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Kento is not a stranger to nightmares by far.
Strangely, he finds a comfort in them.
In his dreams, he can be honest with himself. His subconscious refuses to show him a shred of mercy, never lying to him, never pulling any punches. Time make its attempts to dull the horrors of life down for him into manageable, bite-sized chunks, but in his dreams, his nightmares, every horror and every agony lay itself fresh in front of him, stinging and burning like a brand new wound.
That night, he dreams about a schoolyard battlefield:
He rests against the curse’s palms. Outside of this jagged cage of limb and twisting fingers are a mound of bodies from people he couldn’t save, every trapped and dying scream weighing on his back like claws raking down, flaying the skin from the bone. Inside with him is a demon with a cheshire grin and bright, glinting eyes like crystals, mismatched and glowing with mirth and malice.
When Mahito touches him, there’s a dirty flash of a feeling, too quick for the mind to comprehend. And then, he’s in pieces, reduced to his own cluster of disintegrating flesh, and every grimy piece of tissue stings with the sensation of it, crawling with the waning phenomenon of bleeding, dripping life as its dredged. His soul splits and shatters, melting apart into a deep, consuming black, a sea that he drowns in, its surface far above and clear. He’s dragged deeper and deeper, but with what remains of his winking vision, he stares upwards, towards what could be the sun, desperate for what must be his last glimpse of heaven.
And Yuuji, like an angel above, suddenly descends down on him like a seraphim, his eyes glittering and his mouth wide open.
Itadori had changed after his companion’s death. There are moments, now, that are filled with silence instead of the hyperactive ramblings of a week ago. There are moments, now, where he stares off, focusing on something in the air, like he could somehow pluck a spirit from the very oxygen around him. Somehow, he’s not as young anymore. Something precious has been robbed.
It’s a feeling he hates to recognize. It’s hard to forget the first time he had to watch someone die.
Kento is not a man who knows how to comfort someone, not really. Not in a way that matters. He’s never bothered to learn. It’s something he regrets now. He can craft pretty words to summate his feelings, provide a careful balm to the fresh lacerations that litter his heart, but he fails to find something he can feasibly do that can ease that initial anguish, make it easier to bear, easier to swallow down.
His empathy wreaks hellfire on his conscience. By now, he’s learned to whit it down, force away the bleeding heart inside him that aches and weeps for every lost soul and suffering darling he passes by. There’s just something about Itadori in particular that makes him want to shear away those walls he’s been forced to put up against the world.
He finds himself hoping to hold the boy a lot, these days. He feels his presence in the room stronger than anybody’s. They’re just sitting together, but something grips and chokes at him as the moment stretches on, and that same something changes the taste of the air around him and makes his heart beat that much faster in his chest.
“Itadori-kun.”
Itadori startles slightly, sucking a breath into his lungs before he slowly lifts his eyes to meet his gaze. “Yeah?”
Kento falters. He’d spoken before he’d actually figured out the words he wants to say.
“If there’s anything I could do for you...” he begins.
“No, it’s okay,” Itadori assures. “Just having you here is enough.”
Is it really?
Kento marvels at that. He can’t imagine himself as a comforting presence. Certainly he hasn’t done much to make himself one. Not yet. He may not have the words just yet, but if Itadori had asked it for him, he would have allowed himself closer, ceased from keeping a professional distance. He would have opened his arms out for him and allowed him to nestle in and release himself.
A tickle of disappointment creeps into his gut, as the silence stretches on and eventually, inevitably, falls apart. He doesn’t know why, but even as Itadori brushes the moment away and returns to his smiles, joking around and bouncing excitedly around his office, Kento feels like a failure. There’s more he wants to do, but his hands, his mouth, his body, it’s all too clumsy to manage to put that feeling, that impulse, into something succinct.
Maybe he does just want an excuse to hold him.
Another dream, more syrupy than the last.
At first, an abstract symphony plays. He both recognizes the sounds, and fails to understand what echoes around him, but they are beautiful, each hazy staccato. The soft clicks of teeth, little gulp as someone swallows, a few stifled grunts that he can recognize as his own from far, far away. From a distance, he listens, allowing each noise to wash over him, coaxing him away, further, and further, and further.
