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Most of the time she hates him.
Utahime knows Gojo Satoru’s name well before the first time they meet, when he arrives at Jujutsu Tech with all the fanfare of a long lost King returning to his throne. And Gojo boasts the pompous arrogance worthy of said throne; as a first year student, he already knows he’s far stronger than the rest of them. But he’s a nightmare to be around, and Utahime cannot for the life of her understand why he’s as popular as he is.
"He’s conceited, rude, condescending, arrogant, egotistical—"
"He is," Shoko sighs in resignation. "But it’s justified."
Utahime has since decided that if Gojo Satoru is a necessary evil for the sorcery world to prevail against the barrage of special grade curses, so be it, she doesn’t have to like him to do her job. Once she graduates, she can focus on her own career as a sorcerer while keeping her distance from his unsettling eyes and mathematical techniques.
Now, not even a year later, Gojo is blowing up her plans (literally), deciding to play the part of Knight in Shining Armor on top of his existing title of High School Royalty.
“I came to save you, Utahime!” he calls out lazily, crystal blue eyes peering down at her and an obnoxiously self-satisfied smile plastered on his face. “You crying?”
Fucking jerk, she thinks angrily. Who asked for your help?
His white hair flutters in the breeze, and the sunlight behind him illuminates it in an eerily ethereal way. A memory of Shoko’s voice interjects her thoughts. Have you ever considered how the world looks to someone that powerful?
As if Utahime has any desire to get further acquainted with that prick, let alone understand his perspective.
But of course, Gojo has ensured their continued acquaintance by choosing to pursue teaching. In her opinion, he’s utterly unqualified to be a teacher; he doesn’t have any of the requisite compassion or consideration to care for the success of anyone besides himself.
A part of Utahime gleefully imagines Gojo being unceremoniously fired after a year of complete incompetence. But she immediately berates herself for enjoying the thought – his poor first batch of students will endure a year of frustration and disappointment, trying to learn from a man who ridicules anyone weaker than him. And predictably, a year later, his students have been through situations they shouldn’t have been put in, left to fend for themselves in dangerous missions without sufficient preparation or supervision.
So when Utahime arrives at the Tokyo campus for this year’s joint graduation, she expects to see the weathered, miserable expressions of a graduating class that barely survived under the tutelage of their disastrous teacher. Instead, she’s met with such unexpectedly wide, cheerful smiles that she could have mistaken these kids for normal high schoolers who weren’t spending their adolescence staking their lives to fight against the grotesque horrors of the world.
“Utahime.”
She turns her head, but the row of seats she's sitting in is still empty. Gojo is in the seat diagonally behind her, arms folded carelessly over the back of the chair to her right, head resting lightly on top of them. He’s wearing a grin equally as large as his students, and even through his recently adopted blindfold, Utahime thinks she can feel the piercing gaze of his blue eyes.
Years later, and somehow his unsolicited presence feels more familiar than the scarred face she can barely recognize in the mirror.
“Utahime-senpai,” she corrects sharply, crossing her arms and turning back to the line up of their graduating students at the front of the small auditorium.
She’s looking straight ahead with an excessive amount of focus for the monotonous speech Principal Gakuganji is reciting from prepared flashcards. In theory, ignoring Gojo should leave him with no choice other than to stop bothering her, but he wouldn’t be Gojo if not for his sheer ability to be a nuisance. Utahime feels a sudden brush of fingers against her cheek and flinches away, head snapping back to look at him in shocked confusion.
Gojo’s expression is unreadable. Unfazed, his rough fingertips return to her face, tracing over the freshly healed scar with a delicateness contradicting the brazenness of his gesture. Utahime stares, frozen. Her heartbeat is too loud in her chest as she searches his face for an answer to a question that hadn’t crossed her mind until just then.
What does he think of my face now?
