Chapter Text
The 7-Eleven down the street was the same one you’d been raiding for this tradition for the better part of a decade.
The branding had been updated twice, the shelves rearranged according to some corporate strategy you didn’t understand, and the ice cream freezer upgraded to something sleeker and more energy-efficient. But the soul of the place remained unchanged: fluorescent lights harsh enough to make everyone look vaguely deceased, the distinct comforting smell of oden broth simmering eternally in its compartmented pot by the register, and the soothing ambiance of commerce that never, ever slept.
The night shift clerk was a man named Kobayashi.
He wasn’t the original guy. That guy had moved on to better things, or perhaps just day shifts and a healthier sleep schedule. But Kobayashi had been manning this post long enough to watch you both age in snapshots.
He’d seen Gojo evolve from the erratic twenty-something with a god complex and zero impulse control to the slightly more tired thirty-something with a god complex, chronic back pain, and marginally better impulse control. He’d seen you go from the feral gremlin child in a too-big hoodie who looked ready to bite anyone who came too close, to... well, a feral gremlin adult in business casual with better posture and more refined biting strategies.
Some things changed. Some things didn’t.
“Happy Birthday, big guy,” Kobayashi said without looking up from the manga he was reading behind the counter, not even bothering to pretend he was doing actual work.
He didn’t question why Gojo was wearing a hoodie with the strings pulled so tight only his nose and mouth were visible, like some sort of budget assassin trying to go incognito at the local 7-Eleven. He didn’t ask why you looked vaguely disheveled and were covered in a light coating of dust. He’d seen weirder. This was Tokyo. This was night shift.
“Thanks, Kobayashi!” Gojo said brightly, grinning at him as though they were old friends. “You’re a real one. Appreciate you, man.”
Kobayashi just grunted in acknowledgement and turned a page, eyes never leaving his manga. A true professional who understood that the less he knew about his customers’ lives, the better he slept during the day.
The Rules of the Feast were simple, immutable, and strictly enforced by you, the Monarch of Birthday Protocol and Keeper of Sacred Tradition:
Rule One: The Budget.
Strictly ¥2000. No more, no less.
It had been adjusted for inflation over the years, up from the original ¥1000 war chest you’d swindled out of Ijichi back when you were broke, shameless, and operating on audacity. The principle remained the same: limitation bred creativity.
Rule Two: The Nutrition Policy.
Strictly forbidden.
If it contained a significant amount of vitamins, minerals, or dietary fiber, it was disqualified. Vegetables could only be present if they had been processed beyond recognition, preferably into powder form, mixed with MSG, and printed on a chip. You were here for chemicals, nostalgia, and joy. Not health.
Rule Three: The Birthday Cake.
Must be a Swiss Roll. No exceptions. No substitutions. The convenience store Swiss Roll was the cake.
You grabbed a plastic basket and began the raid.
“Look at this.”
Gojo appeared at your side, holding up a new seasonal item: a strawberry-and-cream sandwich, the kind where they put actual fruit slices between two pieces of soft white bread and called it a dessert.
“They put fruit in sandwich bread,” he said, turning it over to read the label like he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. “This is an affront to nature.”
“We have to get it,” you said immediately.
“Exactly.” He dropped it in the basket, zero further discussion needed. “I knew you’d understand.”
You were already balancing two hot cans of corn potage and a bag of pizza-flavored potato chips that boldly promised “Authentic Italian Taste” despite never having been within a thousand miles of Italy and probably being invented in a laboratory in Saitama.
“I’m getting the Premium Gold Roll Cake,” you announced, scanning the bakery shelf with a critical eye. “They claim they upgraded the cream this year. Supposedly it’s made with milk from cows that were personally hugged by farmers in Hokkaido and serenaded with classical music. I intend to verify their marketing claims.”
“Premium Gold?” Gojo whistled, leaning over your shoulder to read the package. “Damn. Look at us, living the high life now. Are we breaking the budget with this extravagance?”
“I have a coupon,” you said smugly, tapping your phone screen where you’d already loaded it into the store app. “20% off all bakery items. Don’t worry. I run a tight ship.”
