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Nanami has never been successful in knowing exactly what kind of day it happens or what triggers it.
He remembers, vividly, only this: his breath hitching as the air tightens around his lungs, marrow bones scraping together against his ribcage it hurts to even move; and his vision, for that infinitesimal moment, clouds ever so slightly.
The moment doesn’t linger however.
It could have very well all happened under a fraction of a second, to this world he had long suspected was quickly growing tired of his tireless prodding of mortal shells; but to the Messenger of Death, forever suspended in eternity, it certainly felt just as long.
It is a delicate little thing, the breaking of what seemed like his very being.
It was sometimes too blinding and painful, that, more than once during the moment of such peril Nanami glanced up to the vast ocean of clouds, asking: What could I have possibly done? What more could I do that I already haven’t?
But no sooner than that stretch of time threatened to bleed over to infinity, it always stops just short of being a fine line.
Then came the aftercare.
This part of the ritual seemed to rush back at him with more gentleness than he was accustomed to. It came in the form of the soothing of rigid postures and mending tight-knit eyebrows and hunched backs unfurling and heaving breaths steadying.
Nanami was stunned the first time it happened.
He had been situated near a children’s hospital, dangling on the edges of a school bus veering into murky waters, lying in wait for the deed to be done.
It came almost instantly, the pain, that is: Nanami grasped blind at whichever he could ground himself on, nevermind he could be found out for doing so, just because the pain was overwhelming and pressing and urgent.
He had half the mind to go to the front desk himself, believing the discomfort to come from a mortal vein having spent nearly eternity loitering around its sodden earth; when, upon taking the first step, the pain ebbed and flowed right out of him just so.
The firm hand clutching his chest loosened, the ringing in his own ears mellowed to a steady hum.
After a while, Nanami felt himself rooted again.
“How long do you plan on doing this, brother?”
There were great braziers enclosing the dome of the throne room, sandstone columns seeming to spring from the Asphodel forests itself with the way their vines clung to the cool surface. It covered the hall in hues of golden sunshine and dancing shadows altogether—befitting, then, of it’s current occupants who had each boasted of being masters in poetry and sleuth.
Gojo chuckled from where he sat on a high-backed, hand-carved oak armchair raised from the marbled ground. Not breaking eye from his quiet observation of the ground below, he replied, “Whatever do you mean, brother?”
Getou noted the zealous way Gojo was regarding the earthling with amusement.
To borrow colloquially from the world down under, the messenger god then, seemed like ‘a dog with a bone’. Latching, quite obsessively, unto this passion project of another poor deity.
“Gojo,” warned Getou, opting for his given name to better convey his apprehension of the trickster god’s current fixation. “This is not the same. He is not like the others, and you must keep pace this time. Please, brother.”
Gojo quirked an eyebrow facing him, an intricate line of frosty wisps moving along his face. The easy smile on his face had been nursed into something less jovial, but the playful glint in his eyes held.
“Do you mean it because the mortal is fallen?”
Getou sighed, shaking his head. “He is not mortal—”
“Oh yes, I’m quite aware of his situation,” Gojo waved his hand dismissively, already turning his attention back to the hospital scene unfolding before his eyes. “I’ve known since the first fortnight.”
The ambulance sirens had been a mellow ringing against the decked walls, the lingering smell of rotten flesh making the vined fleurs close in on themselves as if in hiding. The spacious dome seemed all too restricting suddenly.
Getou reached for his bow and arrow right away. Gojo looked on, oblivious and blithely ignorant of the decaying all around him.
Instead he turned to Getou, grinning. “This demon is quite something, isn’t he?”
Every time it happens, Nanami feels a part of himself gone.
It didn’t come like what he imagined his own heart breaking would be, because this had been far more sinister and untempered all at once.
It was deliberate, the way his very essence seemed to rip out of him sometimes. It was persistent, the forceful way it had then been plunged right back in, as if someone had probed and picked on his skin experimentally and discarded it half-heartedly.
Nanami had not a body, a heart, a skin to speak of; those of his kind were not permitted to.
Instead he had a shadow of what could be passed off as such. Most of it was in part because most of his duties revolved around blending in as if he could very well have been filled to the brim with so much life, as if he did not spend every waking hour stripping people off of it.
Karma, then—or atonement for his sins?
Only that made no sense, either, because penance had been demanded from him the moment he entered mortal ground. Paid for each sin, painstakingly, he had been doing without a hitch for so many years until the first bouts of searing pain started.
In that brief moment Nanami felt himself out of depth, barely afloat in his own consciousness. It had been like drowning with none but yourself as your own life line to cling to.
It came in visions and sounds, too, sometimes: the smell of honey liquid in the air, images of marble countertops and floral wreaths against wispy ashen hair, a pearly white smirk that molded itself into the vowels of his name—which had struck him so hard he nearly jolted.
Because it couldn’t be.
The gods hadn’t interfered with mortals in a long time. Even longer, their kind, and almost never with his.
Gojo didn’t know where this particular interest in this particular demon started.
He was fallen, that much was obvious: the unguarded way he went about plucking off souls with still a tender hand, the genuine sorrow that befell his face every time he did it, and the sluggish way he went about his duties not at all like the other brazen fiends.
Yuki, for one, paid no qualms to the moral dilemma; no matter it was stillborn or eldery. Meimei, Goddess of Hunting, was her preferred poison for this very reason.
Getou favoured, as War God himself, Haibara: for being the exact opposite and demonstrating at least a little hesitation in collecting their essence.
Nanami had been neither.
He was neither cold nor calculating, but merciful and benevolent at the same time. He had, after enough observance from Gojo, in all his day trips to the mortal world and back as was his role as the Messenger God; been too human in his proceedings.
Maybe that’s why Gojo had taken to slipping Nanami’s soul out from under him every now and then.
I only want to see something, argued Gojo at the start, to an unimpressed Getou already envisioning the worst-case scenario. He won’t ever know a thing, reared his mischievous godhead.
For every time Nanami felt like his soul was ripping itself apart from the seams of his very body, Gojo observed with curious eyes—probing at the sheer lack of black shadows in the ethos as most the fallen had, but instead hosted, amusingly, more light—until he felt the fabric about to tear and quickly nursed everything back together and pounded it back.
The next time it happens, Gojo knew Nanami had known.
It seemed as if he had for some time because Nanami had taken this latest palpitation with decidedly more ease and marched on no matter the pounding of his heart.
His soul hanged, suspended in the dust of the universe and exposed to the divine gaze, for what seemed like forever.
It was the most vulnerable a person could be and yet Nanami had acted as if he still kept all his cards neatly concealed from prying eyes.
It could very well have been that, then, because no sooner than Gojo grew impatient and thrust back the damn thing into its shell had Nanami glanced up at the sky, with a pointed gaze that seemed aimed directly at his shocked ones. No, he couldn’t be—
"Messenger," Nanami smirked. “I don’t believe we’ve met?”