Chapter Text
Satoru was used to Utahime acting like she was so much more serious and mature than him, but he detected even greater formality in the way she conducted herself around him now. A sense of intentional, additional distance. At meetings between the two schools, she avoided his gaze, fixing her eyes diffidently to the tatami or wall-mounted calligraphy while Gakuganji would drone on. Even when Satoru would steal the seat next to hers or sprawl out across from her, Utahime seemed determined to ignore him or to answer his questions in as few words as possible, unless he provoked her further.
No longer was she sharing her lesson plans (while tuning out his suggestions that she just follow the syllabus of life) or mission gripes or where she’d taken her students for their most recent excursions. While he’d always been the one calling her, the one supplying most of the chatter, the lapses on phone calls now grew longer and longer when he didn’t fill them with babble, with his need to hear more from her than the scratch of her pen, an occasional sigh indicating that she was still somewhat listening.
Pointedly, when he crashed a dinner that Utahime had invited all of his first-year students but not him to attend, he poked his head into Shoko’s living room only to be met with Utahime freezing mid-twirl and her voice trailing off mid-song, his students — even Yuta, egged on by Maki no doubt — promptly booing him for killing the mood of their impromptu karaoke night.
“See?” Satoru said as he invited himself to the gang’s leftover hot pot anyway, ladling the broth directly into his mouth before Utahime snatched the ladle and threatened to whack some manners into him. “Aren’t you guys glad you got me as a teacher instead of little miss prim and proper over here? She’s so formal all the time.”
Utahime’s foot yanked a chair out from underneath him just as he was about to sit down. Her expression was all mock concern as he lurched upright before he could fall on his ass.
“I have to be,” she told him with a raised chin as she finally deigned to hand him a bowl and a soup spoon. “Else you’re too familiar.”
“Ah.” Satoru pulled his lips into a tight smile. “So I’m being told that familiarity has bred contempt.”
Her voice dipped into a pitch low enough for only him to hear as she met his eyes. “No. Not contempt.”
Utahime wasn’t sure how Geto had anticipated that her technique would subdue Gojo, if only for seconds. Why Geto had wagered on it.
But if he’d come to place enough assurance in that calculation that he was willing to include it in his plans, then it struck her with fear to wonder whether others around Gojo might be able to come to the same conclusion. That she could be used against Gojo. Useful against him.
It was better, she’d decided, that she visibly distance herself from Gojo, that she discourage anyone from assuming any personal association between them.
It was better for the two of them as well, she supposed. For the two of them to find intimacy elsewhere, to consider other people seriously.
“I’m just saying,” Mei teased her one night, coiling a lock of Utahime’s hair around her painted fingers. “If I were considering my chances with you and found out that the financially endowed tree hanging around you all the time was your ex, I’d take my chances elsewhere.”
Utahime doubted there was anyone around her that was being thusly dissuaded, but she had to concede that she made more new acquaintances on the nights when it was just her and Shoko at a stadium game or at a bar.
In any case, she was already beginning to suspect that her attempts to create distance were for naught by the time the annual Goodwill Event rolled around, and a text from Todo during the first day’s exorcism race confirmed it was too late to change anyone’s perceptions.
The old man called a meeting without you and told us to kill Itadori. Told the others that they wouldn’t get in trouble because he’s Sukuna’s vessel.
Utahime stiffened, the back of her neck chilled with her awareness of Gakuganji sitting behind her and Gojo. Her gaze flitted from the tv screens to glance at Gojo from the corner of her eyes, his blindfolded head already tilted her way.
“They’re all after your tiger cub,” she murmured casually as if making a passing remark about the on-screen brawl between her student and his before getting up from her seat. “I’m heading out real quick to grab Miwa. It’s too dangerous to leave her unaware out there.”
Gojo rose to his feet as well. “Dangerous huh? I’ll come with you.”
Later, after the turmoil of the first day’s events, she confronted her students alone, torn between her disappointment in herself and her frustration with them.