As soon as the thought formulates in her mind, Utahime feels a wave of embarrassment for even caring about Gojo Satoru ’s opinion. She pulls herself away from his gaze and swats his hand away.
You’re not that pathetic, Utahime.
“What the hell are you doing, Gojo?” Utahime asks instead, her voice hushed and not quite as venomous as she had intended. She suddenly finds herself too aware of her breathing, but trying to control it leaves her feeling like she’s on the verge of hyperventilating. Her face burns in the absence of his fingertips.
She focuses towards the front of the room again, wanting him completely out of her line of sight. But his irritating smile is still in her peripheral vision as he leans in to her.
“What’s with the nerves, Utahime? Gonna cry at this graduation too?”
Her skin tingles at the quiet baritones of his whisper in her ear. She clenches her jaw, trying to keep herself from showing any visible reaction to his attempts to provoke her, but as if in defiance, the heat from her cheeks spreads across her face and ears. “No.”
“Yeah, I suppose you can’t cry over me if I’m not graduating this time.”
“I was crying for Shoko, not you, you narcissistic asshole!” she hisses, a little too loudly. The principal pauses, casting her a reproachful look over his cue cards, which causes everyone else in the room to glance questioningly at the two of them.
Next to her, Gojo leans back with a snicker and declares to their audience. “Nothing to worry about, Principal, you know our Utahime is always a little emotional about these things!”
He’s toying with me, Utahime fumes. Her face is still flushed, jaw still tight, body still unsettled from the effect of his touch. And the realization that she's given Gojo the satisfaction of proving that she would react to him exactly like some inexperienced lovestruck girl leaves her feeling even more helplessly irritated.
She considers herself to be a fairly composed person — but in that moment, fingers curled into fists and nails digging into her palms, she wants nothing more than to strangle the smirk out of him.
Perhaps she is as weak as he says, because her resolve to hate him seems to crumble against the benefit of the doubt she gives him each time they meet.
His teaching methods have improved. He’s a little older now. Maybe he’s matured.
Utahime’s mind is always searching for redeeming qualities, as if it can’t accept that this egotistic pile of shit named Gojo Satoru is also the singular pillar providing stability in their turbulent world.
She’s here to talk to him in private, like he requested, and for once Gojo seems to be showing… an awareness of others?
“Are you upset?” he asks her, and she finds herself lowering her guard and relaxing her frown in response.
“No,” she sighs, realizing she’s being unfair.
I shouldn’t keep expecting the worst from him. He hasn’t even done anything yet.
“Right? I haven’t even done anything, after all,” he sings, and Utahime already knows this meeting will end in a headache for her.
Several minutes later, she’s covered in green tea and tasked with a new request to find the traitor in Kyoto who’s working with curses.
“If you’re so strong, you could figure this out yourself,” she grumbles, dabbing away at droplets of tea with her handkerchief.
There’s a brief pause. Utahime looks up, sensing a shift in the atmosphere. It’s abnormal for Gojo to not be ready with an adequately facetious response. He remains still, expression indecipherable behind his blindfold.
“If all it took was strength, I would be able to,” he replies, the signature lilt absent from his voice. He brings his hand up to his eyes, fingers outstretched across the blindfold. “I used to believe that seeing everything meant knowing everything too, but that wasn’t the case.”
His voice trails off, leaving the room silent. Utahime studies him carefully — it’s rare to hear even a tidbit of vulnerability from Gojo, and she’s certainly never thought him capable of showing genuine emotion. Shoko had told her that the incident with Getou so many years ago had changed him, but Gojo was always the same in front of Utahime: flippant and never sincere.
“For example," Gojo finally continues, the breeziness returning back to his voice, "I wouldn’t know how weak and cowardly people think.” He smiles wryly as he meets her gaze. “So help me find the traitor, Utahime.”
The sudden shift in tone leaves her without a retort prepared, but she opens her mouth reflexively anyway. He cuts her off, rising from his chair with a dismissive wave of his hand.