You made your way to the counter, basket loaded with crimes against nutrition. You paid with money you’d actually earned through legitimate employment, not a Ziploc bag of ill-gotten coins extracted from a traumatized assistant manager. It felt like a significant marker of personal growth and character development.
Kobayashi scanned your items without comment, his face as blank as always. He accepted your payment, handed over a receipt, and threw in a packet of wooden chopsticks nobody had asked for but were apparently mandatory with every transaction over ¥500. Some ancient convenience store law, probably.
The whole time, Gojo hovered at your elbow, vibrating with the urge to intervene financially, maybe swoop in at the last second and pay for everything like some kind of convenience store sugar daddy. You ignored him, keeping your body between him and the card reader.
This was your tradition. Your budget. Your gift to him. He didn’t get to ruin it with his infinite bank account and his pathological inability to let people do nice things for him.
“Thanks, Kobayashi,” you said warmly, grabbing the plastic bag full of terrible decisions.
“Yeah. Stay warm out there,” he replied, already back to his manga, visibly done with human interaction for at least the next hour.
The automatic doors slid shut behind you. The night air hit your face, making you intensely grateful for The Sweater under your jacket, doing precisely what Gojo had promised it would do all those years ago: keeping you warm, protecting you, caring for you.
Tokyo stretched out around you in every direction, all lights and noise and endless motion. This was a city that never truly slept, just changed shifts.
“So where to this year?” Gojo asked, already tearing into a meat bun like a man who hadn’t eaten in days, despite the very expensive, multi-course dinner he’d been forced to endure earlier with government representatives and major donors and people whose company he couldn’t stand but whose money and political support he needed.
“Somewhere high,” you said, adjusting your backpack straps and starting down the street. “And restricted.”
“Ooh,” Gojo grinned, delighted in the way only he could be about the prospect of legal violations. “Criminal trespassing. My favorite kind of birthday activity: Felonies and snacks. Are we talking federal property? Corporate headquarters? The Mitsubishi Bank?”
You shot him a flat look over your shoulder. “You do realize I’m not actually one of those Hollywood master thieves, right? I can’t scale glass buildings with suction cups. My skillset has limits. I’m good, but I’m not Spider-Man.”
“That’s exactly what a master thief would say to maintain their cover,” Gojo countered, taking another enormous bite of meat bun, barely chewing before swallowing. “Also, to be fair, you did break out of a haunted bank vault when you were sixteen. So forgive me if I have somewhat elevated expectations of your criminal capabilities.”
“That was different.”
“Was it, though?”
“Yes. Very different circumstances. Completely different skill application.”
“If you say so.”
Instead of attempting to break into the Mitsubishi Bank and getting promptly arrested for federal crimes that would require an extremely awkward phone call to Higuruma, you led Gojo through the winding backstreets of the office district. Away from the neon lights and the late-night crowds. Away from the izakayas and karaoke bars still pumping out noise.
Your destination was a construction site that had been sitting dormant for the holidays. The skeleton of steel and concrete would eventually become a new high-rise hotel, something sleek and modern with a rooftop bar and floor-to-ceiling windows. Currently, though, it was just an ambitious grid of steel beams and poured concrete floors and engineering dreams reaching up into the dark December sky.
“The crane?” Gojo asked, tipping his head back to look up at the towering machinery with the kind of hope usually reserved for children spotting carnival rides.
He’d always wanted to climb one of those things. He’d mentioned it. Multiple times over the years, in fact. With increasing frequency and urgency and decreasing subtlety each time the subject came up.
“The roof,” you corrected, crushing his construction equipment dreams. “View’s better from up there. More space. Less chance of you destroying expensive machinery and causing an insurance nightmare that somehow becomes my problem.”
“Boring,” he muttered, but he didn’t argue the point.
The construction site was surrounded by a high chain-link fence topped with spirals of rusted barbed wire. A large yellow sign was bolted prominently to the fence at eye level, proclaiming in bold, aggressively threatening lettering:
DANGER: NO ENTRY. ACTIVE CONSTRUCTION ZONE. PATROLLED BY SECURITY DOGS. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSTITUTED PROSECUTED.
