Chapter Text
Only five more minutes before Nanami could call it a day.
He leaned back in his chair and cracked his back excessively. His eyes wandered to the stack of papers that were building up on his desk with notes he had to get done from his last session with a patient but instead he sighed deeply, put his glasses down on the desk and rubbed his eyes.
The phone started ringing, sat on the corner of the table and Nanami felt the strong urge to tip it over the edge to make it stop. He only had three more minutes left before he could head home.
Nanami stared down at the phone and waited, his chin resting on his intertwined fingers, trying to make it stop ringing with willpower alone. The person on the other end of the line seemed pretty determined for the evening of a weekday because after his work phone finally stopped ringing his smartphone started.
Annoyed and defeated, Nanami picked up the call, answered with a heavy sigh.
"Hello, this is Child Protective Services. Am I speaking with Nanami Kento?" a woman asked on the other end, her tone was clipped but efficient. "According to our records, you are a registered and licensed foster parent. Would you be available for an emergency placement request for two teenage boys—twin brothers? Their older sibling has been hospitalised, and they need immediate housing. Would you be available to take them in?" Nanami's mood plummeted.
"We- I have not fostered before, are you sure that there is no other possibility?" Nanami asked, tight lipped. He had wanted to have his registration revoked already but had forgotten about it again and again and now it was biting him in the ass.
"I'm afraid not, these boys really need a place to sleep for the next few weeks," came the answer that Nanami didn't want to hear. Her tone was clinical but he could hear the stress underneath.
Nanami took a deep breath through the nose, closed his eyes for a second and ignored the pounding in his head. "Just a few weeks?" he asked and rubbed his burning eyes again. If he really had wanted to avoid this situation he should have taken care of the registration. These boys shouldn't pay the price for his laziness.
"Yes, could you pick them up at the Central hospital as soon as possible? You'll find us in the waiting area," the woman said and Nanami checked his watch. He was already three minutes into overtime.
"I can be there in fifteen minutes," he answered while stacking his paper neatly onto each other to not leave chaos behind on his desk for the next day.
"That is more than I hoped for, we will meet at the hospital then," she said with a clipped tone and Nanami only hummed in agreement. This was not how he had imagined his day ending.
He made it out of the clinic without much trouble. His colleagues and his boss knew he was no man for overtime, that he always headed home neatly at four.
He tried not to think too much about what he had gotten himself into. He could handle caring for two boys for a few weeks. Or at least he told himself that.
Traffic was as annoying and exhausting as always as he crept through the city towards a place that - he didn't know yet but - would change his life.
The universe meant it good with him today because it wasn't the one where he had worked a few years prior and where he had met Haibara years after drifting away from each other after school. Thinking of him always shot a painful blast through his heart and Nanami shoved the memories away forcefully.
After hunting for a parking-lot, Nanami stood in front of the big entrance and stared through the glass doors inside. Even when it wasn't the same hospital, at the end of the day they were all alike and Nanami straightened his tie, rubbed his glasses clean quickly and picked at the cuffs of his shirt, before he entered the building.
The heels of his polished dress shoes were clacking louder than necessary and Nanami couldn't remember a time when the hospital he had worked at had been as silent as this one was right now. He followed the signs to the waiting area.
Nanami looked around the room, between the men and women with their children and grandparents, he found two identical looking boys sitting next to each other. Behind them a woman having an intense phone call. Her white hair was in a braid over her back, exhaustion written into every crease of her face.
As she met Nanami's look she waved him over to her and Nanami started walking, shooting a side eye to the teenage boys. They couldn't be older than fifteen or sixteen. Even though one of them looked significantly older than the other one.
Both had an untidy undercut and messy dark hair on top, one of them was staring into nothingness, nearly never blinking and the other one was leaned against his brother's shoulder, arms crossed in front of him and his chin had sunken on his chest, eyes closed.
The social worker was still on the phone when Nanami stood in front of her, raising one questioning eyebrow. The woman looked just as tired as the twins; the sleeves of her shirt rolled up over her elbows.
Nanami waited, growing impatient with every minute that the woman seemed to ignore him. He glared down on her until she finally looked his way, and her face froze as he saw Nanami's look.
"Wait a second, I'm gonna be right back." the social worker said into the phone and paused the call, finally giving Nanami her full attention.
"Nanami Kento? Alright, let's go get the boys," she said and walked over to the twins, Nanami followed her, clearing his throat uncomfortably. He doubted that this was the right procedure for these kinds of things, it certainly didn't feel right.
