Chapter Text
When Gojo almost falls asleep at his desk for the third time, Getou kicks him in the ankle.
“Ow!,” Gojo says.
“Don’t sleep at work.”
“Oh,” he says as he squints at Getou from his slouch. “Ugh.”
His back will suffer for it in another year. Getou hasn’t asked him his age but it was obvious that he was in his mid twenties.
Then, Gojo pushes off his desk and rolls over to Getou’s side of the office. It’s happened enough that Gojo has perfected a fluidity in his motions so he makes it to the corner of Getou’s desk and continues to lean into his personal space until Getou can smell the cologne he uses and underneath it something softer - berries? Almonds?
“Suguru,” he says.
“Don’t call me that,” Getou says.
Gojo ignores him to rest his face on his hand and peer at Getou through his long lashes. His other hand taps a tune on his thigh and Getou suspects that it’s Sugar, Sugar by the Archies because Gojo had developed a strange and immediate attachment to the song that was confusing. He did not react much to the other songs. “How come you don’t tire?”
Getou scoffs. He is tired, but perhaps not in the same way Gojo expects and it certainly wouldn’t be appropriate to dump the kind of baggage that Getou has strapped to his back and carries around like a guillotine waiting to drop in the middle of their workday. “I’ve been working here for five years now.”
“Isn’t that worse?”
“You get used to it,” Getou says and peeks at Gojo who’s staring vaguely in the direction of their feet, spaced out.
“Have you never had a job before?”
“Sure, I have,” Gojo says but he doesn’t sound very confident about it. “Just not…this kind.”
“You mean in sales?”
“Mhmm,” Gojo says, cryptically. Getou stares at him for a moment and then gets up. “Come.”
He takes them to the break room - which is thankfully empty. The vending machine is stocked with energy drinks and bars of chocolate. Getou buys snickers and a can of coke. “Here.”
He hands them to Gojo who looks so surprised Getou is offended. Before he can leave, Gojo catches his elbow and grins at him. “I’ll just fall asleep here if you leave me.”
Why was this Getou’s job? Nobody else in the office gave two flying fucks about productivity. Not even their boss, Toji, who hadn’t turned his blinds up since last week and is avoiding calls from upper management by making Yuuji decline them or make up implausible reasons for why Toji couldn’t speak to them and Getou is pretty sure it’s giving the poor boy indigestion. But something compels Getou, a sense of service, maybe charity, to join him. Gojo tries to kick his feet up and Getou pushes them off and they sit in silence for a long minute before Gojo says, “You know, I thought you were a complete snob – in the beginning.”
“I am a snob,” Getou says and he isn’t lying. He’s too good for this dead - end accounting job; he'd gotten a Masters in Mathematical and Computational Finance from Stanford. He’d thought he’d go onto start his PhD. But he’d needed the money and before he knew it, five years had passed at a job that was stable but under-stimulating.
“So am I.” Gojo tips his chin back in the chair. “We could do something snobby, like start a fire. The materials for it are in the office.”
Getou hums. “Jogo’s a chain smoker.”
“The microwave sparks when we use it for longer than ten minutes.”
“Nobara put orange peels in Megumi’s desk drawer and his pants and his jackets. We could set Megumi on fire, specifically.”
Getou isn’t sure what prompts him to share this information but Gojo raises his head and both his eyebrows. “Orange peels. Why?”
Getou shrugs. “I think they were trying to convince Megumi that he was emitting the smell. Something about pheromones and…omegas? Not the function.”
Gojo stares at him blankly. “You mean like moth pheromones.”
“I think they mean wolves. A wolf that smells?”
“Maybe,” Gojo says.
“Hm,” Getou says.
They lapse back into silence.
Then, Gojo says, “So Panda’s a man in a suit, right?”
Getou smirks. “Panda is Panda.”
“So they say.”
“You should believe them,” Getou says. Eventually, they go back to their desks but Getou can’t remember the last time being in the break room was fun. It felt like a break. A break in the break room. Strange.
The next day Getou wakes up early because one of his neighbours started drilling an artefact into the wall behind Getou’s bed at 6 am. The renovation didn’t stop even after Nanako and Mimiko screeched at his neighbour in retaliation. Getou gave up and made himself a sandwich for lunch, and on impulse, put in an extra for Gojo. He looked at his box in dismay. A weekend ago, he said that they weren’t friends. But Gojo bought him green juices (they had settled on a specific spinach and berry mixture that Gojo called the Smoothie which Getou had rated 9.5) and it would be rude not to do anything in return. He took the sandwiches with him. When he gets there, he’s surprised to find Gojo’s fancy car already in the parking lot (spray painted an electric blue the same shade as his eyes).
