Chapter Text
Kind Observers, here we are at last.
Morning arrives a bit more gently than Utahime expected. It comes tentatively through the hotel curtains in a thin sliver of pale gold, touching the thick carpet, the fancy chair, the abandoned room-service tray, and the repaired crescent of a hair ornament lying beside Utahime’s watch.
Unfortunately, Utahime wakes first.
There are few things more humiliating than waking first beside someone one has spent the previous night failing to stop thinking about. Especially when nothing has happened. There is some perverse indignity to the fact that he went to sleep when she told him to.
Yes, Gojo Satoru is still asleep beside her.
Utahime narrows her eyes as she sits up. Or maybe Gojo Satoru is pretending to still be asleep.
The bastard.
He is on his side, one arm folded beneath the pillow, white hair mussed against the hotel linen, face still in a way she almost never sees. Without his blindfold, without his grin, he looks younger. Gojo will probably never be soft in any ordinary sense, but he looks unguarded enough that Utahime feels an unreasonable pang of protectiveness. She finds herself interested in the symmetry of his face now that it isn’t moving, the masculine beauty there. There is too much in him, as if every part of his construction conspired toward excess. Strongest was apparently insufficient. Brilliant was apparently insufficient. It feels as if, when he was conceived, the universe, having already made him terrifying, went back and made him lovely too.
It makes Utahime’s stomach flip over suddenly, and she feels strangely frustrated. As usual, he is so close, this time his pillow next to hers, and yet he is also a thousand miles away.
After The Thing Utahime had spent weeks furious with him for crossing a line and then pretending not to know where the line had been. She knew that something had shifted for him too, but he didn't say anything. In fact, something had shifted the moment she saw the repaired pin in its tissue paper. She can see that now. Gojo had signalled something with the gold laid into the silver. She now knew that he'd signalled to her that he wanted, even if he could not admit it, to make a future with her out of the fractured, dulled parts of their past. Then, last night, he had found the line exactly. He had touched her hand, apologised badly for The Thing, almost said something, and stopped.
That was in his nature, maybe, the core tendency of Limitless.
Utahime rolls onto her back.
“Fuck you, Gojo Satoru,” she whispers ruefully.
Gojo smiles into his pillow, but doesn’t open his eyes.
Utahime turns her head very slowly.
“So you are awake.”
“No,” he says, voice rough with sleep, already half-laughing. “This is a dream.”
Utahime sits up. He still looks lovely, and it flusters her. The return of his grin somehow compounds the charm of his vulnerability of sleep, instead of erasing it. Utahime’s yukata slips a little off one shoulder, and she hauls it back with necessary violence.
“We need to talk.”
Gojo opens one eye.
Utahime has seen him fight special grades. She has also seen him laugh while the world rearranged itself around his hand. She has never seen anything quite as cautious as Gojo Satoru hearing the words we need to talk in a hotel bed.
His face is still half pressed into the pillow. “Terrible opening.”
“I mean it,” she says, swallowing. “We need to talk.”
“I know we do.”
That is worse and it makes Utahime’s heartbeat pick up. His voice is still dry, still lazy, but the joke does not land like it usually would. There is too much seriousness in its fibres. He sits up, easing up against the headboard of the big hotel bed.
Utahime reaches for her phone from the bedside table because she needs one ordinary action before she can continue. The screen lights up at once.
There is a message from Tsumiki.
Thank you for yesterday! Did you sleep well?
Gojo, who has tilted his head enough to read upside down, chuckles.
“I think we got Parent-Trapped,” he says dryly. “Is she asking if we’re a real family now?”
Utahime lowers the phone into her lap.
Family.
This is another joke that doesn’t land this time. The children. The strange, illogical guardianship into which she had been folded by increments: first a key, then an occasional visit, then a birthday, then an entrance ceremony, and now, a hotel room with one bed.
She looks at him, hoping for frankness. Gojo stops smiling.
“You always let people think I am more involved than I am,” she says quietly.
He does not ask what she means.
That, too, tells her something. She hopes they are on the same page, that she is getting closer and that this time she might arrive.
“People always misunderstand what I am to those kids and what I am to you, but you allow it.”
Gojo is quiet for a moment. “Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because it helps.”
Utahime’s fingers tighten in the fabric over her knee.
“How practical,” she says quietly.
Gojo exhales through his nose.
Utahime waits him out, hoping he'll say something impractical. She knows from experience that he iis very bad at being given silence. He becomes restless under it, but that restlessness does not necessarily manifest as movement. It just muddles up the atoms around him. He fills the emptiness with noise because otherwise something might rise from below and speak first.
Finally, he says, “When something happens, I think of you.”
Utahime blinks, wrong-footed by the answer because the question has already vanished somewhere inside the long pause.
It is such an ordinary sentence. Is it even an answer? Has he changed the subject?
“When something happens,” he repeats, more quietly, “I think, who can I trust? Who will come? Who will be angry about the right things?” His mouth twists. “It’s always you.”
Utahime looks away, her face hot, unsettled by his candour and trying to parse it.
The river outside throws light against the glass, and she looks at the shine on the carpet as she collects her thoughts, straining them through the things they usually say to one another.
She turns her eyes back to him.
“You kissed me,” she says, because otherwise the moment might evaporate if she waits any longer to phrase it better.
Gojo’s throat moves.
“Yeah,” he says, and his gaze drifts away now too, being cagey in a way she doesn’t like. “I was trying to be tactical.”
Utahime bites her lip. “Is that why you did it?”
Gojo looks at her now, his gaze swinging back suddenly to her. It is the morning, and she is not ready for the brilliance of the sun in his eyes. She doubts anyone has ever been ready for Gojo’s eyes, really. Now, they are too honest, something icy and crushed up, refractions into the millions. Last night he had turned away when she asked him to. Now he does not.