The social worker shook the sleeping twin awake, a rough hand with manicured fingers wrapping around the boy's thin shoulder. He flinched as she touched him and looked up alarmed. Nanami hadn't worked with teenagers often in the past, but everyone should know that acting like this around probably traumatised kids was a no-go.
"Yuji, this is Nanami Kento, you two will stay with him for the next few weeks," the woman said, not looking at Yuji but at her phone again. Nail's clacking on the display in a speed that was unnatural. Yuji met Nanami's eyes, and he tried putting a comforting smile on his face.
He probably didn't look the part of a trustworthy adult, with his slightly tinted glasses, the short blond hair and the grim expression that people told him he wore all the time.
"Nice to meet you Yuji, this is your brother I assume?" Nanami asked and stretched his hand out to Yuji. The boy looked up to him, black rings under his eyes, red rimmed as if he had cried not long ago and a general overwhelmedness radiated off of him. He looked back to his brother who was still only blinking and staring and not acknowledging anything around him.
"Yeah, this is Sukuna. Nice to meet you too Mister Nanami," Yuji said far too politely for a teenager and pointed to his twin, shaking Nanami's hand quickly and with a weak grip.
"You can call me Kento, if you like," Nanami offered but Yuji only nodded quickly and looked over to his brother again.
I worried over nothing; they are so calm and humble. This is going to be a walk in the park!
"Let's get you to my place, you look tired," Nanami said, he didn't really know what else to say. The social worker was already on the phone again and she had walked away a few meters, not giving him or the twins any attention. He sent a few glares at her back so leave the kids alone like this with a stranger.
Nanami gestured to Yuji to give him a second, while he tried talking to the woman who should be the twins' primary contact person but failed miserably at his job from Nanami's perspective.
The seconds crawled by as Nanami waited for her to pause the call to talk to him, but that didn't happen, so he decided to just gesture to the boys and himself and the social worker just nodded and waved, not even bother to pause talking. She was already asking someone on the line to take an emergency placement and Nanami only shook his head disappointed from the system.
He swallowed the rage and turned back to the boys. Now it was easy to tell them apart. Yuji had his brother's arms over his shoulder and guided him to the entrance. Sukuna was moving slowly, not really reacting to Yuji's quiet words of encouragement. He was a bit taller than Yuji and had broader shoulders. It looked a little bit wrong to see the smaller, thinner one carried the broader one.
From behind the two looked even more ragged than from the front. Both of their clothes were pretty worn and dirty. Their shirts and jeans had holes; the bottoms of their pants were frayed. Yuji's clothes looked two sizes too big and Sukuna ... Sukuna was a whole other problem that Nanami would figure out tomorrow.
As he showed them to his car, Yuji made big eyes at the black sleek spotless metal but didn't say anything, only helped his brother into the back seat and sat down right next to him. Nanami guessed that it was normal that the two were pretty close, in the end, siblings stuck together.
Nanami tried to think of something easy to talk about, something he could ask Yuji to get to know him without scaring or prying too much. He apparently took too long thinking because out of muscle memory, he parked and killed the engine and got out of the car.
The twins followed him silently inside the apartment complex. Sukuna again half in Yuji's arms while he guided his brother’s steps.
The women on the lobby desk gave him a confused look but Nanami only shot her a tightlipped smile while showing the boys to the elevator that brought him up into his apartment.
"How rich are you Mister Nanami?" Yuji asked suddenly into the silence of the elevator. Nanami cleared his throat.
"I get by comfortably I guess," Nanami settled on answering. Yuji only hummed and kept on holding his brother upright.
Before Nanami could say anything else, the elevator doors opened with a ping, and they got led into the wide-open space.
"I'll get started on food and you could get comfortable with your room afterwards, you have to share unfortunately, I didn't really have time to organise anything," Nanami explained. Only because Haibara had set up the room years ago, in case they got a placement, did he have the necessaries for the teens.
He gave the twins a searching look before he headed over to the open kitchen. "Don't you have any stuff?" asked Nanami confused, searching for a backpack or any other bag with clothes or other personal things.
"No, not really. We weren't planning on leaving, so everything is back at our place," Yuji explained, shrugging his shoulders as if it was not a big deal.
Nanami stared at him speechless, trying to wrap his head around how that could've happened.