Inside, Gojo is slumped over his desk, the pen in his hand loosely held over the edge of the desk.
“Gojo?”
Gojo’s head snaps up and when he spots Getou, a smile overtakes his face. Not a grin or a smirk but a whole smile. Getou almost stumbles.
“Why the fuck are you here so early?” Getou asks, dropping his bag and taking off his coat. Gojo’s face doesn’t have wrinkles or obvious eye bags but he still looks tired.
“Why are you here so early?”
“Noisy neighbour,” Getou says.
“Same,” Gojo says. Getou frowns at him but doesn’t pry. They weren’t…friends. They didn’t need to know things about each other.
Gojo yawns. “You know, if you go up to the roof at 6 am, you can see the sunrise.”
“That’s what happens when it’s 6 am. The sun rises,” Getou says.
“Oh, fuck you,” Gojo says. He digs into the side of his bag and takes out the smoothie to give it to Getou. “The Smoothies might stop if you piss me off.”
“They make these at 5 am?”
“Food can be made anytime – even at 5 am.”
Maybe Gojo’s family owned the smoothie store. Before Getou can reply, Gojo lays his head down and closes his eyes. “Wake me up when it’s time, okay?”
It’s only when Getou can hear his exhales on the fabric of his sleeve that Getou says softly, “Okay.”
Whatever the problem is with Gojo’s sleeping, it doesn’t persist. After a few days, he goes back to normal – he returns the mp3 but they don’t have anymore exchanges about music because Gojo is completely and utterly tone deaf and has bad taste. It can’t be fixed. But Gojo tells him that he likes the mp3 more than the songs which is something Getou doesn’t know what to make of. Getou finds himself spending more time at his desk trying not to look at Gojo or think of Gojo or ignore Gojo’s foot that seems to find him under the desk every so often. He’s starting to fall behind on work and all his files have gotten mixed up over the past week and his bonus is looking one failed audit away from being gone. This wasn’t the problem. It was that Getou couldn’t give less of a shit about any of those things. He doesn’t care about the audits or the reports or the Excel logo that had, recently, grown into his nightmares as the human from Elf but instead of standing on attention, Will Farrell lay spread eagle in the middle of E and F and said with straight face, reaching out to Getou, “I’m Exfarell, no longer a human or elf,” and then Getou had woken up in a cold sweat.
The tail end of his existential crisis leads to hours spent on the MIT website, scrolling through their PhD program for Maths. Applications close in less than three months. Getou doesn’t think he’d go to MIT or resign from his job at Dunder Mifflin. And yet, neither of those thoughts keep him away from the website for long. He watches Gojo, he watches the dates for application close in, he searches up houses to rent near the university and then looks at his bank account. He has enough to leave. He’s had enough to leave for over a year.
“The vending machine’s given me shrimp chips,” Gojo says. He’s right behind him, emerging in long strides from the breakroom. Getou fumbles with his mouse and clicks off the internet. He doesn’t know why he’s hiding this from Gojo nor does he know how Gojo would react if Getou shared his goals to leave with him. He knows Gojo considers them friends. He knows Gojo is a good person, if a little eccentric. He knows Gojo would most likely tell him to leave, get the degree, and do whatever he wants to. Getou knows. And yet.
Gojo struts up behind Getou and Getou knows he’s close because his cologne crowds into his space before Gojo does. A packet of chips drops onto Getou’s desk and Gojo leans over his shoulder, his sunglasses pushed down so Gojo can side - eye him.
“The numbers are all mixed up. I kicked it and then,” Gojo points at the pack. “This atrocity.”
Getou rolls his eyes. “They aren’t so bad.”
“Horrid, they’re absolutely horrid. Clearly, your expertise in music doesn’t extend to food.”
Getou swivels in his chair but realises that now, they’re closer than before. Gojo is framed over him and Getou can see the light in his eyes - reflecting and refracting into itself like within a stalactite. He doesn’t move away.
“If you’re going to trash it, I’ll take it,” Getou says.
“I was going to put them in Yoshinobu - san’s cheese,” Gojo says.
“Oh,” Getou says. “That’s…a good idea. Also, disgusting.”
“Disgusting,” Gojo agrees with a grin.
Gojo had disliked Mr. Yoshinobu upon introduction and when Getou told him about his section of the fridge, he’d wrinkled his nose with a glare that had endeared him to Getou more than he was willing to admit.