Someone had violently crossed out “PROSTITUTED” with angry black marker, the correction so emphatic it had torn through the plastic lamination. You appreciated their dedication to accurate legal terminology.
Gojo paused at the fence, head tilting as he listened with those supernatural senses of his that could probably hear a mouse breathing three blocks away. “I don’t hear any dogs.”
“That’s because they’re lying,” you assured him. “Never have been. I checked the security company’s patrol schedule and their actual contract with the construction firm. The security guard sits in that little prefab shack over there—” You pointed toward a small illuminated box near the main entrance. “—and plays Mobile Legends on his phone from 9 PM to 11 PM every single night. He usually loses around 10:30 and gets really grumpy about it. He won’t come out to investigate unless he hears an actual explosion or someone screaming. Maybe not even then if his team is in the middle of a match. We’re completely fine.”
“You terrify me,” Gojo said dreamily.
You walked around to the side entrance, half-hidden behind a row of battered vending machines that probably hadn’t worked since 2019 and were covered in peeling advertisements for drinks that no longer existed. The gate here was secured with a heavy-duty padlock, looking extremely serious about its job and possibly had strong opinions about trespassing.
This was the ritual. The tradition within the tradition, the ceremony inside the ceremony.
The Strongest Sorcerer Alive could dissolve this entire city block into atomic dust with a flick of his fingers. He could warp space itself and step through the fabric of reality as easily as walking through a door. He could be on the other side of this fence in a microsecond, less than that, if he felt like showing off.
But on his birthday, he stood guard in a dingy alleyway, chewing on a convenience store meat bun and keeping a lookout for security guards while you picked the lock with your mundane, completely non-magical skills.
It made you partners in crime, equals in this one specific thing. It leveled the playing field between god and mortal. Here, in the shadows, your ability was the one that opened doors.
The shackle popped open easily after only fifteen seconds of work.
“You’re getting faster,” Gojo murmured, sounding genuinely proud. “That was, what, half the time as last year?”
“Practice makes perfect,” you whispered back, slipping the lock free and pushing the gate open just enough for you both to slip through. “Also this is a cheaper lock. Sometimes capitalism works in our favor.”
The climb up was grueling.
Thirty flights of bare concrete stairs that echoed with every footstep, amplifying the sound until it felt like the whole building was rattling with your presence. The construction elevator sat mockingly in its shaft, locked down tight with a keycard access system you hadn’t had the time or resources to properly figure out how to bypass. It was a minor professional failure that stung your pride a bit, something you’d have to rectify before next year. A goal for future you.
By the time you kicked open the door to the roof, your thighs were burning with accumulated lactic acid and your lungs were stinging from the cold air you’d been gulping down. But the rush of adrenaline, the satisfaction of making it, made every painful step worth it.
The view was spectacular. Breathtaking, if you’d had any breath left to take.
From this vantage point, thirty stories up and completely exposed to the elements, Tokyo was a glittering sea of lights stretching out to every horizon, a galaxy sprawled out at your feet. You could see the red blinking lights of Tokyo Tower in the distance, the snake-like flow of traffic on the highways, the dark void of Yoyogi Park, the lit windows of ten thousand apartments where people were living their small, private lives.
“Not bad,” Gojo said, which was high praise coming from someone who could teleport to mountaintops whenever the mood struck him.
He walked straight to the edge—no safety railing installed yet, just a sheer drop into the abyss and certain death for anyone without supernatural abilities or a very good parachute—and stood there fearlessly, looking out over the city he protected. The city that demanded everything from him and gave so little back. The wind whipped his silver hair around his face, tearing his hood back. He breathed in deeply, leaning forward over empty air, tilting his head up toward the stars you could barely see through the light pollution.
You let him have the moment, the silence, the space to just exist without performing. He didn’t get many opportunities like this.
You dropped your backpack on a stack of wooden pallets and pulled out the fleece blanket you’d packed earlier. You spread it over the rough wood to make the surface less miserable to sit on. More picnic, less tetanus risk.
“Come on,” you called over the wind, patting the space beside you. “Get over here before you fall off the edge and I have to explain to Ijichi how the Gojo Satoru somehow managed to trip and die on my watch.”