"It's alright though, we don't really have much anyways," Yuji tried to calm Nanami but it didn't really make anything better.
Nanami pushed the problem away for tomorrow and turned to get started on food. These kids looked like they hadn't eaten a real meal in weeks, so he threw together what he had in the fridge.
Twenty minutes later they sat together at the dinner table and Nanami watched how Yuji quickly shovelled the food into his mouth while his brother ate in slow motion. Whenever a fine line of drool rolled down the corner of his mouth, Yuji quickly wiped it away like it was the most normal thing in the world.
Nanami had his head propped up on his intertwined fingers, not really hungry, watching the twins before he finally decided to address it.
"Yuji? Does Sukuna need any special care? They didn't tell me anything," Nanami said, and Yuji looked up confused, mouth full of food.
His look went between him and Sukuna back and forth before he shrugged his shoulders and answered, "No, he just needs to sleep it off."
Nanami furrowed his brows, hoping that Yuji would elaborate but the boy just kept eating while Sukuna was back to staring again, his plate still half full.
He showed the boys to their room afterwards and gave them a quick overview of the apartment, grabbing some loose clothes of his for the boys to sleep in. The room wasn't much, two beds opposite each other, a desk, wardrobe and a basket of bathroom essentials of everything a kid would need for the first night. Haibara had always been the prepared one of them.
For a lack of words Nanami left the boys to their own and fled to the living room, putting on the TV to scare away the silence.
He was more exhausted than he had anticipated. The mumbling of the TV helped against his racing thoughts while he tried to organise himself. Running lists in his head of what he would need for the boys, clearly they needed clothes, school shit, did he have to enroll them into school? What was their latest school district? He didn't know anything about teenagers god damn it! What do kids need to survive?
Thinking about Sukuna he hoped Yuji would explain what his brother's condition was and how Nanami could accommodate him. The damn social worker could have said something about that! Didn't they check for special needs? Didn't he need some qualification to deal with this?
More and more thoughts were coming while Nanami kept thinking things through. It had been a long time since he fell asleep on the sofa but his back and neck and every other joint and muscle in his body wasn't thanking him as he blinked awake in the middle of the night, and he dragged himself into his bed.
The apartment was silent as Nanami made breakfast; he was still unsure if he should go wake them. All in all he was pretty unsure about all of this.
They are just kids that need a home! Get yourself together!
So he knocked on the door of the twin’s room and called that breakfast was ready, walking away as he got a mumbled response.
A few minutes later he decided to start eating and a moment later Yuji appeared in the doorframe of the kitchen. He was in one of Nanami's shirts and pants that looked way too big on him and only showed more how skinny the boy was.
"How's your brother?" Nanami asked after Yuji had started eating quickly just as yesterday.
"He's still a bit drowsy," Yuji said, not looking up to Nanami and kept his head down.
Again as a loss for words they shared a silent breakfast, but Yuji didn't seem to mind. Nanami made a plate for Sukuna then and slid it over to Yuuji.
"Take this for him," he said with a hopefully gentle smile on his face and Yuji only nodded silently.
"I'm working from home today, so I will be in my office but don't hesitate to ask for anything. Also just take everything from the kitchen anytime, this is your home now too, I certainly don't mind. Later today we can get you two everything else you need, but I can't cancel my appointments on this short notice," he explained.
"Yeah sure, no problem," Yuji quickly answered, finished with the conversation again and only grabbed the plate.
"I should go look after-" he pointed in the direction of their room again.
"Yeah sure," Nanami said, stacking the plates and the food together again to put the leftovers in the fridge.
"Or should I-" Yuji made attempts to help but Nanami only shushed him.
"No, it's fine. Look after your brother."
"Thank you, Mister Nanami,"
"You don't have to-" Yuji looked to the ground again, biting his lip. "You know what, it's fine," he stopped himself and made another attempt at a smile, but Yuji was already turning away and the gentle shut of the door was heard a moment later.
Well, this went great.
Hours crawled by as Nanami worked off his virtual emergency consultation hours, he was one of the few neurologists that still took new patients and accepted anyone that sought help.
The last appointment went satisfyingly, and he wrote his last report quickly, before checking on the boys again. It was weird to have something other to care for than himself in this apartment.
It had been such a long time since he had shared his living space, but the late morning was suspiciously quiet. Too quiet for his liking. Didn't teenage boys do anything? Didn't they walk around, not caring about anything in the whole wide world? Didn't they were these loud, energetic beings that made messes all over the place?