“—senpai, right, right.”
As she watches him leave the room, Utahime contemplates everything she’s just learned: the spy in Kyoto, Gojo, the higher ups he’s always rebelling against, the system that leaves sorcerers suffering and often dead, the world that separates them into strong and weak, and Gojo once again. He’s still the most frustrating person she’s ever met. But somehow, she can’t seem to find the same visceral disgust she used to have for him. At some point, she started trusting him.
Is it because he’s matured?
Or is it because she’s starting to understand the perspective of being a lone man with the strength of a god, yet still trapped as a pawn within the machinations of others?
At some point, Gojo seems to have unilaterally decided that they were friends. Utahime isn’t sure what gave him this impression — one day a few months ago he called her out of the blue to let her know that his new students were able to handle a special grade curse on their second week of school (while Gojo was out treating himself to a parfait), and since then he hasn’t stopped. If anything, he’s only started calling more and more often to talk about less and less relevant topics.
Like right now, she muses as she stares down at her phone, lit up with his name in bright white letters.
Utahime answers. Gojo is a member of the faculty after all; she can’t just outright ignore him, especially not with the recent events threatening their community.
“Hello?”
“U-ta-hi-me!” he chirps into her ear. “Do you think it will rain?”
What the hell. “In Tokyo? How would I know, try checking your phone,” she responds flatly, irritation apparent in her voice. Her thumb is hovering above the button to end the call when she hears him continue,
“...ctually in Kyoto.”
“What?”
“Yep! Anyway, your landlord seems to think it will. She wanted me to let you know in case your laundry is still hanging outside.”
Utahime pauses, taking a moment to process this conversation.
“You’re... at my apartment? Who gave you my address?”
“Well, it was actually pretty hard to track it down, with your cursed energy being so weak—”
Click.
Utahime glares at her phone, which now simply displays the time.
“Aren’t you going to explain why you’re here?”
Utahime watches as Gojo shrugs off his jacket by her front door. She wasn't planning to let him inside, but it seems the landlady’s weather forecast was accurate, and as a Kyoto woman, the rules of social etiquette are well ingrained.
“Shouldn’t you offer me something to drink first? How can I respect my elders when their manners are so poor," he laments.
Utahime’s jaw twitches, but she begrudgingly heads to the kitchen and pulls out a set of small cups from a cabinet. It’s Gojo’s first time at her apartment (and she certainly has no idea where he lives), but strangely it feels natural, like they’ve played this song and dance of greeting and ushering each other in so many times before.
That’s probably the unforeseen result of being familiar with someone for over a decade, she muses as she opens the door to her small refrigerator to pull out a bottle of cold barley tea. You inadvertently became comfortable with someone you hated.
Utahime sighs, and asks pointedly, once again. “Why are you here?”
He pauses for a moment, leaning against the counter beside her.
“Do you hate me that much?”
Of course I do, she thinks at first, but in reality hate feels like far too strong of a word for someone who has fought battles alongside her. There’s not a lot of people in the world who have seen the things that sorcerers have, and it ties them together in silent connection.
“You’re absolutely insufferable, but I don’t hate you, Gojo.”
A grin stretches across his face. “I knew it, you secretly like me, don’t you? Always playing hard to get.”
“Cut the crap before I kick you out of my house.”
“Is that how you treat your guests? Such terrible manners. I still haven’t been offered anything to drink, you know,” he whines, as she rolls her eyes and pours the tea she’s holding into his cup.
“There’s your drink. Now seriously, why are you here?”
He takes a sip. “Can’t I come to visit my favorite senpai?”
Utahime snorts. “Some favorite, if you’re visiting me for the first time in ten years.”
“I can visit more often. Keep your place stocked with sweets for me.”
“I won’t.”
A small smile plays on Gojo’s lips at the familiarity of their exchange. He takes another sip. “I trust you, Utahime. Do you trust me?”
