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“Are you gonna kiss me or not?”
Nanami suppresses a sigh, palming the stitched lining of the black fedora hat nestled under his fingers. The wool already had a bit of an ashen tone to it, stray lint strings clinging to the fiber he was itching to take off.
It was his favourite, but more importantly, he was still on duty.
“Gojo-san,” he starts, turning to look at his assignment of the day perched dangerously close to the railings of this particularly high-rise rooftop. Assignment was putting it mildly, for this man was, for all intents and purposes: a suicidal maniac looking for trouble.
“How many times do I have to tell you that’s not how it works?”
Gojo bellows over in laughter, in the process almost throwing himself off the roof, were it not—absolutely not, he insists—Nanami’s quick flick of his fingers that favoured the winds to his favour, but that Gojo’s feet planting itself firmly on the concrete was purely the twenty-two year old’s fast reflexes.
A professional basketball player, it wrote on the black card he fished out his briefcase earlier that morning. Ijichi also scribbled a small note towards the end, making Nanami squint, because the assistant to the reapers rarely ever strayed from character: can be quite difficult, it read, might need more persuasion.
It was with that forewarning Nanami opted for his favourite felt hat and headed towards the rainy slums towards Upper Tokyo, with more intent and readiness than usual.
He moved through the shadows of the living until he chanced upon the man who went by Gojo Satoru, long-limbed feet casually dangling over the skyscraper of the hospital deck with nothing to support him aside from the rusted handles above his head. The paint was chipped, the steel way past corroding.
“Hello,” said Gojo, in his flimsy coat and pale complexion, when the man first locked eyes with his mortal form: all rigged lines of black that stretched from the top of his hat, down to his pointed leather shoes.
His uniform was standard, all nondescript and intentionally so; lest anyone catch whiff of them en route. No, the seeing and believing part was reserved for those in the non-standard, for those the hourglass deemed short on time as it was; and lended, for the last time, a helping hand to guide them down the path of the grains.
Nanami could not have believed, maybe would have opted out of this particular task altogether, if he had only known how much of an annoying menace this one would be.
“Come on,” Gojo taunts, again, for the nth time in the span of an hour Nanami has spent standing towards the back of the ledge, hands itching not just to dust off the lint but haul something back; and Gojo, foolish and possibly careless, in front the railings with his long arms and longer legs. “I know who you are. I know how they do it. Your hat gives you away.”
Nanami, because the winds were picking up and Gojo had yet to fall off as per the vague inscription on the card, indulges him: because, surely, who else could after? “Do pray tell.”
Gojo’s smile widens at that—the silk strands of snow hair framing his face moving with the wind, the glint in his eye sharpening for just a fraction; that, thought Nanami distantly, what kind of person who smiled and looked like that be doing on the edge of a roof.
Smiling to himself as if in satisfaction of having a curiosity fulfilled, Gojo turns his attention back towards the high-rise buildings enveloping the Metropolis skyline.
“A friend told me it was like true love’s kiss and eating the poisoned fruit at the same time. Either you’re the prince charming coming to claim me or the snake threatening to exploit me. Which one is it, reaper?”
Nanami eyes him for a few seconds. “Neither.”
Gojo’s ears perk up, tilting his head and quirking an eyebrow. “How so?”
It’s this moment, thinks Nanami, that was the particular reason the soul roster somehow landed this twenty-something in his lap and expected him to make their journey into the unknown as safe as he possibly could. It is this particular afternoon, when the clouds are just shy out of reach from the pillar they stationed themselves in; and the wind just a breeze too strong for when it can dangerously throw them off it.
Nanami does not remember much about his past life, only this: that he died young, almost painfully so.
The sound of flesh being torn and the buzz of subway stations have always startled him, for reasons he could never place, no matter how much he tried locating the source of such.. agony. He walks the rainy streets and has remained a non-combatant for as long as he remembers in this life, but that is to say, perhaps what eats at him most days—it is not much.
He could tell Gojo that all this talk of death’s kiss claiming last breaths is a little myth, conjured up in the shadows of bored soul chasers looking to pass the time and whispering a little too loudly on mortal winds.
He does not tell it like it is: that once mortal lips meet death angel’s, it does not bring eternal bliss, but more so; relentless anguish at having known of every life you have lived since, but feeling powerless in the knowing. It brings with it, more than the sands of time coming to claim you at the final station of your life, the foreboding warning that lingers—that this might be your last.
It is a cruel fate, thinks Nanami, and he is still paying for it today.
Instead, Nanami does something else entirely, the first of his own accord in his previously rule-stricken life because he felt he was tempting fate as it was with all his uncertainties; and, more importantly, because you seldom saw happy people lounging around rooftops seeming both dejected and satisfied at the same time—he looks at Gojo that way.
The same way he had been trying, in vain, to somehow fold the story into itself and see past his own pages; the same way he had been granted the power to do so on others, but never with himself.
Maybe then he would understand why the rain felt harsher that morning, the steps in his stride heavier, the air in his lungs harder to breathe through.
“This is Nanami Kento-kun, a former salaryman! He’s got a good head on his shoulders!”
“You told him what?! That being a child was not a crime?”
“No, I know it isn’t, but we need to prepare them for this..”
...
“Hey, Nanami, wanna go out for drinks? I’m buying.”
...
“Ijichi told me you had Shoko heal you after fighting Mahito.. How bad is it? Let me see.”
“Say, Nanami, what do you like about Gojo Satoru? I’ll start. Everything!”
…
“What do you mean Gojo’s sealed in a box?!”
“No, that’s not, I didn’t mean—alright. I’m coming.”
“There’s too many of them underground and I still can’t find Gojo, Yuji is somewhere—”
“I’m so tired..”
“My arm..”
...
“You’ve got it from he—”
Nanami forces himself out the memories and jolts back into reality, breath coming in small pants.
His eyes snap back to Gojo almost immediately, locking eyes with his worried gaze, a small frown perched on his face. In his muddled daze, he failed to recognize Gojo was standing just before him, the man dangling by the edge long gone.
“Reaper,” Gojo says warily, voice laced with concern, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. You okay?”
That’s what does him in.
The fingers holding unto the fedora hat tighten, his own stomach contorting as he feels his nerves shift with every shaking breath. Suddenly the wind is too much. The sun is too imposing. The blue of Gojo’s eyes too knowing and the tone too familiar; and, thinks Nanami, he now knows why.
“Gojo-san,” he manages, nerves settling just enough to say: “You’re not going to die today. It's not your time yet."
Gojo Satoru does not die in the late afternoon sun, when the reports should have said the wind blew his feeble body too harshly, or his friends whisper the recent passing of Getou was the last push he needed to make that jump. His head does not crack as it meets pavement, the warm blood seeping into the cobbled road and eliciting hysteria from the passerby.
But, and at this three quills and ink palettes have been broken and spilled over sullied parchment, Nanami Kento died: in a downtown station by the Shibuya line, not by the hand of an errant curse they all banded together to eliminate; but, and this answers the why since his first awakening; because he could have easily dodged the strike, and yet did not, and so the divine gods have sought punishment the only way they knew.
Nanami does not meet Gojo for the first time on an abandoned rooftop under the light breeze of August summer, where they are young and confused. He meets him, first, in a world far too alike their own; but cruel, in that they sealed him away and asked him to come badgering the lock as if through sheer force of will he could tear it open, as if he could outrun forces stronger than he was, as if—
Gojo Satoru, he writes into the report, is already dead.