If possible, Gojo leans even closer. “But I like you better so you can have the shrimp chips.”
Then, Gojo walks away and Getou stares at the back of his head where a singular piece of hair has escaped from his cowlick. Getou’s hand twitches. Beside them, Nanami exhales loudly, and makes a comment about taking his annual leave.
The company has two hundred new trampolines and Getou is behind on his application to MIT. Truthfully, he hasn’t started. It is a source of fear and he has taken many bathroom breaks to avoid looking at his computer. He finishes work faster so he doesn’t have to finish his CV(which parades through his accomplishments quickly until the end of university and then comes to a stunned halt at Dunder Mifflin - 6 years and working) and Toji is so impressed with him that he tells him that Getou can have a Christmas bonus next year. Next year. Getou has been factored into too many long term plans involving Dunder Mifflin. The anxiety of his potential future at Dunder Mifflin and his potential future at MIT and his potential future back in Florida with his perfectly pleasant parents drives him into a spiral. And maybe that’s why, they have two hundred new trampolines in the warehouse instead of paper. It was a website error but Gojo’s glee when his mistake was announced made it seem intentional – like Getou would intentionally order trampolines to entertain him.
They weren’t to be opened – that was obvious but Yuuji, Gojo and Megumi had identical looks of disappointment when Getou told them he was returning them immediately. Besides, what were they going to use them for anyway? During lunch break, all three are suspiciously absent and, at the end of the break, when Gojo returns and Yuuji settles into his reception and Megumi wanders off to the single cubicles (that Getou had wanted when he’d first come to work at Dunder Mifflin but instead he’d been delegated to a table that reminded him of doing group work in grade school), Getou raises his head from his computer to stare at them.
“You opened the trampolines, didn’t you?” Gojo is sweating enough that his hair has come down into gentle waves, face flushed. He looks – debauched, artful.
“No, of course not,” Gojo says and doesn’t blink. His eyes are unnervingly bright. Getou stares back until he can’t and then sighs.
“Did you use helmets?”
Gojo tilts his head delicately in question.
“Low level netless trampolines can pose a serious risk of head injury on unguarded participants.”
Gojo doesn’t respond for a long moment and then rolls over on his chair. Getou can smell the musk of his cologne and sweat. It should be disgusting. It should. Getou turns his eyes back to his email.
Gojo whispers, “After work, warehouse.”
“No.”
“Please?”
“Not even a little bit.”
“Helmets will be provided.”
Getou pauses. “Where are you getting helmets from?”
Gojo grins and pushes away from his desk, rolling away from their table into the common office space. “No trust is no bueno, Suguru.”
There are no helmets. There is, instead, a plastic bag filled with packing peanuts taped to Gojo’s face. Getou shuts the warehouse door and starts to walk to his car. The rest had left fifteen minutes ago and Getou had been too embarrassed to walk to the warehouse in plain sight. The only reason he’d even considered it was because…well, it had been a while since he’d been on one. His parents' old house had one in the backyard but he hadn’t used it too much because he didn’t have any siblings to share it with. The legs broke off in a bad rainstorm and nobody bothered to fix it since.
Before he got to his car, Gojo ran out of the warehouse and ahead of him. He put his hands out.
“You know you want to,” he said.
Getou raised an eyebrow. “Do I?”
“Of course you want to,” he says, “It’s a trampoline. Unless you’re scared?”
Getou knew what he was doing, this might’ve been something he couldn’t have seen through in high school but he was older now.
“Highest jump wins.”
Getou submits to being wrapped the same way. It’s surprisingly light and he feels like he has…packing cubes taped to his head. It’s a new and original experience. He takes his shoes off and walks to the trampoline.
As they jump, the trampoline bends in dangerous ways. Getou briefly thinks about the weight capacities of the product he’d ordered. Gojo grips his forearm and Getou’s thoughts brush by him softly and fade away. The sound of the elastic bending underneath them echoes through the warehouse and Getou’s hair tie comes undone. Gojo’s eyes widen in surprise – and Getou notices that his irises are bordered by a dark sapphire colour, almost entirely black, and as one follows the gradient across his eye, he thinks that’s what shattered glass might look like in an ocean. Something very blue. Then again, Getou has never found the words to describe Gojo’s eyes without understating their allure.
When Getou realises Gojo’s still holding onto him, he feels like he should shrug out of his hold. Instead, he says;
“Is this all?”
Gojo grins and releases Getou. “Nope, we’re going to play.”
