Work Text:
“You can’t stay here.”
Gojo feigned indignation, gasping as he brought a long manicured hand up to his chest. “And here I thought librarians were generous souls!”
Nanami quirked an eyebrow, staring hard at the 6-foot something standing in the doorway of his home in the middle of the night.
The said librarian deliberates for exactly three seconds, then slams the door shut. The muffled sounds of someone trying to kick down the door along with a profanity of curses ring throughout the night.
Nanami had woken up, sometime during the early crack of dawn, to the relentless badgering outside his village home.
He trudged down the long flight of stairs, ready to give the intruder a passionate earful of proper decorum and whatnot, when upon swinging open the door he was met with Gojo Satoru—famously undead but just as annoying as any living creature.
Or so the tale goes.
At first glance, you wouldn’t have known someone as chatty and beaming with life as he could have ever been responsible for instilling a period of mass hysteria in the entire town.
When Gojo arrived, the taverns and local pubs had already been sullied with whispers of nosferatu and bloodsuckers that plagued the neighboring town.
There were curfews enforced, cloves of garlic hung at every door, mandated masses every Sunday—the whole thing.
It was only when someone as, for the lack of a better word, poised as Gojo set foot into town that everything changed.
With all the charm of a local prince, he managed to curry the public opinion to their favour and held the pitchforks at bay. Hell, not a month after he arrived, the mayor was quick to instil actual laws in the guidebook that gave their kind civil rights to mingle with mortals harassed.
Even if Nanami hadn’t known of him and his condition beforehand, you’d be hard pressed to walk into any local pub and not know.
Gojo only made it a point to broadcast it to every known pub within the town, lest there be misunderstandings or fake news loitering around.
There was not a horse nor man in the little village who wouldn’t have known which side of the tracks this one erred to.
If his unnatural palette of colours weren’t enough of a dead giveaway—ashen hair and even icier eyes—then surely the fact he meticulously brought a blood flask on every social occasion was enough of a ghastly confirmation.
They let him be most of the time, if not for the added tourism novelty he offered or just a general jovialness that made even the florist’s stressful day end on a lighter note.
Gojo was the harmless town vampire, the same way Nanami was the quiet librarian who kept books.
It was the way of the world, and Nanami was intent on following through.
No sooner than Nanami has one foot out the door the morning after, he’s not only greeted with the early morning dew and bustling Monday commoners—but an obviously irked immortal.
Gojo coughs, quite pathetically because he doesn’t even breathe, and pushes himself off the brick wall. Much to his chagrin, he also didn’t look like he just spent the entire night on the streets.
“Well that wasn’t very nice,” Gojo huffs.
Nanami doesn’t even acknowledge his non-presence. He fixes the collar on his coat and makes for the farmer’s market. With his luck, he might even make it back before opening time.
Gojo catches up to him in two long strides, long arms bare in a cream tunic. The biting morning air does nothing to him, of course, pesky dead skin.
“Listen,” Gojo begins, an edge of desperation now in his voice as he trailed after him. “All I’m asking for is one night. You’d be doing me a huge favour and I’ll be out of your hair.”
Nanami opens his mouth to bite back, spitefully, only they’re suddenly cornered by the rancher’s son—Yuji—pushing a wagon filled with the day’s freshly-picked fruits down the busy road.
“Goodmorning, Nanami, sir!” the 15-year-old greets in mock salute, earning a ruffle of his head from Nanami, before he began perusing the pile.
Gojo, having taken up temporary residence in the Zen’in household and knowing the kindred friendship it’s youngest shared with this young boy, beams down at him. “Yuji!”
Yuji’s smile widens, looking back and forth between the two. “I didn’t know you two were friends!”
Nanami frowns, inspecting a pear. “We most certainly are not—”
He’s interrupted by Gojo making a show of slinging an arm around his shoulders, bringing their faces together and positively beaming now.
“Best of friends, actually! We’re so close that Nanami here is doing me a solid by letting me stay over at his house for awhile. Isn’t that great?”
Nanami tries to shrug him off to no avail, superhuman strength and all.
The weight against his was firm, and maybe even a welcome warmth in the cold morning; not that he would admit it to anyone, lest of all give Gojo any more ammunition.
