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Nobara likes Jujutsu Tech.
This is her final decision on what she’ll say if she’s asked about it. She likes the city, likes the busy schedule, likes the people within it, and she loves the stipend of money she gets every month. Everything about this place fits her to her core, from the brutality of the Sister Exchange event to the giggly domesticity Yuuji breathes life to whenever he helps them make dinner.
It feels like home in a way hers never had, like freedom and life and stretching her wings as far as they can go because she knows the tips of her feathers will never catch on a wall.
There’s a few things, however, that she can’t exactly put her finger on yet.
It starts with Yuuji, because just about everything starts with that idiot. They find him passed out on the couch with Gojo-Sensei, of all people, Saturday morning and well past sunrise.
‘...They’re so weird,’ Nobara thinks, sat in the empty classroom a few days later, watching Yuuji struggle through a math problem a few feet away at the desk beside hers, Gojo-Sensei tilted over his shoulder and gradually but quietly pointing him through the steps, though maybe to no avail, she wonders.
Megumi’s engrossed in his own assignment sat by the window, having ditched his desk for the tiny little lip of space like the emo loser he is, pencil scratching away as he works, unbothered. He probably thinks he looks so cool, foot slipping off the edge every ten seconds.
She forgives him for not seeming to notice, considering he’s too busy contracting main character disease, even though it’s more likely that he just doesn’t care.
Yuuji says something under his breath, just small enough for her to miss it, and Gojo-Sensei huffs, poking out his tongue as he says something cheesy back, just the right brand of insufferable that Yuuji thinks its the funniest thing on planet earth.
Silently, Nobara tilts her head, newly dyed hair spilling over her shoulder as she blinks, mind slowly turning.
Ever since that morning, she’s seen something familiar on Gojo’s face- something she knows, deeply and intimately, but which she can’t put a name to. It’s on the tip of her tongue, balancing on soft muscle and teetering dangerously, precariously unreachable as it wobbles. It’s been driving her insane.
She goes back to her own assignment rather than infuriating herself more, pissily dragging her way through polynomials even as her thoughts run wild. Something about it wants to scream Fumi-chan, Fumi-chan, Fumi-chan, loud and frenetic in her ears even though Nobara is quick to shut it up, snapping on the muzzle and slamming the door. Something else digs a nagging into the top notch of her spine, a buzzing little itch that claims she knows exactly where she knows it and yet giving her no answers whatsoever.
‘Who even cares,’ she thinks to herself, brushing her teeth that night as something goes clattering in the kitchen, Megumi and Yuuji’s voices clanging together as they bark words that dissolve into stupid teasing as soon as their sound breaks. ‘It isn’t like Gojo’s that interesting.’
Except he is, she knows, even though she refuses to admit it, turning the faucet on with a squeak and watching the water run, staring down the drain as if it’ll unravel the mystery for her.
‘It only started after that morning when we found them on the couch,’ Nobara thinks again, again, again, again, watching from the corner of her eye as Gojo stands at the edge of the training field, gaze fixed steady on where Maki beats Megumi into a pulp.
A full week and a half later, and she’s still catching that thing showing up on Gojo-Sensei’s face, so irritating only because she can’t put a label to it, and nobody else seems to notice it or care. ‘What am I missing,’ Nobara laments, sighing and dragging up to her feet when Maki guffaws, turning to her with a triumphant, gloating smirk.
Her next mission goes badly.
She gets a gash on her shoulder, the handle of her hammer snaps, and a twelve year old girl is decapitated right in front of her. When Nobara swallows the water and tylenol Ieiri gives her when she gets back, she can still taste the tang of her copper blood.
“Are you sure you’re alright, Kugisaki?” Ieiri-san asks, mellow as she peels her gloves off, and Nobara only shrugs, rolling her shoulder as she plasters a grin on.
“Me? Nah, I’m fine,” she scoffs, a flash of movement in her peripherals as she turns her head, shimmying her shirt back on as her eyes meet hazel in the mirror hanging on the back wall.
‘...Oh,’ she thinks, faltering enough she almost stutters, staring at her reflection as the smile on her lips freezes into a curl, ‘that’s what.’
It stares back at her, the thing that’s been driving her crazy for two weeks now, so familiar it could be family and yet nothing but a stranger.
“Kugisaki?” Ieiri calls, and she snaps her eyes away from the mirror, making her smile bigger, wider.
“All good,” she promises, the dead girl’s last horrified expression flashing in her mind as she shoves open the clinic’s heavy door, leaving before she can be grilled again on her mental state.
‘No wonder,’ she thinks, listing down the long, drafty hallways back to the dorms, lips curled up and eyes a little glassy, pretending because to refuse to could mean certain death. The big kind, the little kind, the medium ones in between. Any death, every death.
Gojo-Sensei is pretending too, just like her. The reason she hadn’t been able to recognize it on him immediately, she puzzles, is because he always keeps his eyes hidden.
Once she knows about it, it’s difficult to keep herself from seeing it.