“No,” he says levelly.
Utahime feels the fizz in her stomach she has been quelling for years.
“No?” she repeats.
“I mean, yes, technically. Your mother was coming, and I thought I’d make one last effort to sell the bit the most convincing way I could think of. I made a choice.”
“You put your tongue in my mouth in front of my mother as a tactic?”
He winces. “When you say it like that—”
“How would you like me to say it?”
“You can’t think up a good euphemism?” he quips. “I thought you poetic types like that shit.”
Utahime glares at him.
“No,” he says again, and this time there is no humour in it at all. “Maybe that’s why I started. It’s not why I kept going.”
Utahime becomes very still, a central wick in her catching fire and pulling taut.
There are things she has known and others she has not. Utahime has felt things and buried them, and grown used to the excitement he causes her and the sensation of pushing it away. Now, she has known the taste of him for weeks now, against her own will: the shocking softness of his warm mouth, the firm hand at her waist, the sound he made when she gripped his haori, as if being touched by her had surprised him more than being caught kissing her ever could. She has known the way he looked afterwards.
“Afterwards, you acted as if nothing happened,” she says carefully.
“I didn’t know what happened.”
She scoffs, but it comes out weak. “You’re not stupid.”
“When it comes to you, I’m very stupid.”
Utahime feels something in her unclench and hurt at the same time, the unfurling of a palm to discover the crushed fruit within. She realises that Gojo does not know how to deal with what he feels for her.
Is this the rough shape of the truth? Gojo Satoru, who had been given the world as a problem to overpower, had met a thing he could not blast, buy, trick, teleport, or laugh into submission.
It’s her, Utahime.
God help them both.
“You should have said something after it happened,” she says at last.
“Like what?”
“Like, ‘Utahime, I kissed you because I wanted to.’”
His lips part. It is so sudden, so genuinely startled, that she almost laughs.
“Would that have worked?” he asks.
“No,” she says. “But it would have been honest. And what do you mean “worked”? To achieve what exactly?”
“Let’s find out,” he says ruefully. His mouth curves, tentative and helpless as he recites. “Utahime, I kissed you because I wanted to.”
Her face heats at once.
“Too late.”
He chuckles.
“I think I can do better," he muses. He schools his face into the seriousness of recital again. "Utahime, I kissed you because I think about it all the time. I've hoped we'd kiss at least once before one of us dies. I've hoped for a lot more, if I'm honest. I'm pleased it happened. But you were so mad that I didn't know how to bring it up in conversation again."
It ends on another chuckle, fondly despairing of her and her temper.
The sound of his wry laugh loosens the last strange knot in the room, but not all of it. There are still years between them, and children, and the jujutsu world. There is still the fact that they are both proud and very likely to injure each other’s feelings.
But something has mellowed.
Utahime reaches for the hairpin on the bedside table. The silver is cool against her fingers. The gold seam follows the old fracture in the shape of a branch now, fine and visible, part of the design, a bright future out of dulled parts.
“I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“You are bad at humility.” Her fingers close around the hairpin. “But I’ve stayed anyway. And I hate show-offs.”
Gojo’s gaze fixes on her, aware that something has shifted forever no, but still uncertain.
“I know.”
“No,” Utahime says. “I don’t think you do.”
“Utahime,” he says quietly, and maybe he’s warning her that he won’t let her take back whatever she’s about to say.
“You said when something happens, you think of me.” Her voice is steadier than she feels. “When something happens, I think of you too. I’m always thinking about you. That’s what I hate, not you. I don’t hate you, despite what everybody thinks.”
Utahime feels Gojo’s fingers touch the tips of hers. It’s the most tentative brush, unbelievably chaste, but it’s touching without Infinity. It’s breaching a staggering divide.
“And I love you too,” he murmurs. "Which is what everybody already knows."
Gojo is looking down at their touching fingertips. His face lights with a small smile, a held-back, helpless pleasure that she almost forgives him everything. Utahime, uncharacteristically, moves first.
It is not like The Thing.
That had been panic, his kiss arriving with an excuse attached and her body betraying her before her mind could catch up. This is worse because there is no longer any excuse.
Because she loves him, Utahime leans across and kisses him.
Gojo freezes enough for her to feel the bright astonishment go through him, before he kisses her back. His mouth moves over hers with that same delicious restraint, soft and questioning, and Utahime realises he is giving her the option to retreat from her own decision. It is so considerate she wants to scream.
She bites his lower lip to make Gojo’s fingers tighten at her waist.
He eases up so the sheets tangle around his hips, one hand sliding up her back, the other catching the side of her face, and the kiss turns deep enough that Utahime’s hand closes blindly in his shirt. They have recreated, in a gentler watercolour, the scene of their first kiss, but now the hairpin is clutched in Utahime’s hand.
She is tired of being embarrassed by things she wants.
Gojo pushes her into the pillows, coming over her as they kiss.
“Tell me to stop if—”
“Do not stop, you oaf,” she says breathlessly. “I will tell you. I promise.”
There is that word again: promise.
The first one had been made in rain and kept too late. This one is immediate, warm between their mouths, and Gojo seems to understand the difference because his hands on her body become sure. She draws him in until the room has narrowed to the heat of him through the thin hotel cotton as her legs part for him.
After that, things become less orderly; the hair ornament gets lost in the sheets.
Kind Observers, we have spent many pages watching these two misunderstand promises, secrets, favours, gifts, beds, and rumours. Surely, then, we may allow them one closed door.
As Gojo and Utahime sink into their love, the morning-gold river goes on shining outside, a seam in the city, and part of the design.