A sleepy sort of curiosity is finally what beckons him to lift his gaze, and when he does, the first thing he’s gifted with is Yuuji’s smile. It’s painted with crimson, and pleasure glows from him, soft and so radiant it’s blinding. Kento may have tried to call out his name, but his breath is caught in his lungs, reverence paralyzing him to the spot.
Yuuji leans in as if to kiss him. His head lowers, and his mouth nestles against his chest as if in worship. It’s only then when Kento notices the blood he’s soaked with.
Yuuji bites down and a groan oozes from him without his say. He draws his head back and a sliver of flesh stretches as it follows him, reluctant to part from his body before it inevitably tears. A charmed giggle falls from the boy as he chews and hums and moans from the taste.
The blood still housed in his body sings.
“Yuuji,” he whispers. His name tastes like the gore rising in his throat.
Another smile, and Yuuji leans in to press their mouths together. He waits until his lips part to welcome him in, and he bites down on his tongue, moaning as thick scarlet starts to gush free.
Kento wakes with a start. His heart is racing, his eyes wide and unseeing. He’s far too aware of his body, every piece and part that makes it up, tingling frantically with a sensual warmth that is far, far too familiar for his liking.
He doesn’t look down at himself, afraid of what he’ll find. He already knows, without even needing to look.
It isn’t panic that hits him through this realization. He’s lived and slept through too many horrors for his heart to dare What strikes him is something far worse, primal and deep, forcing his ugly heart to wrench around in his chest, pumping frosty blood through his veins.
He doesn’t know what to call it, because it’s worse than desire. Plain desire would be easier. This, this is dangerous. Foreign, and shameful.
Kento keeps a bottle of whiskey beside his bed for times like these. With shaky hands, he reaches out for it, steeling himself against the shame he’ll inevitably feel for the rest of his days.
It’s a drunken mistake. Or, rather, he wants to use his drunkenness as a convenient excuse, one that justifies his lapse of judgement and morale. His hands were moving before he’d even reached for the whiskey he keeps by his bed.
With every ring, he regrets it more. His dreams and their strange, ghostly effect on him wane with every shrill pale of the phone waiting to connect he hears. What are you doing? It seems to chastise. You shouldn’t be doing this. You know better than to be doing this.
He’s about to hang up when Itadori conveniently, unfortunately, picks up.
“Hello...?”
He sounds tired, confused, justifiably so. Fondness bursts into his chest like fresh grapes popping apart, and for a moment, he can’t breathe enough to reply.
“Hello?”
“Yes, hello,” he replies stupidly. “It’s Nanami Kento.”
Itadori chuckles a little. “Yeah. Hi, Nanamin.” The sound of him shifting in bed follows, the soft fluttering of fabric moving gently against cotton and bared skin. “When you gave me your number, I never thought you’d call me unless it was, like, for work. Is this a work thing?”
“No,” he replies, battling against his shame again. “It isn’t.”
“Oh.”
Itadori settles with that for a moment. A few long seconds pass by, wrought with anxiety on Nanami’s end, though Itadori seems content with the silence, the only sound on the line coming from the last little shift against the bed he makes before he finally seems to get comfortable.
“Did you need something...?” he finally asks.
“I wanted to check on you,” he says, another convenient excuse that he pulls right out of the air.
“Oh.” Another restless little shift against the bed, his contentment shattered. “Why? Did I do something to make you worry about me?”
Vaguely, he remembers a promise Gojou coerced him to make at a bar very far from here. He’d been genuinely impressed at the self-awareness it had taken; Gojou knew he didn’t have the sense to keep a child from being isolated alone. Itadori didn’t need to show signs of stress, Nanami knew the repercussions of his faked death couldn’t be easy. He knew the basement he resided in at the moment felt cavernous and hungry, a void that threatened to swallow him up every other moment.
“Not particularly.”
“Really?” he murmurs. “Okay.”
Gojou had told him to protect his heart. But Nanami’s the one needing protection from his nightmares at night, Nanami’s the one reaching out with a wound in his chest and tightness in his throat and something he doesn’t want to name but is increasingly, inevitably, fearing more and more with every day.
