Chapter Text
It was spring again, which meant that baseball season had restarted, Tsumiki was rehearsing for Swan Lake, the cherry blossoms were in bloom, and it was time for class field trips.
Satoru hadn’t planned on chaperoning their field trips (his schedule was never so forgiving as to allow him to plan an out-of-town trip); but he’d somehow gotten lucky by having an assignment in the south when Tsumiki’s class was visiting the Osaka Castle. But as thrilled as he was to have gotten to experience that with Tsumiki… he knew Megumi was feeling a bit neglected—especially after Satoru had had to miss his last two baseball games due to impromptu missions. So Satoru had been fully prepared to beg, cheat, lie, and steal his way out of his Jujutsu responsibilities for a day if it meant he got to chaperone Megumi’s field trip too.
That’s why, on one of his very few and coveted days off, Satoru was Kyoto-bound on the shinkansen, in a car filled with third graders. And he couldn’t have been happier.
The rest of the kids were all squealing in excitement and talking animatedly to one another, despite their teacher’s best efforts to quiet them down. But Megumi was in the seat beside Satoru, staring silently out the window as the countryside flew by.
Satoru did sometimes worry that Megumi seemed to lack any friends in his class, or his baseball team, or his swim class… or anywhere really. But he knew he couldn’t force him out of his shell—knew that as long as he was still himself around Satoru and Tsumiki, that it would be okay. Of course, being himself still didn’t entail talking much, so Satoru in the aisle seat spent the trip making friendly conversation with the other parent chaperones. Occasionally Megumi would turn to him and tap his arm, and Satoru would grab a fruit snack from his bag and place it into Megumi’s hand, all while never faltering in whatever story he was telling about his kids.
Despite the screaming children, it was honestly a relaxing way to spend the day. He had his long legs sprawled into the aisle, leaned back in his seat, relishing the fact that the only curse he had to worry about was a singly flyhead—currently pressed into the farthest corner of the train car, trying to escape Satoru’s aura filling every cubic inch of the enclosed space.
When they finally rolled into Kyoto station, the kids were up and screaming and bouncing around the train, all while Megumi stayed in his seat, expression blank, waiting for his turn to disembark.
Satoru was smiling and chuckling slightly at the excitement and decibel level of the kids as he made his way off the train. But his smile fell off in shock when he stepped off the shinkansen and directly into a familiar face. He stood dumbfounded for a few seconds. Then his expression broke into a grin. “Nanami!” he exclaimed excitedly.
He was met with a mirrored expression of surprise, then an exasperated sigh that he hadn’t heard in two years. “Gojo,” Nanami eventually said, his tone deeper than Satoru remembered. He was taller than Satoru remembered, too.
Before Satoru could say anything else, two small hands planted themselves on Satoru’s back. “You’re in the way,” Megumi said as he shoved Satoru forward, moving him to the side so the rest of the third graders could unload from the shinkansen. After moving Satoru out of the way, Megumi came to stand by his side. Then he followed Satoru’s his gaze to Nanami, who was staring down at Megumi with a confused look. Megumi returned it with a skeptical glance of his own. “Who is this?”
That snapped Satoru out of it, and he put his hand on Megumi’s shoulder, nudging him forward to properly meet Nanami. “Megumi, this is Nanami Kento, we went to school together. Nanami, this is Fushiguro Megumi. My kid,” he said, his chest puffed out with pride at the statement.
Nanami’s brow furrowed. “Fushiguro?” he asked, incredulously. The events that unfolded at Jujutsu Tech the day of the would-have-been-merger were no secret; Nanami knew perfectly well everything that happened between Satoru and Toji. “As in—” Nanami cut himself off when he met Satoru’s gaze, whose eyes were sharp as he gave a small shake of his head. His look of disconcertion grew, but he took the hint and dropped the subject. “…What are you doing in Kyoto?” he asked after a long pause.
With a grateful smile, Satoru chirped: “Field trip—we’re heading to the Fushimi Inari Shrine.” As he spoke, he let his eyes travel up and down Nanami. The dark colors of JJ Tech had never really suited him, and he must’ve realized that. Now he wore a pastel pink shirt tucked into grey slacks, and his complexion thanked him for it. “You on your way to class?” Satoru asked, having kept close enough tabs to know he was in university now. Besides, the messenger bag thrown over his shoulder was clearly weighed down by a heavy laptop.
Megumi, realizing the conversation wasn’t going to turn to more interesting topics, sighed and left Satoru’s side. Satoru watched him walk off to rejoin his class where they were gathered in front of their teacher, but his attention returned to Nanami as he spoke again:
“It’s dead week. I’m heading to a café to work on my final project.”