Basketballs lay all around and the trampoline is strategically placed underneath the hoop. Oh, Getou thinks.
“I’m going to win.”
Getou does not win. Even better, he ends up in the hospital.
“It’s not a fracture,” Getou says because he feels like he should say something. He wasn’t in too much pain because Gojo had sprayed an entire bottle of numbing spray on not just his ankle but also every bit of skin around it and gone beyond numbing to possible nerve damage. The nurse had been severely disappointed to see the state of them.
“You don’t know that,” Gojo says. He has his eyes fixed on the swollen lump of his ankle since they’re been parked in the waiting room. He’s never seen Gojo worried or…fussy. But, that’s what he was doing right then.
“Satoru,” Getou says. Gojo’s eyes snap towards him and Getou realises he’d said his name gentler than he’d intended. It was also the first time he’d called him by first name. “You’re fussing.”
Gojo gestures at him. “You almost broke your neck.”
“You said the packing cubes were secure,” Getou says, a small smile forming.
“Securely attached. Why would you trust me?”
Getou rolls his eyes. “You’re blaming me? The victim?”
“You’re not a victim.”
“Am I not?”
“What you are is a massive idiot,” Gojo says.
“I was only trying to catch you,” Getou says. “You stumbled off that trampoline first.”
Gojo doesn’t speak but crosses his arms and takes a seat next to him, facing straight ahead. The packing cubes are still taped to his head and he looks ridiculous. Getou feels a small sliver of something like fondness.
“Next time, I’ll put you in a space suit,” Gojo says.
“Or do me a favour and just put me in a coffin.”
Gojo turns, and with a casual touch, undoes the mess on Getou’s head. “Does this mean you’ve agreed to a next time?”
Before Getou can answer, the receptionist calls Gojo over to fill in the forms.
“Emergency contact?”
“Nobody that lives close enough. You can leave it blank.”
Gojo doesn’t leave it blank. He writes his own number down, ignores Getou’s protest, returns the form, and promptly wheels him into the doctor’s office. Getou finds himself facing a portly doctor who smiles at them in a kindly manner and skillfully ignores the cubes taped to Gojo’s head.
Gojo gestures at Getou’s knee. “I think it’s a fracture. He can’t put any weight on it and he fell pretty hard. I had to carry him out like a princess.”
Getou brings a hand up to his hair and drags it down his face. It was not a moment that he wanted to revisit. He would have liked to remain on the floor of that garage until Todo came in the next morning and ran him over with one of the moving machines.
The doctor, strangely, talks more to Gojo than he does to Getou. Getou finds the whole experience surreal.
“It’s not a fracture,” the doctor says after examining him.
“Great,” Getou says. “So I can leave?”
“It’s a sprain but I would advise you to be careful. We don’t know if there’s any tearing and if so, it may get worse if you’re to walk on it.”
“I have a job, I need to walk.”
“Perhaps you could consider a few days of sick leave.”
“Is it alright if he had help?” Gojo asks and Getou turns to him, incredulous.
“Satoru –”
“Suguru,” Gojo says firmly. Getou doesn’t have a response.
“That’s fine,” the doctor says. Gojo grins at him and wheels him out.
Before they get inside Gojo’s car, Getou stops him with a hand. Gojo had been suspiciously quiet the entire way back from the reception to the car and Getou suspects that it wasn’t a bout of philosophical rumination that had overcome him but something else.
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” Gojo says.
Getou raises an eyebrow. He lets Gojo help into the seat and fasten his seat belt. He suspected that Gojo was feeling something akin to guilt but it didn’t look like he’d admit it out loud. Gojo got in next to him in the driver’s seat, still quiet, and laid his hands on the steering wheel without moving to start the car. The silence was unsettling Getou.
“Satoru,” Getou said and realised, uncomfortably, that using his first name felt natural. Gojo turned his head and dropped his sunglasses lower on his nose.
“What is it, dearest bumblebee?”
Getou thumped his head back against the car seat and closed his eyes. “Drive me back. You’re feeding my cats.”
“You have cats?” Gojo asks, then, “Does that mean I get to see your house?”
“What?” Getou asks. Gojo starts the car with a renewed sense of purpose.
“I would like to see your house and cats,” Gojo says as he backs out of the parking lot. “Are your cats hairless? How many are you holding hostage? And more importantly, do you have a dishwasher?”
Getou opens his eyes and turns to him, wary.
“Why do you want to know?”
Gojo responds as if it’s obvious, “I’m nosy.”
Getou sighs. “That you are.”
