Chapter Text
Gojo and Nanami sharing a heat isn’t really something that can stay a secret, even though Nanami wants it to. These things have a way of spreading around.
So, he isn’t entirely surprised when the other Jujutsu High students look at him in the days following his heat with a mixture of emotions plain on their faces: interest, envy, and disbelief are the primary ones Nanami notices.
He ignores everyone, including his own cohort.
Gojo, of course, basks in the attention whenever he deigns to show up again, preening at all the looks he gets and even hamming it up a bit, waiting for Nanami outside his classes, sitting with him in the dining hall, walking him to and from the training fields.
“Don’t you have important things to be doing?” Nanami grumbles, after the second time he leaves class to see Gojo leaning against the opposite wall, waiting for him.
Nanami is trying. But he can’t fully change who he is at heart.
“Are you implying you aren’t important?” Gojo shoots back, grinning.
Gojo can’t really change who he is at heart either.
It’s lucky that their dispositions work so well to balance each other out.
When it’s almost time for Nanami’s next heat, several months later, he tells Gojo he’s going to ask Shoko for the inhibitor. He doesn’t want to miss three days of school, and he doesn’t want his heat to turn into an excuse to spend time with Gojo. He wants to be able to do that even without his heat.
Gojo just shrugs when Nanami tells him. He wraps an arm around Nanami’s waist and leans in, nosing at his scent gland. They’re out on the training fields, in plain view of anyone who looks in their direction. Nanami tenses a bit, but Gojo just smiles, refusing to let him go.
“That’s fine,” he murmurs into Nanami’s neck. “We don’t need your heat to fuck.”
Nanami can feel himself flush. He swallows. “We don’t?”
Gojo looks at him. “Nope,” he drawls. He pulls up one side of the dark blindfold he’s wearing today to gaze at Nanami with a crystalline eye. His gaze flickers between Nanami’s eyes and his lips. “Do we?”
Nanami feels a little faint. “I guess not.”
Which is how he finds himself, not even an hour later, propped in Gojo’s lap in Gojo’s own room, hips rolling as he rides him.
“Just like that, baby,” Gojo breathes, hands curled around Nanami’s waist, fingers pressing into skin. Nanami moans shamelessly. “Come on. Come on.”
Nanami can’t help but laugh a little. “I’m not sure what else you want me to do,” he gasps, hands gripping Gojo’s shoulders.
“Kiss me,” Gojo demands.
Nanami smiles, and does.
Nothing much manages to stay secret at Jujutsu High. So, it isn’t long before the looks Nanami gets from other students transform into rumors that he and Gojo are, somehow, if everyone’s eyes and ears are to be believed, a couple.
Nanami doesn’t even bother responding to those rumors, because it’s no one’s business what he and Gojo are.
And anyway, Nanami isn’t quite sure himself.
He just knows they’re something.
When he’s on campus, Gojo seeks Nanami out. Sometimes to fuck. Sometimes just to be with him, to spend time in his company. Sometimes he watches Nanami read, or interrupts Nanami while he’s reading, or demands to be read aloud to.
Sometimes Gojo helps him train.
Sometimes Nanami cooks for him, with the limited resources he has at school.
Nanami uses inhibitors for his next several heats. When his fourth heat rolls around, he’s near the end of his third year, Gojo isn’t even a student at all anymore, and he and Gojo have been… well, whatever they’ve been, for the past two years.
“You gonna block this heat too?” Gojo asks him, and Nanami shouldn’t even be surprised anymore that Gojo seems to know exactly when his heat is approaching.
It is the first time Gojo has asked, though, which must mean something.
“I don’t know,” Nanami answers, though he had been planning to. He raises an eyebrow. “Why? Is there a reason I shouldn’t?”
He’s thankful, as always, for Gojo’s tendency to get straight to the point when he wants to.
“I’m going to have a rut soon,” he says. “At the same time as your heat, in fact.”
Nanami blinks. That’s… that’s…
Gojo, wearing dark glasses today, lowers them on his nose so that he can stare at Nanami unhindered.