At the news that Nanami wasn’t on a tight timeline, Satoru grinned, then grabbed the strap of Nanami’s messenger bag to slide it from Nanami’s shoulder and throw it over his own. Nanami tried to protest, reaching out to grab his bag back; but Satoru had infinity on and his hand stopped an inch from the strap of his bag.
Nanami tsked.
“Your project can wait,” Satoru told him. “You need some fresh air, and we need another chaperone.” Without waiting for Nanami to respond, Satoru began walking after Megumi, then turned back to wave Nanami along. “Come on, don’t slow down the group.”
Inari station was only a single transfer from Kyoto station, but with about thirty children to keep together, that one transfer took a lot of orchestrating. So Satoru didn’t speak with Nanami until he had successfully conducted the five kids in his group through the train transfer and to the entrance to the shrine. As the groups reconvened and the teacher began another headcount, Satoru let out a relieved exhale and looked back to Nanami. “So. How is it?”
“How’s what?” Nanami asked, his voice gravelly, as they began to follow the group through the shrine.
While there were plenty of cultural structures to look through on the way, the first thing on the agenda was to take the class through the torii path leading up the mountain. To wear them out with a hike before trying to teach them any real history.
Satoru rolled his eyes at Nanami’s dry response. “Dude. Anything. It’s been two years; something has to have changed. That haircut for one,” he said with a shit-eating grin. Nanami leveled him with a glare and crossed his arms in discontent. His hair was infinitely better now though. It was shorter—no longer falling in a fringe over his forehead, but a clean, tapered cut. He already looked like he belonged at Wall Street.
“It’s fine,” he answered simply. It seemed like that was all he was going to say, but when Satoru heaved a sigh and opened his mouth to give him a hard time for being so terse, Nanami was quick to cut him off. “I don’t know what to say, Gojo. We don’t have anything in common anymore.”
And that hurt Satoru’s feelings a little more than he wanted to admit. “So you can’t even bother to make small talk? Can’t tell me about your final project, or what café you study at?”
Nanami scoffed. “That stuff wouldn’t interest you.”
“That’s a pretty big assumption,” Satoru stated, but he knows it’s a fair one. Back in high school, he hadn’t cared about anything but sorcery, and that was the only version of him that Nanami knew. But Nanami wasn’t the only one who had changed. There was a lot more beyond sorcery that mattered to him now. Things related to his kids, primarily, but he was open to new things, and certainly a better listener than he used to be.
After a pause, Nanami spoke again. “It’s a stock portfolio. Throughout the term, we ‘invested’ fake money in the stock market. And now we have to write a report on which stocks performed the best and the worst, and do research into why, and how to better predict the trends for those commodities in the future,” he explained, then cast a cutting look over to Satoru. “You really want to tell me that sounds interesting to you?”
Satoru inhaled slowly, considering the question as they walked through the shrine, skill keeping a close eye on the children. Then he let out a laugh. “Jesus. No. That’s boring as fuck.”
“Shh!” Nanami hushed him quickly, as they were still surrounded by grade schoolers.
“But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear about it,” Satoru continued. “So, which commodity did the best, or whatever?”
With his Six Eyes, Satoru saw Nanami’s energy flare for a moment and his body language soften ever so slightly. “…Cotton,” Nanami eventually answered, and Satoru couldn’t help his smile. “But can we stop pretending that my studies are in any way more interesting than the fact that you’re chaperoning a field trip for Fushiguro Toji’s son?”
Satoru shook his head with another small laugh. It had been a while since he’d had to explain the situation to anyone who knew the truth about Toji. After all, Shoko, Yaga, and Ijichi had all been in the loop since the beginning of his guardianship. “That been bugging you?” he asked as they finally reached the torii path and began to climb. They stayed at the back of the pack, making sure none of the kids veered off the path or fell behind.
“He really doesn’t know?” Nanami asked as they passed through the first gate. His expression was conflicted. “You’re raising him in place of the parent you killed, and he doesn’t know?”
Satoru couldn’t help but bark a laugh. “Okay, well first of all, I’m not raising them in place of anybody. Megumi hadn’t seen his dad in at least a year, even before I’d killed him. Toji was a piece of shit,” he grumbled out the last part with deeply rooted hatred in his voice for what he put Satoru’s kids through, but that wasn’t the part that caught Nanami’s attention.
“‘Them’?” he asked.
Satoru looked at him for a moment, then quickly realized he had failed to mention a pretty important detail. “Oh. Yeah, he has a sister. Tsumiki.” Then he waved off the tangent to get them back on track. “Secondly, it’s not like I’m keeping it from him. I tried to tell him, but he said he didn’t want to know what Toji was doing. He knows he can ask me if he ever changes his mind.”
“And you aren’t concerned about how he’ll react when he does find out?”
Satoru shook his head again, slightly entertained by Nanami’s unnecessary concern.
See, Satoru’s reverse cursed technique had been far from perfect, the first time he used it.