“Okay...” Itadori says again, before letting the silence creep in.
It lasts, for a long time.
In the quiet, he can almost fall asleep again. He can almost drift off to the soft sound of Yuuji’s breaths, the peace that exudes from him, even at this distance. This is what he’d hear every night if they slept besides each other, he dares to think. And there would be a wonderful warmth that accompanies it, Yuuji’s back to his chest, his hands gently settled along his body. His heart would slowly patter along, and all would be calm.
Kento doesn’t realize his eyes are closed as he imagines it. He hardly realizes the fantasy has washed over him. The quiet stretches on like a spell. Minutes pass, measured by that soft inhale and exhale.
Eventually, Itadori interrupts.
“Nanamin,” an awkward laugh falls from him. “Did you need something?”
“No. That was it.” The next breath he draws in comes with a sedated sense of relief. The rawness of his nightmare has dissipated. He tries not to think about how or why. “Thank you.”
“No problem,” Itadori chirps, cheerful and patient. “I mean, I didn’t actually do anything, but...”
“No,” Kento repeats again. “You’ve done far more than you know. Thank you.”
He laughs softly. “You’re kinda weird, Nanamin.”
And he is. Far, far more than he ever admits.
A sadder dream. Yuuji weeping. His own body limp. Cold meat sits between his teeth. He chokes as he chews, collapsing before he could even properly swallow down his first mouthful. He sobs. Eats. There’s no need for a grave by the time he’s done.
Another dream, and this is one he cherishes as it forms. He and Yuuji sit together. It’s a ridiculous, elaborate setting, a long table placed before them, adorned with silver discs that are each topped with wet, glittering piles of bloody crimson. Nanami looks down, a vague attempt to study the meal in front of him. It’s all winding red on his plate, indecipherable swirls of gore that almost starts to steam as he stares at it.
He lifts a fork and he brings it to Yuuji’s mouth, and the boy accepts it quietly, smiling all the while. Something glows deep inside of him with every work of his jaw as he dutifully chews, veneration burbling up, filling the hollow in his own gut he’d never realized he’d hosted. Yuuji swallows and an ecstasy follows after the sight, soaring through him, cutting deep. The sweetness of a deep, visceral understanding hits him. All this red, this gore, it’s all his, taken from his own body, and Yuuji is accepting him. He’s immortalizing him with every mouthful, pulling him inside of himself and allowing him to sink into his every cell.
He shudders once with naked delight. Yuuji beams at the unrestrained sight, all too happy to please him, already opening his mouth for more.
Again, Kento lifts the fork. Yuuji leans in, licks the blood from the tongs, and he eats with a soft moan of satisfaction, immediately searching for his next bite.
It doesn’t take long for him to finish his plate, and then he’s turning his amber eyes up towards him pleadingly, eager and impatient for more.
Kento smiles.
Once again, he lifts his hand, and he reaches towards Yuuji. He presses his thumb to his mouth and slips it past his lips, lets the pad of it rest against the flat of his tongue.
He meets his eyes. Yuuji’s lashes flutter shut as he suckles around the skin like a newborn. Sweat and the natural salt of the flesh is gently coaxed away, savoring every taste of him until there isn’t a single bit left. Then, his teeth start to dig in.
Tissue rips. Sinew is quickly sliced through. His teeth pierce between the bones, separating knuckle from flesh. His nerves sing and ring in a vibrant, excruciating chorus.
He pulls back as he swallows, and waits, smiling patiently with pupils dilated until he reaches out to feed him another.
It’s not a close call. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The curse he’s spent a disappointing amount of time hunting down this morning bursts in front of him. It emits a short, sharp scream that has a harmony rippling over his chest, his blood, something like satisfaction washing over his body.
The blast scatters viscera in a sharp radius around him, pieces of bone and bloodied flesh flying past. He turns his face away, but it doesn’t keep a wayward shard of a monstrous talon from nicking across his face. The claw cuts a small line across his face, a shallow wound that gently oozes a thick rivulet of red slowly down his skin.
