring as the snow falls and don’t really even do anything afterward, Suguru just lifts up the blanket on one of the futons and they just lie there while Suguru kisses his eyelids and draws lazy circles on every vertebra. Snow is still falling the next morning. Gojo has a feeling that Suguru is awake, despite his stillness, despite the artless fanning of his hair across the tatami. He resists, only slightly, the urge to shake him until neither of them can pretend.
I’m leaving now. Don’t you care?
It’s starting to get cold, cold enough that the train stations are starting to fill up with Christmas ads, the kind that feature idyllic dates wandering past brightly-lit storefronts, as well as the “If you’re alone on Christmas, don’t worry, treat yourself to a whole cake!” kind, and it’s the first time Gojo finds himself frowning at an otherwise totally delectable-looking dessert.
I want more.
That’s what might end up coming out of his mouth, if he were able to open it like usual, if it weren’t wired shut with kisses and orchids and smoke and the threat of what waits outside their temporary rooms.
I want more.
More than the handful of hairties hidden in his dresser. More than the love hotel receipts, folded up and eaten with a gulp of milk tea from a vending machine on the way back to his empty apartment. More than returning to class as usual, rehearsing answers to questions no one asks.
One night, Gojo goes a little far. He straddles Suguru’s hips, holds his face in both hands, and makes their eyes meet.
Tell me, he wills.
What are you doing?
What do you want?
And then, with gritting teeth: Aren’t I a sorcerer too? What about me?
Even with Gojo’s thumbs digging into his cheeks, Suguru’s expression is serene, nirvanic. Half a dozen eyes and still Gojo was wrong, about the prude thing. And everything else. And he’s scratched and kicked and left hickeys and demanded unreasonable hours and stolen hairties and still Getou Suguru only smiles, the same way he did a very long time ago, rather than snapping, See? This is why I left you.
Gojo’s grip tightens. Once upon a time, they’d held their heads together, and spoke low, so no one could hear their plans to offer the Star Plasma Vessel a choice. Slog onward to her destined duty, or languish in heavenly mediocrity — whatever it was, they would protect her.
It hadn’t worked then, but Gojo was stronger now — the — strongest. So…
So if Suguru just —
If he just —
Suguru’s mouth opens.
“Satoru.”
Suguru’s voice is barely anything, and still Gojo jumps, as if electrocuted. A 100% hit. Suguru’s hands curl over Gojo’s, which Gojo realizes now is shaking, slightly. Not from fear, or sorrow, or even any kind of frenetic lust. Suguru turns Gojo’s hands over, so their palms meet, calmly. As if he knows, how suddenly Gojo wanted — to be the one penetrating, for once — to wrap his hand around Suguru’s heart and wrest it out, to keep for himself.
Suguru’s hands are so warm. Encompassing. For a moment Gojo thinks, So that’s how you do it — that’s how easy it was, for him — to herd masses into the lines of his palm, between his teeth, to swallow them whole. A couple syllables, spoken by a voice he hasn’t heard in years, and all his questions and comments flee him immediately, leaving just a single thought.
Gojo deflates, and then swells. He reaches for the lamp on the bedside table.
The lights go out.