After his first encounter with Toji, he’d managed to close up all of his wounds and bring himself back from the verge of death. But his healing hadn’t been seamless.
“Were those from a curse?” Megumi had asked.
It was the summer Satoru had met the kids, even before they’d begun living with him, and they were at the waterpark. Satoru was sitting on the ledge of the wade pool, his feet in the water as six-year-old Megumi stood nearby.
Tsumiki was giggling and splashing water in the deeper end with another girl her age. She always made friends so easily on their outings, which left Megumi with no choice but to hang out with Satoru. But Megumi was warming up to him, and didn’t mind spending time with him. He even seemed to enjoy ‘accidentally’ splattering him with water whenever he shook out his hair.
Satoru usually wore a shirt when they went to the waterpark, but it was just too damn humid this time, so he was just in his swim trunks. Which meant there was nothing to hide the two-foot-long scar that travelled from his throat to his waist. That, in tandem with the four horizontal scars down his right thigh, did garner a bit of attention. The one on his forehead likely would too, if it weren’t covered by his hair the majority of the time.
Tsumiki had looked horrified when Satoru had stepped out of the locker room, but her social skills were far beyond that of any normal eight-year-old, and she had been doing her utmost all day to keep her attention politely averted. Megumi wasn’t as practiced in social niceties, and Satoru had caught him looking more than once; at least he was a bit more subtle than the strangers overtly staring as they walked by.
“Nope, they were from a person,” Satoru answered.
Megumi’s eyes widened in shock momentarily, before his eyebrows furrowed. “A person did that? Why?”
This conversation felt like walking on a barely frozen lake, so Satoru took a moment to consider his words before answering, “I was standing between them and something that would make them a whooole lot of money.” Behind his sunglasses, he was carefully watching Megumi’s reaction.
“It was over money?” Megumi asked, his voice cold—disdainful, if a child could experience such an emotion.
Satoru knew Megumi was thinking of his father right now. It felt a bit unfair that Megumi didn’t know Satoru was also thinking of Toji. “Yeah,” was all he said.
Megumi frowned, continuing to stare at Satoru’s throat for another moment. Then he looked away. Then he glanced back, then looked away again.
Satoru smiled and shook his head fondly at the kid’s curiosity. He brushed his hair back from his forehead. “You can touch this one, if you want,” he offered.
Megumi looked at him for a moment, weighing the offer. Then he waded over. Satoru leaned forward a bit so Megumi could reach up and place a finger on the scar on his forehead. The skin there was shiny, and the texture raised but smooth.
“Do they still hurt?” Megumi asked as he pulled his hand back.
“Nah, it’s just a bit of an eyesore, huh?”
Megumi was quiet for a moment, not socially adept enough to recognize the self-consciousness in the question. Then he asked, “Why do you have to fight people too, as a sorcerer? Aren’t sorcerers all on the same side?”
“It would be nice if they were, wouldn’t it?” Satoru said, kicking his feet in the water. “But no, we aren’t all on the same side. There’s tricky politics and factions even between sorcerers within Jujutsu society, let alone those outside of it.”
“Have you ever had to kill a person?”
Satoru froze for a moment, then looked at Megumi. Despite the heavy question, Megumi was staring at him with the same expression he wore when he asked if Satoru was staying for dinner. The question itself wasn’t difficult for Satoru to answer… just the fact that Megumi was the one asking it, while they were dancing around the topic of Megumi’s father without his knowledge.
“I’ve exorcised more curses than I can count,” he said eventually. “But I’ve only ever killed one person.” He cleared his throat, then gestured from his throat all the way down to his knee. “The person who gave me these.”
Megumi just hummed, and nodded. Taking time to absorb this new information about what his future as a sorcerer would hold; then he decided he wouldn’t let it ruin a day at the waterpark. He flopped down in the water, splashing Satoru. “Can we get popsicles? I’m hot.”
Satoru had been a bit worried back then, about what Megumi would think when he found out. But over the years, as Satoru had cemented himself as Megumi’s father figure, and as Megumi’s resentment over Toji’s lifestyle and abandonment grew, Satoru became less and less concerned.
He saw Megumi’s expression each time Satoru used a headband to keep his hair off of his forehead, each time he took them to the beach and joined them in the water without a shirt. He saw the way Megumi’s eyes darkened for just a second when he looked at Satoru’s scars.
To Megumi, those scars were a window to the darker side of humanity—a glimpse into the twisted things people like his father were willing to do for money.
And he likely would never admit it, but Megumi had grown a bit protective over Satoru these past two years. He didn’t like the knowledge that Satoru could be injured despite his technique, and he certainly didn’t like knowing there were people capable of wanting to kill someone like Satoru—someone who so clearly only wanted to help people.