Gojo turned, and even in the darkness you could see the shape of his boyish grin. He walked back over and dropped down beside you, long legs dangling off the edge of the pallet stack. You settled in next to him, pressing your shoulder against his for warmth and contact.
You unpacked the feast. The potato chips were opened ceremonially and placed between you. The corn potage cans were cracked, sending little puffs of steam into the night. The strawberry-cream sandwich was retrieved from its plastic prison. The Premium Gold Swiss Roll was unveiled like a treasure.
You pulled out a single, cheap, red-and-white striped birthday candle and jammed it unceremoniously into the center of the cream. You flicked your lighter. The tiny flame caught, flickering wildly in the rooftop wind, struggling valiantly to stay alive.
“Here,” you said, shielding the flame with your hand. “You know the drill. Make a wish.”
Gojo stared at the candle. Over the years, this was usually the part where he made a joke. He’d wish for world peace delivered via express courier, or for Gakuganji to lose his dentures during an important speech, or for some genius pastry chef in Sendai to invent a revolutionary new flavor of Kikufuku. He’d wish for things that were grand, silly, impossible, meaningless.
But tonight, his face was serious. The blue of his eyes reflected the tiny, wavering flame.
“What’s wrong?” you asked quietly, concerned now.
“Nothing’s wrong.” He replied, his mouth quirking in something that wasn’t quite a smile. “I just... don’t know what to wish for.”
“Wish for something nice for Satoru,” you said, bumping your shoulder against his.
He turned his head to look at you fully, and the firelight danced across his face, softening all the sharp edges.
“Satoru already has everything he needs right here,” he said softly.
It was a cheesy line straight out of those bad rom-coms you watched together on rainy Sundays when neither of you had the energy to do anything else. It should have made you groan, should have made you roll your eyes and shove him off the pallet for being ridiculous. But coming from him, up here on a freezing roof with the world spread out below and nothing but sky above, it hit you right in the chest and made you melt.
“Then wish for it to stay,” you whispered.
Gojo held your gaze for a heartbeat longer, then closed his eyes. The ghost of a smile touched his lips. He blew out the candle. The darkness rushed back in, but it didn’t feel cold anymore. You plucked the candle out and handed him the plastic knife.
“Happy birthday, old man.”
“I’m thirty-six, Spices. That’s peak performance age. I’m in my prime.”
“You complained about your back three times today.”
“That’s unrelated.”
He sliced the roll in half—or what should have been half, except his piece was a lot smaller—and handed you the larger portion without comment, like he thought you wouldn’t notice. You noticed. But you didn’t say anything. You just accepted it and let him have his little quiet act of affection.
You ate in companionable silence for a while, watching the city pulse and shift below, sipping soup that warmed you from the inside out. The Premium Gold cake was genuinely better this year. The cream richer, the sponge fluffier, the whole thing just slightly more indulgent than it had any right to be for ¥400. You weren’t sure if it was the upgraded recipe or just placebo effect, but it tasted perfect.
Once even the crumbs of his birthday cake were gone and the corn potage was just a warm memory in your stomach, you reached into your bag for the final item. The most important one.
“Okay,” you said, feeling a sudden spike of nervousness despite having done this for nine years running. “Present time.”
It was no longer a repurposed pickle jar with a faded label you couldn’t scrub off. You’d upgraded to a proper mason jar with a hinged lid a few years back because you were a sophisticated adult now with disposable income and standards. You’d moved up in the world.
This year’s jar was filled to the brim with konpeito: those tiny star-shaped sugar candies he loved, glowing in pastel pinks, yellows, greens, and blues. And mixed in carefully with the colorful sugar stars, distributed evenly throughout, were dozens of small, meticulously folded strips of paper. This was the core of the tradition. The heart of it. A year’s worth of observations. Twelve months of moments. Three hundred and sixty-five days of seeing him.
You handed the jar to Gojo. He took it with both hands, carefully, the way he always did.
“Heavy this year,” he noted, shaking it gently so the candies rattled.
“It was a busy year,” you said, tucking your hair behind your ear self-consciously and trying not to sound too awkward about it. “Lots of… data points.”
“Selfie,” he announced abruptly, whipping out his phone.