It’s everywhere Gojo-Sensei is, like it clings to him in a second skin. It’s in the lax, loose sort of laziness in his flamboyant posture, the stupid jokes in his obnoxiously happy words, the curve of his widened grins that despite their width, never particularly seem terribly genuine.
‘What do you have to pretend about,’ Nobara wonders, zoning out during a breakfast that Gojo’s crashed, supposedly with news to give them though the box of sweets he brought to share seems to be his bigger priority. ‘You’re the strongest, aren’t you?’
“Nobaraaa,” Gojo whines, flicking a crumb at her when she just sits at the breakfast bar, mechanically chewing a spoonful of cereal. “Megumi’s so mean, I brought these to share! You at least have one if he won’t.”
She snorts, slurping up another spoonful of milk as loudly as she can just to make Megumi scowl, the resident target of ungodly, over-exuberant attention at eight in the morning.
“Dunno,” she says, resting her chin in her hand, curious to see the artificial crumple of his expression, hidden behind the black of his blindfold. Yuuji is out still, roped into a self-sanctioned camping trip with Panda and Inumaki-senpai and lost in the woods somewhere. It had been some inane excuse they’d given last night, something dumb like wilderness survival training, even though it had been for little more than utter teenage bullshit. She’s certain they brought sparklers, and that Panda has all the materials for what she thinks could be a Molotov cocktail. She’s also certain that Gojo knows all about it.
“Awww,” Gojo pouts, giving the box of sweets a jiggle. “But they’re expensive. You like expensive,” he teases, and she narrows her eyes, because he’s right, but she’s also curious.
“...No,” she says, simple as she turns away, nose high in the metaphorical air as she shovels in another spoonful of cereal. She’s so curious it practically aches like a cavity.
Just as she thinks, Gojo-Sensei sticks out his tongue and blows a raspberry, childish and immature, except now that she’s looking for it, she sees it everywhere. How his shoulders sit a little lower than before, how when he stuffs his tongue back in his mouth his lips curl the smile they’d had earlier even larger. How it sits there, plastic, even as he gets up, cracking a joke about grumpy teenagers and early mornings.
He’s pretending again. She knows it- she knows it, and the glare Megumi sends her way only solidifies her conclusion.
For whatever reason, this was important to him, enough that Megumi actually reaches out to take a sweet despite how she knows he doesn’t like them, except that by the time he grabs it, Gojo’s gone again. His hand waves behind the corner, a line tumbling off his tongue about being late for a mission, and it’s too cheery, too happy.
Wordlessly, Megumi turns his head to her, brows furrowed and disappointment in his green eyes past the annoyance. Nobara only shrugs, dragging her spoon in her cereal, certain now, but with what can’t really be called anything else besides a pyrrhic victory.
“Sorry,” she says, curt and a little clumsy as she sets a pastry box on Gojo’s office desk two days later, harder than she really meant to. She winces slightly when it dents a corner, watching white eyebrows climb up slack face behind dark glasses.
“...For what?” Gojo-Sensei asks, leaning onto an elbow and twirling a pencil between his fingers, a playful smile slipping on his lips and something she might even call a ghost when he’s been vanished by missions since the day with the sweets. He gasps suddenly, teasing and mocking, clapping a hand over his chest. “Don’t tell me you actually like me, Nobara?”
She doesn’t dignify the farcity with an answer, face slated into something flat as she stares level at him, tall even sat in an office chair, thinking. Chewing on her words, on her thoughts, on what she knows now.
“You’re pretty lonely, aren’t you,” she blurts, blunt as a rusty shovel, and can’t help but be a little victorious about it when Gojo visibly pauses.
“Is that why you got me apology pastries?” Gojo asks, mouth curling up into a catty tease, eyes tensed with stress behind his glasses. “To insult me to my pretty face?” He bats his lashes, pushing his glasses further up his nose to hide his eyes, and Nobara knows exactly what he’s doing.
Her hometown is a sour sort of taste on her tongue, bitter and stagnant like the water in the creek of its small woods, covered in algae and buzzing with mosquitoes. It lingers sometimes on her skin, filmy and gross, a reminder that she would have had a death if she’d stayed in that suffocating village. A small one, a big one, or any of the medium in between.
“...I’m sorry for whatever you’ve lost, Sensei,” Nobara says, because she’s curious, because she’s looking in the mirror watching blue eyes widen, evidently more than a little at a loss. “It sucks,” she continues, shrugging, because though maybe they’re the same, their losses are different- they have to be when hers set her free. “You don’t have to be so fake all the time about it, though.”
She watches Gojo flounder for a while, lips opening, parting further, shutting again into a thin line, glossy and pressed together a little tightly.
“...Class is going to start soon,” he says, instead of anything else, and Nobara only nods, quietly leaving the office.
She wouldn’t have been honest before she left that smothering place, either.
“Delivery,” Gojo hums two days later, after another disappearance on a slew of unrelenting missions.
Nobara looks up, hands lurching just in time to catch the box of chocolates dropped into her palms. Gojo sticks his tongue out, blindfold hiding his eyes, hands in his pockets as he leans over her.
“You gonna insult me to my pretty face?” She echoes, ticking up a grin of her own when he smiles, scoffing a huff of a laugh.