Well, he wouldn't know. When was the last time he interacted with teenage boys before the twins?
So he went over to their room again, only to tell them he was off work now and they could continue their plans on going to the Mal. Without much thinking he knocked and opened the door, but his eyes were truly tricking him right now weren't they?
Because the first thing he saw was Yuji sitting on the windowsill, a cigarette between his lips, the window cracked wide open, and the room filled with smoke.
Praying this was his imagination tricking him, Nanami stepped back out of the room and closed the door. He took a deep breath and counted back from three slowly before he walked in again. Unfortunately it wasn't his imagination tricking him and the scene hadn't changed at all. This couldn't be true; everything went so well!
"Yuji, what do you think you're doing?"
"Do I look like Yuji?" came the heated answer and Nanami felt dread drip into his chest as it fell from his eyes like shells.
"'Kuna be nice! This is Mister Nanami. Mister Nanami, this is Sukuna!" came from the other side of the room. Why Nanami hadn't seen Yuji earlier was a riddle to him, the boy was right there!
"Well," Nanami cleared his throat, "It's nice to finally meet you Sukuna. But I don't allow smoking in this apartment and you're also still underage," he tried as calmly as he managed. This could be true. Fucking universe!
"Sounds like a you-problem," Sukuna replied with a spiteful tone and Nanami glared at the teen. What the-
With wide struts he crossed the room, reached out for Sukuna, to take the cigarette away but the boy only jumped up, locked eyes with Nanami and took a fighting position that made Nanami stop in his tracks and freeze in his movement.
He fucked up. Of course this kid expected violence, he probably didn't know anything else.
Nanami stared at the boy, his face was the same as Yuji's but at the same time it was completely different. Were Yuji was soft and gentle, Sukuna seemed full of sharp edges. The silence weighed heavy between them until Yuji walked over to his brother, took the cigarette from his hand and threw it out of the window.
"I'm sorry. He is currently working on being nice, but it does not work all the time!"
Nanami's face was visibly tense as he walked through the doors of the massive shopping mall, both boys to his right. Sukuna had sulked on the ride, after arguing about not wanting to come. In the end he was walking next to his brother while Yuji held onto Sukuna's shirt with a light grip.
With horror Nanami watched how Sukuna's attention span was ridiculously attracted by anything and everything and he understood quickly that if Yuji wouldn't have held onto him like this, his brother would have been gone instantly.
What the fuck have I gotten myself into? Nanami asked himself, he was hanging behind the boys, not keeping up with the pace they had going. So he could only watch horrified as someone crashed into Sukuna, a whole-body flinch shot through the kid paired with a grunt and he instantly went up to the aggression level of a guard dog. He got uncomfortably close to the person that bumped into him until Yuji pulled him along with mumbled apologies.
At a loss for words because this was just too much and too sudden for him to handle, Nanami watched how Yuji stared down Sukuna at the exit of a shop with the words, "Put. It. Back." and Sukuna emptied his pockets with a scowl on his face.
How could he still have something in his pockets? Nanami asked himself. He had caught and stopped Sukuna with a glare every time the boy had tried to steal something. It must've been a dozen times by now and Nanami was exhausted.
As it came to looking for clothes, Sukuna was not paying attention at all, growling at everyone that was coming too close to him or his brother, while Yuji helped Nanami to pick out some much-needed shirts and pants.
"Yuji, you both need clothes," Nanami said as Yuji grabbed an armful of shirts that were clearly too big for him.
"Nah, we always share this is fine," he said and now the too big clothes on both of them made painfully sense.
He tried arguing with him a little bit longer, but it didn't do anything. Yuji was already uncomfortable with Nanami buying them new clothes. Always arguing that they had stuff back at their apartment they could pick up. But if these clothes were as raggy, dirty and worn down as the ones the two had on their backs, Nanami felt obliged to give them shirts without holes and faded colours.
Once Yuji handed Sukuna's hood that he was holding on over to Nanami - who only glared down on the boy - his nerves were more than tight with the problem-twin.
"I don't have to hold onto you like a toddler, do I?" Nanami said with a sharp tone, getting daggers thrown at him from Sukuna who only mumbled something to himself but stayed by Nanami's side until Yuji came back.
This kid was nearer to an animal in survival mode than to a boy.
