"…Gojo?"
"Mmhm?" he responds, poking around the gift shop. Naoya is long gone by now, but it was still too early in the morning for any of the tourist areas in the salt flats to be fully opened. It didn't stop Gojo from snooping in the singular gift shop that didn't lock its storefront. Earlier in the day, Yoshi had given a bracelet to Gojo, but he took his sweet time chatting with Naobito before using it to follow her and Naoya to Bolivia.
"Why did you stay back to pick up your shoes, but not mine?"
She glowers at his polished black Chelsea boots next to her damn house slippers.
The tall sorcerer pauses, stretching to his full height and pivoting on his heel to face her. His sunglasses are still hooked onto the front of his jacket right now, so Yoshi can see the moment that Gojo gets a funny thought and decides to share it.
Eyes glimmering like the morning sky, Gojo tells her, "Because I really like your feet."
As Gojo begins to giggle at his own joke, Yoshi nods slowly, ruminative. "I could just leave you in Bolivia," she remarks calmly. "That bracelet only worked because of me."
"Don't be so salty, Yoshi," Gojo teases, a large smile stretching over his face, "Or do you want me to lick you….?" Yoshi's eyes go wide, and surprisingly, so do Gojo's, like he didn't actually realize it sounded erotic until the words were out of his mouth. "That isn't what I meant," he confesses. Then his voice lowers half an octave and he runs his tongue over his lips. "I'm not opposed, though."
It's still dark enough that the stars are out, and Gojo, with his pale hair and eyes, practically glows in moonlight. He's pretty, and his easy smile makes him even prettier. If they were anywhere else but here and now, Yoshi might be overwhelmed by him. Every time his teasing takes a turn towards flirting, Yoshi notices it. Every time he smirks or bumps her arm or tilts his glasses down to look at her, Yoshi notices.
She isn't blind, she isn't an idiot, and Gojo is terribly attractive.
But he also licked salt off the ground half an hour ago.
Yoshi inches away from him, wrinkling her nose.
"Oya," Gojo notices her movement and pouts, the sultry look vanishing as quickly as it appeared. "Did you just try to move out of my licking range?"
"Ew," Yoshi exhales and presses her lips together so she doesn't laugh out loud. It was too stupid to laugh at. "Now I need to worry about feet licking?"
"Whoa, hey! Those are two separate things!" Gojo exclaims, scandalized. Yoshi ends up laughing anyway, because he looks so offended. "But if I did lick you, it wouldn't be gross. You'd ask for more."
"N-No," she continues to chuckle. It's far too late for him to turn it back into a sexual joke. "Go brush your teeth, I've seen where your tongue's been." As soon as he starts to look too smug, Yoshi turns away from Gojo and starts to unwrap a slap bracelet from her wrist.
"Hey! Don't leave me." Gojo hastens to her side and digs his fingers into the fabric of her jacket. "Of course I'd brush my teeth first, I'm not an animal…"
If she lets him, Gojo could probably talk her ear off as easily as Wendy. "Glasses," she interrupts, dropping the conversation.
"Ah? What about 'em?" He fiddles with the dark shades at his collar but doesn't move them. There's so little cursed energy in the salt flats that Gojo doesn't need to cover up the Six Eyes out here. Yoshi hadn't known about that when she chose Uyuni, but she thinks it's why Gojo seems so giddy about this place.
It'd be nice to stay longer, but it's freezing cold and she has no cell signal out here.
"Put them on," she instructs. "We're going back."
"So soon? I wanted a souvenir," he whines, but he jams his glasses back on obediently, keeping one hand attached to her windbreaker. "How about some…uh, llama-wool socks? A jar of salt? Never mind, let's go."
Yoshi takes them back to Tokyo.
—/—/—/—
The rush of her cursed energy is almost familiar to Gojo now, a flicker that's faster than lightning and more potent than venom. He inhales the thin, icy wind of Bolivia, and exhales into the warm, heavy air of home.
Gojo groans a little, focusing on Infinity to slowly adjust the air pressure around himself.