Panting from the fight, Kento stills once he feels it. He doesn’t move until the single drop of blood is pooling over the slight curve of his lip, and without thinking he tilts his head back and lets his mouth part open, allowing the blood to fall onto his waiting tongue.
He shivers. His mind wanders. He imagines a tongue dragging along the smears of crimson. He imagines pressing his bloodied lips to his throat, his mouth. A fantasy unravels, and Yuuji settles over him like a heron finding its perch within the cool waves of the ocean, his face nestling into place against his shoulder like its his home. His mouth finds that gentle trail of blood and kisses it away.
Without even realizing, he swallows the blood in his mouth, tongue immediately swiping out for another wanton taste. He bites down on it hard, punishingly, the second he realizes what he’s doing.
God.
When did the gore dripping down his lips become a comfort?
The disgust that rises up after that jagged fragment of indulgence is enough to dash every fantasy from his thoughts. He’s so ashamed of himself. Now he’s daydreaming about it - not of death, but of the romance that frames the phenomenon of it. He doesn’t know what to do.
“Your body is fine,” Shoko says quietly as she gingerly pulls her hand away from him. Her touch lingers, a patch of warmth clinging to his starving skin. Nanami watches warily as she tugs a new pair of rubbery gloves over her otherwise dainty fingers. “If there’s a problem with ‘your soul’, that’s not exactly something I can check. Even reversed techniques have a limit.”
“I see.”
He tries not to sound disappointed. It’s to be expected, after all. Everything Mahito does and says seems to be completely unprecedented, unheard of, unexplored. And, as it stands, he may just be one of the only people in the world who seems to have been able to survive an encounter with him. Not much to compare himself to there.
Trying to keep from frowning, he starts to button his shirt up again, sighing softly to himself. “I apologize for wasting your time, then.”
“No waste at all. It’s good to know for future reference. It’s not like there’s information on the subject otherwise,” she says plainly, echoing his thoughts. “If there really are side effects to this nonsense, it does us all good to know them.”
“Still,” Kento quietly insists.
Shoko shrugs. She glances over him for a moment before she takes a seat at her desk. “What are your symptoms like?”
He looks away. “There are some things about myself that have... changed,” he finally, reluctantly says. “I don’t feel unstable but it is... unlike me.”
She flashes him a withering look and he grimaces. He knows he’s making this difficult, but now that he’s here, it’s hard to summarize it all into symptoms.
“I’ve been... disorganized,” he attempts, regurgitating the jargon he’s read about. “I’ve been having these thoughts that are... I guess, intrusive. Not obsessive, but... strange and fantastical. I... I don’t know if... this fixation?” he struggles to place the words. “I don’t know if ... But it started with these dreams. And the more I have, the more I’ve...”
He trails off with a grimace. Regret curdles in his gut. Trying to name what this all is only serves to make it worse.
She sighs at him.
“You know, whatever it is... It might not be psychological.” Shoko simply shrugs. “It might just be you.”
He swallows.
“I know.”
The two are blending. The Itadori in front of him and the Yuuji of his dreams. He looks at him and he can see the soft, pink flesh of his lips, plump and pouting, and he could almost see the stain of crimson that streaked across it. He’s so close to that satisfaction, he can feel it rustling in his gut, that hunger, that need, that untapped adoration begging to overflow and drown them both out.
Maybe he really is going insane.
It’s just the way these dreams, these fantasies, they all hold a clarity that the real world seems to lack. There’s really no other way to explain it. Everything he experiences in the most lurid of his thoughts is far too preferable to reality. It turns those moments into the worst of cravings, until every thought has that lingering along the edges of his mind.
It’s shameful, how he deals with it. His drinking worsens and he starts to avoid him, cutting off the midnight conversations that had accidentally grown more frequent as the weeks went by, refusing mission requests and accepting longer and longer shifts, just to keep from accidentally passing him by. Shameful. A grown man avoiding a child, just because he’s too afraid to face his own delusions.
But he can’t avoid it any longer.