But rock bottom of the shopping trip was reached, when Sukuna wouldn't stop changing the mannequin's fingers to middle fingers and grinned spitefully about it. The employees kindly asked him to stop, until all three of them were politely asked to leave the shop. The judging eyes of the people around him only made Nanami's want to sink into the floor right on the spot.
Why did he think bringing these boys to a public place had been a good idea? He should've just ordered everything on the Internet!
Finally on their way back to the car, the boys' hands filled with paper bags of clothes and other things they desperately needed, Sukuna suddenly stopped in his tracks. His feet suddenly seemed cemented to the ground as Yuji bumped into him and was unable to pull him along.
Nanami turned around with a sigh, only to see Sukuna stare at the blinking neon lights of an arcade shop.
"What is this?" the boy asked, always with that aggressive tone in his voice as if he was mad at the store for existing and daring to cross his path.
"It's an arcade shop, you can play games there," Nanami explained, his tone tense. He really needed to catch a break real soon.
Yuji's mood peaked as he stepped up to his brother, "Oh you love games, let's go!"
"You need money for that," Sukuna stated.
"Oh," if Yuji were a puppy, his ears would hang down now and his tail would've stopped wagging.
Without thinking about it, Nanami pulled out his wallet and held out two fifty bills to the twins.
Sukuna only eyed him with a hiss, "I don't want your money!"
A second later, Yuji carefully took the money from Nanami's hands, mouthed a silent thank you and pulled his brother along into the sea of blinking neon lights.
With a sigh as if several years had been taken from him over the last few hours, Nanami sat down on one of the benches in the area, the bags to his feet and his head landed in his hands only a second later.
A headache was building behind his eyes, and everything seemed too loud and bright. He really had won the lottery with those boys.
It was typical that twins could be the complete opposite of one another. Yuji and Sukuna, though? They were like night and day, Jing and fucking Jang, sugar and salt, water and gasoline, a family-friendly, children-loving golden retriever and an abused, unsocial Rottweiler.
He was no match for these boys. How could he have ever thought that he was up for this completely on his own?
Haibara though? He surely would've known what to do with Sukuna's attitude and Yuji's humble soul, but Nanami had no fucking idea.
So he pulled out his phone and called back their social worker.
"Nanami Kento? Yes, the Itadori boys of course. I apologise for the urgency of the situation yesterday. It was a complex case, and we needed those boys settled as quickly as possible. The department was at my ass- was handling multiple emergencies and unfortunately there was some miscommunication. It was truly a big shitsho- a paper war. And that they had to sedate one of the twins was also not really helping, but he just exploded after they denied him to see his brother," the woman dumped on him in one go and many things became clear to Nanami just in that second.
"It would've really helped to know that little detail!" he hissed into the phone and listened to another apology train of Misses Social Worker. She sounded tired, her words slipped into informal and too emotional outbursts now and then. Nanami almost pitied her and the chaos the department seemed to be dealing with.
"So, how long until another placement opens up? You said this would only take a few days, in the worst case up to a few weeks," Nanami asked impatiently. He clearly gave the boys enough money to be occupied for a while, but god knew what Sukuna would do with that.
"It's that bad?" she asked sympathetically and Nanami didn't hold back as he dumped everything of the last twenty-four hours on the poor woman.
"You know, it's quite common to feel overwhelmed by this. I'm sorry, I thought we told you but these two mostly grew up in the system. They never had anyone but themselves to protect each other. So it's going to be ... a challenge."
"Sounds to me like they belong to someone who knows what they are doing!"
"You are a doctor aren't you?"
"I'm a Neurologist! Not a Psychologist!"
"Ah details, details. Right now you are their best shot at a normal, safe place to live. And anyways, who even knows what they are doing when it comes to children hu?"
Silence flooded the line as Nanami struggled to believe what this woman's line of argumentation was. This was ridiculous! He was supposed to be their best shot at a normal place to live?
The social worker cleared her throat, "Of course I could put them in a group home with twenty other boys, no privacy, no chance of education and no primary caretaker. If you want that and clearly feel unfit for this position, I could arrange that. That could be arranged in a few hours when I make some calls."
Nanami's eyes wandered over to the boys. The big glass windows of the store gave a free view of them. They were standing next to each other, both of them at a game console, their eyes glued to the screens while their fingers pressed the buttons repeatedly and they awfully looked like fifteen.
"Fine, the guilt trip worked, congratulations. Until you find a better permanent solution I keep doing this. When is their brother going to be available again?"
"Their brother is seventeen."