Instead Nanami picks up half the morning batch and dumps it into his woven basket. He hands Yuji the bill—keep the change, kid—and treks off to the village center, a comfortable arm slung around his shoulders.
“You’re asking me to watch you die.”
Gojo smiles, but it’s not the one he readily gives out to the rest of the curious public.
This was one best shared between hunched shoulders in a local pub, candlelights casting faces in hazy mildew, normally confident timbres going down just so.
“It’s not like that,” Gojo manages, eyes trained on the kerosene lamps glistening in the tavern.
Nanami scoffs, almost spitting out his drink. “Then what is it? Assisted suicide? You can’t ask me to be witness to this.”
“I’m not asking you to,” Gojo sighs, the sound a strain even to his own ears, the greatest irony of it all being how life seemed to only be catching up to him now when he wanted to be done with it.
He opens his mouth once, twice; before finally landing on: “I’m just so tired.”
Nanami flinches instinctively.
The musty air suddenly felt weighted, his own breaths coming at a heavier pace. The boisterous laughter around the tavern faded into obsolete silence, muffled and intrusive all at once.
Nanami felt liquid hot, his knuckles gripping the now empty beer glass whitening.
“I know,” because he truly did know at that point, and then: “But you can’t ask me to do this.”
Nanami was twelve when he met Gojo.
Molars bare of sharp edges and short fingernails trimmed neatly, he had donned then; making Gojo, for all intents and purposes, just a regular thirteen-year-old boy.
Human, he had been, too.
Nanami’s grandfather had business with the next town, some books needed restocks and the pick-up location was mistakenly arranged just one stop short of their own humble village.
Nanami was twelve and an avid reader of the fantasy genre, and so maybe it had been written down in the stars, that his first real friend would be someone who had seemed to spring from the novels themselves.
Because Gojo wasn’t always a monster.
No, before all that, he truly had been the most animated little boy who flitted through life with undeniable charm and all the love in the world of parents who also ran the local government.
He was the only child and harbored the suffocating devotion of one who grew up with nothing ever given in half, but always full.
There was always a full breakfast table with his favourite food, a full bookcase filled with every possible book imaginable for bedtime stories, and always; the unerring, confident stride Gojo took in life knowing he had such a steady foundation incapable of crumbling.
Until that one night, a rival revolutionary gang grew tired of the tyranny and broke into the mayor’s townhouse.
The papers the morning after had mentioned in detail of the gruesome and visceral way the delinquents murdered the alcalde and his wife, until the end, where it lay in fine print: Only the young boy was spared.
Nanami remembers seeing Gojo again some years after, him at seventeen and his childhood friend a blossoming eighteen; only he had a chronic slump in his shoulders and the childlike wonder ever-present in his eyes had steeled.
It tugged at Nanami’s heart to have seen Gojo through his best and now broken.
There was radio silence after that.
No hidden letters in the fresh stock of books delivered from the neighbouring town, nor midnight visits from a lonely grieving tourist.
His grandfather was next to go by the autumn of his 19th, old age and all; couldn't be helped, the doctors said. He had been truly alone, himself, then.
Nanami would meet Gojo again—whoever he had become, he had not recognized anymore—on his 21st.
In the period of panic over the next town’s bloody massacre, the story Gojo tells him in hushed silence is: a deal with the devil gone wrong, waking up lusting for blood and angry and paranoid, but above all, damningly: It’s still here, Nanami. I still hurt.
Gojo had, all of them, fooled with pretty smiles and dazzling charm.
Nanami, foolishly, wanted so badly to be as bewitched.
“I can’t do this, Gojo. I won't do it—anything but this.”
Nanami tastes ash in his mouth and smoke in his lungs.
Gojo is there at his door, for the nth time, with the same self-deprecating grin plastered on his face. It is the week after, he is restless and bored he says, and exactly five stripes of sunlight beam through the glass panel outside a beautiful summer day.
Nanami's heart breaks.
Trust Gojo to stage everything; his flirtatious comments, snide remarks, even his own reckoning.
The final act to a life-long role he had done, maybe literally, to death now.
Gojo strides in casually, a hand in his pocket and some of the same youthful vigour playing in his eyes again; because, Nanami knows, this had been a long-nurtured childhood wish from when the first window broke at midnight and his parents hid him in the cupboard.
“Is there any other place as heavenly to die as than this?”