Still caught within the daze of his day, he doesn’t quite recall why Itadori is in the room with him. The lurid fog of sleep deprivation holds tight to his thoughts, making everything blur around him. All he registers is that he’s alone with him, has likely been alone with him for a while now, and it’s quiet and comfortable and peaceful in a way that only those dreams are. The same eerie contentment fills him, anticipating what’s to come.
It’s almost amusing. Kento chuckles to himself, shaking his head.
“Are you doing this on purpose?” he wonders aloud. He doesn’t know what script he’s following, but the words make a dreamy sort of sense to him.
Itadori blinks at him. “What?”
Kento stares at him. He lifts a hand, quietly beckoning him closer. “Come here.”
Itadori meets his eyes, mouth hanging ajar for a moment, giving him a sweet glimpse of his tongue, his teeth, the warm wet of his mouth. Then he creeps forward a few steps, not stopping until he’s right in front of him, golden eyes turned up to stare at him.
If it was Itadori, he would never. He’d known better. He’d know never to touch a student, a child, in this way.
But it’s not.
No. In this moment, this is his Yuuji.
His Yuuji.
The phrase melts through him and sweetens the air around him like a cloud of powdered sugar, his integrity shuddering to pieces inside of him like chocolate dissolving coyly into milk. All he can focus on is that hollow inside of him and the sweet ways Yuuji would fill it; all the ways he could fill Yuuji, be absorbed into the hollow he’s sure exists inside of him, too.
He leans closer, closer still, and there’s a shock that seems to jolt through Yuuji, his eyes widening as he nearly twitches back in a confused retreat. It’s a motion that should alert him, but he’s too far gone, too lost in the familiar prospect of getting to touch him. His palm comes to rest against his cheek, and Yuuji makes a small, weak sound under his breath, like he’s seconds from collapsing down in front of him.
“Yuuji,” he whispers. He usually doesn’t get a chance to speak this much in his dreams - another thing that should have alerted him to the truth. But it feels so good to say.
And it feels so good to touch him. To just let his hand reach out without a single thought behind it, without feeling a thousand restraints trying to tug him back into his proper place.
His thumb rests against his lips, slipping past after a moment, Yuuji’s hot breath puffing against the skin as a little shudder passes through him.
“Bite down,” he whispers softly.
He’s obviously hesitant. But his golden eyes are full and focused on him, brimming with overflowing trust.
He follows his instruction perfectly. Kento feels it in the way his jaw tightens, clamping down, his teeth slowly digging into the pad of his thumb. He can feel the imprint as it gently presses into the flesh. He feels his imagination carving in, painting the image of dull canines piercing in, sawing through, blood welling, streaming down a smooth chin as tissue ripped away like paper. He imagines watching his throat work as he gulps him down, taking him into his beautiful body...
He’s lightheaded. Yuuji stares up at him and he feels he can’t breathe. He pulls away, slowly, and the boy only watches him, tracking the movement with his wide, sharp eyes, his pupils large, his expression far too open. Innocent confusion, sweet and simple naivety.
“Nanamin...” he whispers back to him.
For a moment, he doesn’t know how to respond. Too late, he accepts what he’s done. Not realizes, accepts, with a cold, harsh, steely resignation.
“... I shouldn’t be doing this, Itadori-kun,” Nanami exhales with a shudder. It’s not too late, he thinks. It’s a momentary slip he’ll never forgive himself for, but he can still stop before it’s too late.
“You can,” Yuuji offers, his voice honeyed with need.
And it’s cruel, he knows that. It’s cruel to stop now and force Yuuji to have to piece together what had happened. But it’d be crueler still to give him more to fall apart about. He’ll wonder what could have been, but he won’t agonize as painfully for days, weeks, maybe - hopefully - years to come.
“I shouldn’t,” Nanami says again, and he pulls away, every cell in his body aching already from the distance. “I’m sorry.”
Again, Mahito’s hand lands on him.
He wonders what he’d do, what he’ll say, what he himself should have done.
Kento can taste blood and bile on his tongue, sweet with the thrumming sense of peace he’s met with at the end. He doesn’t regret what he’s done, what he’d failed to do, what he’d let fear keep him from. Everything from his wildest dreams can only ever happen once he’s dead.