You leaned in, cheek to cheek, the jar held up between you. He snapped a dozen photos in rapid succession—some serious, some silly, one where he licked your cheek without warning and you looked appropriately scandalized.
“Perfect,” he declared, reviewing them with obvious satisfaction. “These are going in the group chat.”
“Don’t you dare—”
“Too late. Already sent.”
Gojo didn’t open the jar to read the notes right away. He hadn’t done that since the first year. He liked to save them now, ration them out over time like a precious resource that needed to be conserved. You knew his routine, even if he’d never told you outright.
He kept all nine of the previous jars on a shelf in his bedroom, in that massive, sterile penthouse apartment he barely lived in because he preferred crashing at your small, cluttered place where things actually felt like home. You’d seen the jars on the rare occasions you went over there to grab something he’d forgotten or left behind.
The jars were lined up in chronological order. You knew he revisited them regularly. You’d noticed the candy levels fluctuating. The paper scraps sitting in different configurations, like he’d unfolded and refolded them in various orders, searching for something specific or just letting himself remember.
He saved them for bad days. On days when the weight of the world was crushing his spine and he couldn’t remember why he was doing any of this, he would open a jar, eat an expired candy that probably shouldn’t be eaten anymore, and unfold a piece of paper to remind himself that he was seen and loved by the one person that mattered. And not for the grand, earth-shattering things he did that made it into reports and legends, but for the small, human moments that made him who he was beneath it all.
Gojo tucked the jar safely into his hoodie pocket and opened his arms.
“Come here,” he murmured.
You scooted closer, wrapping your arms around his waist, burying your face in the warmth of his chest. He held you tight, chin resting on the top of your head, one hand smoothing down your back in absent strokes, a gesture of comfort that was as much for him as it was for you.
“This,” he said into your hair, “is the best birthday ever.”
“You say that every year.”
“And I’m right every year.”
You huffed a quiet laugh against his chest, feeling the rumble of his own answering chuckle vibrate through his ribs.
You stayed like that for a bit, just holding each other while the city breathed below you and the wind tried unsuccessfully to push you apart. Eventually you separated enough to finish the rest of the snacks, passing the strawberry sandwich back and forth and debating its merits as a legitimate food item.
Gojo was looking out at the city, eyes half-lidded. To you, the view was beautiful, a sprawling constellation of light and life, Tokyo breathing in and out in real time. To his Six Eyes, it was a sensory nightmare. Even without curses factored in, the sheer volume of data must be overwhelming. His brain was forced to process all of it, all at once, all the time.
And yet, he seemed to like looking at the world without his sunglasses or blindfold, at least, when he was around you. Like maybe the pain was worth it if he got to see things the way you did, just for a little while.
“Is it too loud?” you asked, studying the faint crease between his brows.
He gave a small nod. Then, he closed his eyes and leaned his head against your shoulder, his temple resting just below your ear.
“Describe it to me,” he murmured. “Tell me what you see.”
So you did. You turned the overwhelming sensory data he perceived into a quiet story. You squinted at the sprawling galaxy below and began to narrate it for him, one small piece at a time.
“Okay,” you began, shifting just enough to get a better view without disturbing him. “There’s a long string of bright white lights moving west. That’s the last train on the Yamanote line. It’s probably packed full of salarymen who stayed out way too late drinking with their colleagues and are going to have a lot of explaining to do when they finally get home to their wives.”
Gojo made a soft sound of agreement against your shoulder.
“And the Shinjuku Gyoen,” you continued, pointing, even though he had his eyes closed. “It has a little cluster of dim yellow lights. Those are the paper lanterns they put up for the winter illumination event. From up here, it looks like someone took a handful of stars and just... sprinkled them across the trees like fairy lights.”
You felt some of the tension leave his body, his shoulders dropping, the rigid line of his spine softening. His breathing deepened, slowing to match yours like he was using you as an anchor, something steady to orient himself around.
“All the way down there, on that corner on our right, there’s a rectangle of light. That’s Watanabe’s udon shop, I think. His light is still on. He’s probably in the back, cleaning up for the night, listening to his old jazz records.”
“He has good taste in music,” Gojo mumbled, his voice drowsy.