A car honks at them as it passes by and the driver gives Gojo the finger. He doesn’t even notice.
“And,” Gojo adds. “To be friends.”
Getou doesn’t know what to say to that, so he looks out the window and watches them slowly approach his neighbourhood. Somehow, it feels like he’s fighting a losing battle.
As they start to arrive at Getou’s house, a vague sense of dread creeps up on him. Had he left anything embarrassing outside to be discovered? He had a well - stocked fridge and an artful layout of cutlery. Everything was clean because Nanako and Mimiko liked everything to be clean. It’s not a hard feat to achieve since Getou doesn’t have much furniture. Really, his house is so bare that it lacks any real identifying details about Getou. It could be teleported into IKEA and it would fit in without a hitch. As Getou watches his own face in the side mirrors, and the strange glow that has overtaken him since he was forced on this excursion with Gojo, he thinks about what this might say about him. The only, and obvious, conclusion one could draw from his IKEA - showroom house is about Getou’s internal life - specifically that it was hollow and shrouded by a sense of stoic endurance. In a sudden panic, Getou realises that Gojo’s going to see through him to the emptiness of his personal life that he hadn’t hidden explicitly but had – over the past two weeks – wished was not a reality. When he spoke to Gojo, his personhood seemed to materialise in a way that was unfamiliar to him – he felt more real. This was disconcertingly untrue for all the other parts of his life.
Gojo jerks him out of his thoughts as he parks by his house. Getou sees his blinds move as Nanako peeks out at the noise. Gojo spots her immediately and takes his hands off the steering wheel to wave at her. Nanako, who is possessed of the same spirit as a fridge magnet or a dispassionate bovine, lingers in the window without reaction and slowly rests her head on her paws to sleep.
“Doesn’t she like me?” Getou knows Gojo has no particular inclination towards wanting to be liked. Still, he says, “She doesn’t know you.”
“She’ll warm up to me – I’ve heard pets resemble their owners,” Gojo says. Getou wants to protest but for whatever reason, holds back. Hasn’t he proven it by allowing Gojo into his house? It’s only been a few weeks since they met and Getou was, quite truly, scared to examine his attachment to Gojo.
Gojo wheels Getou into the house and then doesn’t hesitate in the hallway. He squints at everything.
“Put me on the sofa.” Getou needs to regain his sense of control by placing himself in the centre.
“You live alone,” Gojo says, but not in a disparaging way, not even as a simple observation. Instead, his tone is admiring.
“I don’t, I have two cats.”
“And they are the most adorable, beautiful –” Mimiko scratches the finger that Gojo extends towards her – “motherfuckers.”
“Mimiko.” Geto pats the sofa and Mimiko hops onto the cushion next to him. As they linger in silence, Getou clears his throat.
“Thank you for driving me here.”
Gojo nods.
“And for taking me to the hospital.”
Gojo nods again.
“You didn’t have to.”
Gojo opens his mouth to protest but Getou continues.
“You didn’t.”
“It’s because –”
“And I don’t want to take up any more of your time.” It was nearly 10 pm. They had work the next day.
Gojo folds his hands across his chest and leans against the breakfast countertop. “You’ll be fine if I leave?”
“Of course.” This was an obvious lie but Getou hoped that his want to be left alone was clear enough that Gojo would simply turn around and leave Getou to carefully unpack every detail of the day and then lay waste to it by blowing his own head off.
“Well, okay.”
With that, Gojo exits his house without a backward glance. Getou stares at the front door – now closed. A silence lingers in Gojo’s abrupt absence. Getou sighs at the ceiling and shuts his eyes in disbelief for a moment. The moment turns into a minute, and the minute into an hour as he succumbs to sleep and soon after which he’s being shaken awake by Gojo who’s holding the very wide bottle neck of a milk bottle.
“I got us dinner.”
Getou is so dazed and confused by his sudden return that he doesn’t know how to respond.
“The drink is milk, which is unconventional some might say, but it’s the only choice when there is a large spread of chilli.”
“What?”
Gojo’s on the floor of the living room, taking out the second box, and doesn’t pause when he replies. “Eat your fucking food, Suguru.”
Getou does eat his fucking food but the feeling of being off - balance in an almost benevolent natural disaster follows him through the night when Gojo offers to tuck him in, is refused, and tells Getou that he’ll be picking him up for work the next day. His persistence is uncanny and unnatural and a million other things that pointed to a severe lack of decorum and self-control. Yet, Getou couldn’t bring himself to think of Gojo with any degree of dislike. He also felt that the question of why was best left unanswered.