Though he could essentially teleport himself with Limitless, it wasn't like Yoshi's talismans—he just propelled himself at extreme speeds and protected himself from the deadly g-forces that came with it. Ironically, there was a limit to how far he could move with Limitless, mainly because it became too difficult to navigate. Yoshi had a completely different set of problems to solve in order to jump through space.
"How do you adjust to the altitude shift?" Gojo asks her. "Moving between extremes like that isn't easy."
Yoshi hums thoughtfully, her gaze drifting skyward. Then she reaches around and points, vaguely, to her left flank. "For stabilizing pressure and heat… I think. I haven't looked at it in a while."
"Damn, Yoshi, you forget your own tattoos?" he jokes. Though she answered plenty of technical questions about her talismans, Gojo hasn't seen Yoshi take off her jacket since that spar with Megumi, and now he wonders what it'll take for her to do it again. "That seems like a problem."
Yoshi shrugs, unbothered. "I have a lot of tattoos."
She says it so frankly that Gojo knows there's no subtext, but it's not fair. You can't allude to magic body tattoos without making a guy wonder where they are and what they look like.
Gojo tips his glasses down to bat his eyes at her. "I could remember them for you, if you show…" But he doesn't get to finish his proposition, because his phone starts to buzz loudly from his pocket. Yoshi, already figuring out what he was going to say, just throws him a sardonic look as he takes out his phone.
"I've heard that one a thousand times," she mutters.
"Yeah, but not from me," Gojo argues, glancing at his phone screen. A dozen missed messages and four missed calls. "Whoops. I'm in trouble!"
—/—/—/—
Gojo starts chatting on the phone, and Yoshi leaves him be, gravitating towards the nearest subway station map. Without an anchor inside Tengen's barrier, she couldn't travel directly onto the campus. She picked Ginza Station so she'd have some time to look for an expensive bottle of nail polish, and then some reasonably-priced sneakers.
She's about to leave Gojo and find the nearest beauty store when she feels arms wrap around her, tight, lifting her up. "What—"
The world blurs, twists, presses into her skin uncomfortably for a millisecond.
"—are you doing?" Yoshi wheezes, her feet touching the ground again. She's missing a house slipper, and now she's on some rooftop. She twists around to look for Gojo, fists raised.
He's right behind her, holding up his hands defensively. "Sorry, but it was urgent!"
Yoshi breathes unsteadily, getting her bearings. He carried her here, much like the way he carried her to Jujutsu Tech, and the faulty seal on her foot partially nullified his shielding technique in the process. Again.
"W-What's going on?" she demands, looking around at the darkened sky. Someone's put up a veil. A fight? A curse?
"A mission," Gojo says promptly, still tapping away at his phone. "Yikes, I missed a meeting… Just go inside, south wing, third floor stairwell."
She frowns. Her sock is getting wet. "Gojo—"
"I'll buy you some shoes," he adds, but the corner of his mouth twitches in amusement when he notices that she's down to one slipper. "In five-to-ten business days. You know how busy I get."
He's not explaining anything. Great. Fine. She'll just deal with it.
"Just fuck off already," Yoshi growls in English, marching to the roof's emergency exit. She offers no word of goodbye, but she senses Gojo's cursed energy leave the rooftop as she pushes the door open.
On the way down, Yoshi stops twice. Once to glance at the building's layout from the fire exit signs, and once to peer out from the fourth story window. She can feel residual cursed energy from a fight in the courtyard… Yoshi has no idea what she's walking into. Of course Gojo would just dump her somewhere with no warning, that dick.
At the bottom of the third story stairwell is the blond sorcerer, knelt beside a monstrous, disfigured human. A victim of the cursed spirit he's been hunting. Bloated, purplish, misshapen.
And breathing.
Nanami clears his throat. "I'm sorry to ask this of you, but…"
Yoshi snorts. "No, you're not."
He bows his head, placing a palm against the distended forehead of the victim. Nanami sighs, sounding far more weary than a young man should. "No, I'm not."