“Todo aside, why didn’t any of you tell me?” she demanded, seeking each pair of chagrined eyes in turn, trying to understand where she’d failed with them.
“The principal told us not to,” Momo finally spoke up for the rest of them, lower lip pouting. “He said you’d have a conflict of interest if you heard about the scheme. That you’d tell Gojo.”
And Utahime realized that in the eyes of the puppeteers around them, her loyalties were already laid bare.
“You have the handscroll?” Utahime asked without looking up from the one in front of her as Gojo shut the door of her classroom behind him.
“Found it in the family archives,” he replied lightly. “But you’re going to have to come with me to review it.”
She gave him a tired look. “Why didn’t you just bring it with you?”
“Couldn’t. The thing’s even older than the estate and more brittle than your temper. I figured it would rip if I even tried to pick it up.” He held out his hand, wiggled his fingers. “Come with me. At least this way, you’ll be spending your night reading in more scenic surroundings.”
Utahime bit her lip, regarding his hand dubiously. If her hunches were right, she needed to see this scroll, but doing so under his clan’s roof unnerved her. “Your family won’t mind an outsider poking around in their library?”
Gojo looked like the thought had never occurred to him. “Who cares if they do? Anyway, I made sure no one’s to disturb the wing housing the archives so the library’s all yours tonight if you want it.”
Her fingers slid, fitted, between his.
His clan’s archival room was indeed a marvel, a semi-amphitheatre of curved wooden shelves rising in tiers. When Utahime craned her neck up at the ceiling’s intricate fan of honey-coloured beams, she felt like she was walking under a lofty open parasol.
“Are you sniffing the scrolls?” Gojo asked from behind her, more than a hint of amusement apparent in his voice.
“The cedar,” Utahime corrected, her head still bent close to a scroll-lined shelf. “Smells kind of like home. Like the strips of gomaji we write prayers on at the shrine.”
She could tell he was giving her an odd look even with the blindfold on. “If I’d known you’d enjoy the scent of this place so much, I would’ve brought you here sooner.”
“Why? Because it’s wasted on you?”
“Hey! I’ve actually spent quite a lot of time in here. It was great for hide and seek when I was a kid, and as I discovered later, at least a third of the collection is of erotic woodblock prints.”
“A third?”
Gojo nodded solemnly. “Want me to show you those shelves?”
Utahime spun on her heel, pretending to head for the closest door. “Never mind. I want to leave. Where’s the exit?”
“Kidding.” Gojo tugged her back by the sleeve. “Just kidding, well not really, but let me show you the scroll you came here for.”
At one of the low tables in the center of the room, she carefully unrolled sections of the yellowed handscroll as she skimmed the passages of text on Heavenly Restriction.
Utahime wasn’t sure how much time had passed when she abruptly stood and paced closer to the shelves, her hands curled into fists over her mouth as she fought the urge to chuck the scroll confirming her worst suspicions.
“What is it?” Gojo rose from the chair where she thought he’d dozed off to sleep.
She bit her tongue, resisting the ugly impulse to curse him for besting her even in teaching. Between the two of them, she was surely the one who was cursed, cursed to fail in being able to help or save anyone. She wanted to bang her head against the shelves for all of her failings, wanted to call Kōkichi right now and demand to know why, why , hadn’t he trusted her or any of his classmates, the kids whom she told daily to guard each other’s backs.
“I’m pretty sure I know who the mole is.” She covered her eyes with her hands, digging her fingers into her skull as she ran them through her hair. “Well, one of them anyway. One of my second-years, Muta Kōkichi — he has an innate technique we call puppet manipulation. I think the combination of a Heavenly Restriction and his technique is what’s allowing him to augment his cursed energy and use his puppets for spying.”
Gojo was silent for a moment. “You sure?”
“You think I want to name a student when it comes to this?” She glared at him, hating herself and knowing that the daggers in her eyes should’ve been directed at herself instead. “Warp me back to campus. Please. I need to go find him.”