She gives him an odd look, not sure where this conversation is heading. Utahime isn’t about to tell him her darkest secrets anytime soon, but she would trust him with her students' lives. “I know that I can rely on you.”
“Ah,” Gojo nods his head in exaggerated understanding. “So you don’t like me, but you have no choice but to rely on my strength. Of course.” His words are said lightly, but there’s an undertone of bitterness to them, and Utahime feels slighted at the implication her trust could be so easily earned.
“People are more than their strength, including you. And I’m not so dumb to trust someone just because they’re strong,” she tosses back at him, opening the refrigerator to put the bottle of tea back.
“Is that so?” He smirks, arms crossing over the top of the fridge door as he watches her. “You got street smarts, huh?”
Utahime is too lost in thought to pay attention to his teasing, and she stares at the dim yellow light illuminating the rows of her favorite beer, the cans starting to fog up from the warmth of the kitchen air.
“I’ve known you for more than a decade, Gojo,” she begins slowly. “I’ve seen you with your students. I’ve watched you build a place where they can be kids and grow without their futures defined by pointless politics. I trust you. Not just for your strength.”
Gojo’s smirk grows into a shit-eating smile. “That might be the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
Utahime sighs, defeatedly. He really doesn’t deserve my sincerity.
“You know, I spent so many years wishing for you to wake up one day without Six Eyes or the Infinity, for you to be helpless, powerless, a nobody.” She stops, looking up at him meaningfully over the door.
“But these days, I’m glad that the strongest sorcerer is you, and not anyone else.”
There’s a silence, and then Gojo pulls down his blindfold carefully, bright blue eyes meeting hers. It’s been a while since she’s seen them, and they drag her into their endless depths as he leans in. His hand reaches past the open fridge door between them to pick up a lock of her dark hair, sliding his fingers through it.
"That’s not good, Utahime." He exhales slowly, then swallows, his eyes never leaving hers.
“I can’t have a weakness.”
She stands there under the intensity of his gaze, the chill of the refrigerator meeting the heat coursing through her veins. Her heart beats rapidly, anticipating his next movement. Gojo’s expression is soft, but his eyes are sharp, always. His fingers reach the end of her strands and twirl them around gently. The sound of the rain outside grows louder.
At 31, Utahime knows what he’s telling her. She wonders whether she should pretend not to. The tension in the air is full of unspoken answers to unasked questions. She can almost see the paths laid out in front of her, choices lingering in the air.
She’s never known how to interpret the underlying subtext beneath their banter. It never seemed serious. It’s not like she hasn't noticed the sly glances that others give them when he devotes so much attention solely to her, the barely concealed flirting behind his incessant teasing. Gojo has always been attractive; always been elusive.
But Utahime has always preferred the responsible, mature type. The ones who are kind, dependable, and predictable, whose passions are a quiet simmer. The ones that will make you their world and prioritize you above all else. Good men.
And Gojo isn’t one.
She breaks eye contact, pulling the fridge door shut from under his arms. His hand falls from her hair and hangs limply at his side.
“Yeah," she replies quietly. "You can’t have a weakness.”
Utahime thinks she might understand it now, the loneliness, the pressure to have only connections to people who are as strong as him. His burden to carry is large, and it’s his alone.
Gojo leaves shortly after that, quickly briefing her on the latest updates from his missions.
Utahime hasn’t seen him since that night, and today she gazes at her front door, recalling the image of his silvery white hair disappearing into the rain.
She would have thought she’d be rejoicing at Gojo’s imprisonment in a box. It’s weird, but she feels his absence, and not just from a purely tactical standpoint. These days, she’s always half expecting to hear her name sung in that familiar lilt as she walks around campus, to see her phone screen light up with his caller ID. For him to appear and diffuse the tension in the most miserable missions, if only by redirecting despair into annoyance.
But Utahime tells herself he’s not worth missing. She could never stand him anyway, most of the time.