So no, Satoru didn’t worry in the slightest that Megumi would resent him. The truth would probably only make Megumi despise Toji more than he already did.
But that knowledge wasn’t easy to articulate. Instead, he said: “Jeez, Nanami, you sure worry a lot. Lighten up, would ya?” He adjusted the laptop bag over his shoulder. “Ask about something fun. Megumi is in a science club, you know. And Tsumiki is learning Mandarin.”
Nanami sighed, still hung up on his unanswered questions about Megumi, but he allowed the topic to change regardless. “How old is his sister?” he asked, indulging Satoru.
“Ten,” he answered, immediately flipping open his phone to show Nanami his screensaver. It was a photo of Megumi and Tsumiki in their new school uniforms on their first day at the new school after moving in with him. Satoru was expecting a nod of acknowledgement, so when Nanami took the phone from him to look at the screensaver, he couldn’t help but grin.
“They seem like good kids,” Nanami said as he handed the phone back, looking up ahead to see Megumi staring up at the torii as he walked, admiring the fantastic red, even if his eyes were occasionally drawn away by the harmless curses flitting about that none of the other kids could see.
“They really are,” Satoru said, parental pride in his voice. He put his phone back in his pocket. “So how’s Uni, Nanami? Besides your stocks.”
Nanami shrugged. “Alright, I suppose. College doesn’t really live up to its reputation of being stressful. Though I guess we probably have a different tolerance for stress than your average student.”
Satoru snorted a small laugh. He’d imagine a daily routine that didn’t have the constant looming threat of death or dismemberment to be pretty boring. “But… Is it better?” he asked. ‘Are you happy?’ was what he meant.
Nanami thought for a moment, then shrugged. “It’s not worse.”
And Satoru supposed that would have to be good enough.
He got Nanami to tell him a bit more about college, but Nanami had never been the most talkative, so Satoru filled the rest of the time talking about the kids, and complaining about Shoko’s relentless bullying. Without needing to discuss it, they unanimously steered clear from the topic of Jujutsu, and Satoru thought there might’ve been appreciation in Nanami’s eyes for it, but he couldn’t say for sure.
The hike didn’t end up taking too long. Due to the limited stamina of young kids, the tour guide led them along the shortened route rather than taking them all the way up the mountain, so they were back at the base of the shrine after only half an hour. Despite having been a ways ahead of him throughout the hike, after stepping off the trail, Megumi had stopped to wait for Satoru and Nanami to step through the last torii and fell into step beside Satoru. He and Nanami exchanged another silent, appraising stare, before Nanami gave Megumi a small nod, which Megumi returned.
Satoru watched the exchange with amusement. The two were eerily similar. But then he saw Nanami’s gaze drop discretely down to his watch.
There was still plenty more to the field trip, but Satoru knew he’d kept Nanami from his studies for long enough, so he leaned down to Megumi. “Hey, go grab something for your sister,” Satoru instructed, giving Megumi a small shove towards the gift shop where the other kids were currently overwhelming the shop keeper. Then, as Megumi did as instructed, Satoru stood back up and looked at Nanami.
“I’m glad I ran into you,” he said with a smile, holding his computer bag back out to him.
If Satoru were any less perceptive, he wouldn’t have noticed the slight twitch to Nanami’s lips before he smothered it with a sigh. “It was fine seeing you too, I guess,” he replied, taking the computer bag back.
Satoru rolled his eyes at the response. If he wasn’t so used to Megumi’s dry responses, he might’ve been offended. “Hey. Next time you’re in Tokyo, stop by, okay? Tsumiki is getting into baking. I’ll cook, and she’ll make dessert. Yeah?”
Nanami blinked a few times, as if processing the invitation, but he nodded.
“You still have my number?”
Nanami nodded again, and Satoru smiled.
“Good. I’ll see you around then.”
“Yeah,” Nanami said, “See you.” He took a half step back towards the station, before turning back to Satoru. “I wouldn’t have expected it,” he admitted, and Satoru quirked a brow before Nanami continued. “But you do seem like a good guardian. Or parent, or whatever you are.”
Satoru was silent for a moment. He liked to think he was doing a good job, but with the number of games and recitals he had missed, and the dinners he hadn’t made it home for, he didn’t know if others would agree. But despite being out of the game, Nanami understood the extra layer that Jujutsu brought to the whole affair. That regardless of how much Satoru loved his kids, being the strongest had to come first, or the consequences would have to be weighed by human lives.
“Nanami Kento, is that a compliment?” he asked after a long while.
“Don’t let it get to your head,” he said, then turned on his heel to leave.
Satoru grinned, turning around himself to watch Megumi ruffling through the stuffed kitsune in the giftshop. But his Six Eyes followed Nanami back to the train station.
His Six Eyes caught that Nanami had stopped for just a moment and looked back to the shrine. To Satoru.