“He has terrible taste in music,” you argued. “It’s all mournful saxophones. Sounds like a whale dying in a closet.”
That earned you a huff of laughter, a warm puff of air against your neck. His arm, which had been resting loosely around your waist, tightened its hold, pulling you closer. He was tucked comfortably against you now, his considerable height folded down and his full weight leaning into your side, his face hidden from the sensory assault of the city view, sheltered and safe in the small space between your shoulder and neck.
You described the river of red taillights snaking along the highway, a slow-moving artery of light pumping through the city’s heart. You pointed out the green light of a pharmacy sign, probably serving insomniacs and emergency contraception buyers and people with sudden 2 AM medical concerns. You described the scattered golden rectangles of apartment windows still lit at this hour—late-night workers, new parents with crying babies, students cramming for exams. You even described the almost-total darkness of what you thought were the Imperial Palace grounds, though you were mostly guessing based on the general direction and the conspicuous absence of light in that particular area.
Gojo didn’t respond with words. He just kept breathing deeply. His hand had found its way to the hem of The Sweater, fingers absently playing with the fabric, including the grease stain you’d acquired earlier, which he seemed to find somehow comforting.
Here, on a cold, unfinished rooftop thirty stories above the world, he wasn’t the Strongest. He was just Satoru. And for tonight, however briefly, you were his eyes.
This moment was a gift made all the more precious by everything that had happened. Everything you’d both survived. Every close call that had stopped your heart. Every time you’d thought you might actually lose him, might have to figure out how to exist in a world where he simply wasn’t there anymore. Every time he’d walked into danger like it was nothing because to him, it was nothing, because he was Gojo Satoru and nothing could touch him, nothing could hurt him, nothing could bring him down.
Except it could. You knew that now, in a way you hadn’t fully understood before. You both did. The illusion of invincibility had cracked this year, and you couldn’t unknow what you’d learned.
After a long stretch of your rambling narration, the city seemed to settle into its late-night rhythm. The wind died down to a whisper. The distant hum of traffic softened. The world exhaled.
Gojo turned his head and pressed a soft kiss to the curve of your neck. It wasn’t a kiss of passion or demand. It was a kiss that said thank you. A kiss that said I see you, too. I see you seeing me. A kiss that said I’m here, you’re here, we’re both still here, we made it another year.
You leaned your head against his, your cheek resting on his soft hair, and let your eyes drift closed. You sat there together, two small figures against a universe of light. For a little while, you were both just two people in the dark, somehow always finding your way home to each other.
As you sat there with him on that rooftop, breathing in sync, you let yourself hope for more years. Twenty more. Fifty more. However many you could steal together.
Someday, when you were both old and gray and creaky, when Gojo’s back pain was legitimate instead of him just being dramatic for attention, when your knees protested stairs and you needed reading glasses for the notes in the jar, maybe by then, the world would have finally stopped demanding so much from him. Maybe he’d be allowed to just exist, to retire from saving everyone and just save himself for once.
And on that distant someday, sitting together on a much more sensible piece of furniture with proper back support, you’d look back on these nights with deep fondness and maybe a little disbelief. You’d remember the cold that bit at your fingers and the stars you could barely see through the light pollution. You’d remember cheap convenience store cake and the way his eyes reflected candlelight.
You’d remember that once upon a time, in the margins of an implausible story about gods and monsters and power beyond comprehension, two people found each other. One was too powerful to ever be normal, and one was too broken to ever be whole.
Somehow, against all odds, they’d fit together anyway. They kept finding each other every year after that. They kept choosing each other, over and over, in a thousand small ways that one else would ever see or understand.
And they lived. Not happily ever after, because real life was always messier and harder and more complicated than fairy tales ever admitted. There would be arguments and mistakes and days when everything felt hopeless. There would be fear and loss and all the things that came with loving someone in a world that was constantly trying to take everything away.
But they lived well. They lived fully and intentionally. They loved fiercely with their whole hearts. They were together and they stayed together through all of it. And that was the greatest magic of all.
The end.
(Or perhaps more accurately: to be continued, next December 7th, same time, same tradition, different restricted location, same two idiots, forever and then some more after that.)