#has me FROTHING at the mouth to explore nobara

[ddelline]

s(tory) i(n) p(rogress) saturday

blurb | sup tumbler, it's ya girl!!! ya girl who's popping back in here after being absent for a solid month n a half (not voluntary, believe me) w a wildly non-canonical slice of jjk!post canon!doomed yuri!bit. I've been tits down (ass up) in work & gigs but caught up w the manga & anime today, anddd........

.......ho boy. if I wasn't f*cking inspired to write depravity for cv(sm)/adsr ANDDD, anDD venture off-road into au/rare pair!hell after that. gege, I did not have an ounce of faith left in u. but wtf!!!! anyway here we are w/ a bit of (incredibly) rough nobamaki (no I don't go here so idk what the ship apprev is (nor am I clever enough 2 coin my own sexy-sounding ship shorthand))

premise | post-canon (wherein everyone who's currently alive stays alive, plus nobara (as canonically never refuted!!!) lived post-shibuya) wherein both kugisaki nobara and zen'in maki, somewhere between bleeding wound & puckereed scar tissue, learn that you can be simultaneously more and less than your heritage - and be better for it. plus yūji. bc it's yūji

She startles awake at dawn.

An approximation of dawn, at the very least.

It’s funny, Nobara thinks, viewing the world through a half lens: she’d berated all of her tiny, narrow-eyed and even narrower-brained town of Yomogita as being one-eyed—as in figuratively—without ever stopping for a second to consider a) the possible physicality of the expression, or b) that she might one day be one-eyed (now literally, not figuratively).

It’s day three post-apocalypse—because what other term are you supposed to use when describing the past couple weeks—when she stumbles out the door of her corner of their figurative dorm at ass-o’clock in the morning and runs smack in to the unyielding front of Itadori.

The physicality of Itadori is a fun house that’s been abandoned to its vices, lilting just on the side of forsaken more than unoccupied: he’s baby faced and peach-haired at the same time as he’s sixteen rows of abs and a set of quadriceps fashioned to choke, rather than scale.

Nobara twists left and slams into him, but instead of admitting to the loss and conceding that she’s still wholly out of her depth with only one eye (plus a coorinated set of PTSD-guided nightmares, give or take) she starts and jumps backwards.

“Itadori!” she barks. 

Itadori has the good graces (which she was never taught—or they never stuck, whatever) to look sheepish. “Kugisaki,” he concedes. “You’re up early.”

She sucks a breath through her teeth. “Someone’s got to pick up the slack.”

Itadori inclines his head. He motions haplessly outwards, as if to say ‘headed out?’.

He says: “Where’re you headed?”

Tomato, tomah-to.

There’s a fine line between actively questioning and passively acknowledging, though via noncommittal query, what her intentions are, at 06:48 AM.

Nobara acknowledges the soft cheeked, unyielding abs-and-shoulders dichotomy of Itadori; she sees only the snot-nosed silhouette of the baby sibling she’d never had.

“You can take a guess, can’t you?”

“Hm. I guess you can’t sleep either.” 

It’s neither pitying nor searching. Is a question that isn’t a question.

Nobara rights the waist of her skirt and smooths the lines of her shirt down. It’s just beginning to crease, the poplin cotton of the uniform shirt starchily pressed still, its perfunctory lines not yet worn down to the point of giving beneath the press of the day’s whatever burdens. “It’s morning. You thought you could sleep in, or something?”

Itadori tilts his sharp-boned, soft-cheeked face. He smiles. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”