“No,” Gojo-Sensei says, folding down into a seiza next to her at the kotatsu table. It’s late, maybe almost one in the morning, dark in the dorm besides one stray lamp in the corner, just enough light for her to finish her essay with. “I…” He starts, and then stops, mouth closing as he sighs without any breath.
A large palm drops onto her head, steady and quiet, and Nobara lets it sit there as she opens the box, eyeing the assortment of expensive Belgian chocolates with interest. She picks out a truffle while Gojo figures out what he wants to say, nibbling on the shell of it as she looks up, waiting.
“You’re too observant, you know that,” he mutters, pouting slightly, and Nobara laughs.
“Takes one to know one,” she refutes, shoving the rest of the truffle into her mouth as Gojo-Sensei audibly sighs, blowing white hair out of his face where it’s fallen over his forehead. Maybe he really does use Limitless to keep it up.
She can’t say she isn’t a little surprised when he reaches up and tugs off the blindfold, blinking tired eyes open before they’re swinging down to fix on her. “Should I ask Shoko to put you on medication,” he snarks, and Nobara raises an eyebrow, pulling out another chocolate even though she’s still chewing the first.
“Should I ask for you,” she retorts, and smiles when Gojo snorts, mussing up her hair.
“...I’m fine,” he murmurs, hand dropping away to settle on the top of her back, nothing but a reassurance, maybe for him or maybe for her. “I’m your teacher. I can take care of myself, so don’t worry about me.”
“If we don’t though,” Nobara says, leaning just a little closer, “who will?”
It’s probably more than telling when Gojo says nothing, something melancholy on his face as his arms slinks over her shoulders when she tips closer still, a simple, steady weight once she’s slumped against his side. Like this, he doesn’t really feel like the strongest. He doesn’t really feel like Gojo-Sensei, infallible and unshakable. He feels like a man, flesh and flimsy blood, scar-able tissue and human to the core.
“...If you want that privilege,” he murmurs, long enough after the silence has sunken in Nobara’s gotten used to it, “you’ve got to catch up to me, first.” She lifts her eyes, meeting blue as they bore down, an intensity to them she doesn’t usually see the other side of when she’s only ever been hidden behind it. It freezes her for a long moment, stuck in the shell of her skin, until the corner of his mouth ticks up, and Nobara suddenly gets it.
“You’re so damn dramatic,” she teases, holding up a caramel chocolate in an offering, and feels a little more peaceful when Gojo-Sensei relaxes. “I’ll kick your ass one day.”
“Oh, will you?” Gojo placates, and Nobara scoffs, shoving the chocolate at his face when he only opens his mouth and raises an eyebrow, annoying as can be.
“Yeah,” she declares, smearing caramel drizzle on his cheek as Gojo snorts a giggly laugh she’s never really heard before, chocolate catching on his teeth when he bites into it. “I’ll beat you up until you’re stupid, then I’ll drag you down to the clinic and treat all your injuries.”
He laughs again a little louder, that chiming giggle that’s so unlike the usual bark she’d been associating with him since the beginning of the year, and it’s almost like an affirmation. Something real, genuine and uncontrolled.
“I hope so,” Gojo says, the words wistful though they aren’t sad, and Nobara can’t help the sudden pang of visceral, aching loneliness that rings in her chest. The strongest is what everyone calls him- what she calls him. She’d known he’d been lonely, but she’s never one to assume that people don’t have lives outside of what she can see of them.
Except, Nobara knows, flopping down with a purpose onto Gojo-Sensei’s thighs, thwacking his arm until he sighs and gives in, unfolding to sit in a butterfly instead. Except that for him, he doesn’t. They are his life.
“Help me write my essay,” Nobara declares, clutching the box of chocolates close so she can nibble on them where she lays, knowing that Gojo knows she’s not doing any more work tonight and a little curious still because she refuses to be nervous.
“You mean you still haven’t started it?” He chides, fingers snapping down to playfully pinch her side, and Nobara squirms away, butting into his stomach as she groans as loud as physically possible.
“I hate Englishhhh,” she whines, eyes a little gritty in the late hour when she shuts them, groaning into expensive shirt and knowing with a clarity that though maybe she’s got a long way to go, there’s already a staggering amount of trust in the press of limbs and body against her own.
She feels the slight movement when Gojo shakes his head fondly, no doubt rolling his eyes, vindicated for more reason than one when a callous free palm smooths over her shoulder, the touch something she could almost call a little reverent. It would make her sad if she let it, so she doesn’t.
“Your lowly scribe awaits, your highness,” Gojo-Sensei teases, fake somber and false solemn, badly enough so to make her grin, and as she opens her mouth to talk, Nobara sets the chocolates down. She doesn’t really need them anymore.
She’s got a lot of work ahead of her, she thinks, dozing off as she tries to order pronouns and tenses right with a sleep clumsy tongue. It isn’t work she doesn’t want to do, because Nobara likes Jujutsu high, likes the city, likes the busy schedule, likes the money she gets from the school.
She loves the people within it most of all.