“I usually block my ruts,” Gojo admits, which doesn’t surprise Nanami, as Gojo has never once mentioned or experienced a rut in the years he’s known him.
“But I could not block it this time. Let it happen. And we could spend the time together.”
Nanami stares at him. His mouth opens, but no sound immediately comes out. His heat and Gojo’s rut, coinciding?
“That sounds…” he begins.
“Fun?” supplies Gojo.
“Messy,” finishes Nanami.
It’s only because he’s watching Gojo carefully that he sees a flash of disappointment in his eyes, there and gone so quickly that at any other time Nanami might have said he imagined it. Gojo shoves his glasses back up his nose, nods quickly.
“Yeah,” he says, tone so careless it sounds like its being filtered through clouds. “It probably would be pretty messy.”
Nanami holds up a hand. “I didn’t say I don’t want to.”
Suddenly Gojo is right up in his space, glasses entirely gone, their faces centimeters apart. Nanami doesn’t think he’ll ever get fully used to Gojo’s eyes. He hopes he doesn’t. He always wants to feel his stomach swooping when Gojo looks at him.
Nanami decides to be brave.
“I want a few things,” he starts, “if we do this.”
Gojo just stares at him, says nothing.
Nanami holds up a finger. “I want a kitchen, stocked with fresh food.”
Gojo nods, like it’s that simple.
Another finger, two of them up like a peace sign, an offering, a secret message. “I want privacy. And more space than here in the dorms.”
Gojo nods again. “My estate,” he says. “More space. Private. A kitchen.”
Nanami has so many things to say about that, about this sudden invitation to the Gojo estate, but he stays focused.
“I’m taking the emergency birth control,” he says next, and is relieved when Gojo nods.
“Well, duh, Nanamin. I’m not ready to be a father yet. And you haven’t even graduated.”
Nanami’s breath catches for a moment. Gojo looks so guileless he isn’t entirely sure if the alpha is aware that everything he just said implies a distinct and solid future for the two of them.
Which sort of brings Nanami to his final point.
“I want you on my side, when the higher-ups inevitably decide they’ve had enough of you fooling around with a common-born omega.”
Gojo’s expression hardens, as if he himself didn’t call Nanami common-born years ago.
“They wouldn’t dare,” Gojo starts, but Nanami cuts him off.
“They already do, and you know it.” Nanami takes a deep breath. Now or never. “I’m not a toy, Satoru. I don’t want to be tossed aside when someone else decides I’m not worth much anymore. Or when your family pressures you into a mating with an omega from one of the important clans.”
Nanami doesn’t think he could stand that. He certainly couldn’t watch it happen. It would break some part of him, to see Gojo mated to someone else.
“That isn’t going to happen,” Gojo says fiercely. He pulls Nanami all the way into his arms, holds him tightly, says into Nanami’s ear, “You are mine. They can take you away from me when they can pry you out of my cold, dead hands. And since I can’t be killed, and will kill anyone who even tries, anyone who touches you, that simply. Won’t. Happen.”
His last word is a snarl, a dangerous alpha sound, and Nanami shivers. Gojo brings a hand to his nape, stroking, and the motion is so gentle compared to his words that Nanami feels vaguely disoriented.
“Do you understand?” asks Gojo lowly.
Nanami nods. Gojo’s words, you are mine, float in his head. He can feel his mating gland swell, just the tiniest bit. “Yes.”
He does. He understands. This is probably as close as Gojo can get right now to telling Nanami that he loves him, that he wants him, wants a life with him. Nanami feels the weight and the promise of it.
“Okay, then,” he says quietly, bringing one of his own hands up to Gojo’s hair, tugging softly.
It isn’t so bad, he thinks, having the impenetrable Gojo Satoru for his own.
Gojo pulls away just enough to look at him. “Okay?”
Nanami nods. “Okay. Let’s share our cycles.”
Gojo crashes their lips together, laughing. “You won’t regret it, Kento,” he says between kisses.
This isn’t something Nanami needs to be told.
He already knows.