“Not in the dead middle of night, Utahime.” Gojo’s voice was firm, his grip similarly so as he pulled her hands away from her face. “You’re not going to confront him right now or alone. We’ll handle it in the morning.”
“What if this can’t wait? You said whoever the mole is, they're in contact with either curses or — ”
“What do you take me for if you think I can’t handle a second-year and more walking trees?” He took hold of her shoulders, his thumbs kneading circles along her curled-in posture. “I’m the strongest. If I survived Megumi’s mood swings during puberty and Hakari bringing the higher-ups down on my head every other week, I can handle this.”
Utahime’s shoulders shook with her exhale. “I should go back anyway. I don’t need to read any more of this stuff.”
Gojo’s hand found hers, but his grasp didn’t tighten on her hip as it usually did before warping. “You can stay here tonight instead. Now that we know there’s at least one mole on campus, it’s probably safer for you to avoid your usual routes until we resolve this.”
Her brow knitted as she looked up at him. “I…really don’t want your uh, household to know that you had someone stay the night.”
Already pulling her by the hand towards the door, he glanced over his shoulder at her, his voice lowering suggestively. “Maybe they’re used to me having overnight guests. Or maybe all of the servants are under a binding vow of silence.”
“Gojo, that’s not funny.” She tried to draw her hand back from an immovable force.
Abruptly, he stopped in his tracks and pulled down his blindfold, looking her in the eye. “What does it matter if people know?”
He was right, for once, she realized with a swallow, not that she was going to acknowledge it aloud. In light of everything else that had happened, of everything that was about to happen, what did it matter if people knew when they already suspected?
Her hand curled tighter around his. “Okay. Fine. Lead the way, young master.”
He winked at her. “Careful now, I could get used to hearing you say that.”
His room was spartan, all sparse, hard lines and angles, three of the four walls bare.
“Where’s the Playstation?” Utahime couldn’t help but joke as Gojo opened one of the sliding doors, revealing shelves and the first sign of personal belongings.
Gojo blinked as he handed her a folded yukata. One of his own, the cotton dyed to match his eyes. “What?”
“You — you used to say at school that playing 99 years of Momotaro Dentetsu was harder than any mission.”
His eyes crinkled at the corners. “You remember that?”
A burn crept up in Utahime’s cheeks. Try as she might, she’d retained a lot of useless info about him over the years.
He crossed the room to the one wall of gold-lacquered and painted panels. “I moved out of my childhood room when I became clan head, not that I use these quarters much either, but this room has an adjoining one.” He opened the sliding doors at the center, revealing another bedroom, more furnished than his and more decorated with potted stems and blooms.
“It’s unused, but it’s clean,” he told her, scratching the back of his neck as he waved a hand at the adjoining room. “The servants still clean it every day, even though I told them not to bother.”
Utahime’s eyes flickered over the room, then to him. “It’s beautiful,” she said simply, suspecting already who’d lived there before. “The whole estate is, really.”
Gojo’s lips twisted into a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I never brought you here, but I don’t think you missed out on anything. My mother was unhappy here. I was unhappy here. I thought you would be too.”
She stared back at him, her heart clenching and feeling caught in her throat.
“If I lived here,” she said slowly, turning away from the adjoining room and watching his pupils dilate as she stepped closer to him instead. “Would we have separate rooms?”
He played along with her hypothetical immediately, understood immediately the possibility of a future together she was asking him to consider anew.
“Only if you wanted to,” he answered, his eyes hungry, but his hands still. Waiting to see if his hunger was mirrored in her, whether she could consider his home hers too.
She reached up, curled a palm around Gojo’s neck as she sought to meet him somewhere in the middle. “I don’t think we would,” Utahime breathed against his lips, his devouring kiss.
She let him lead her to his bed instead.
Between her and the prison realm are six steps.
Six steps littered with bodies, carnage, and curses, but still, only six steps.
Certainly more has separated her and Satoru before.
Her hand tightens around the shard.
Let me save him.
Let me bring him back home.