Chapter Text
“Yes.”
“I’m…I’m sorry, My Lady?”
“Yes.” Utahime does not quite condescend, but her eyes are a little haughty. Just enough. They think they’re moving a pawn. She, master of the board, knows just the look to warn them that she is the one moving theirs. “Is that not the answer you wanted?”
“Oh, no, no, that’s…wonderful, My Lady.” The envoy’s head bobs as he bows at the waist, this time, not the neck. Utahime lifts a skeptical eyebrow. “I’m merely surprised.”
She regards him coolly for a moment. Small things matter at times like these.
“It’s a good offer.”
“Of course, My Lady, we never would have brought it to a lady of your stature-“
“With room for improvement.” She cuts him off with a gracious smile and a flick of the wrist that refills his teacup before he even sees her move. “We could arrange a more substantial compensation for my family, I’m sure.”
She wants to snort, because the idea of her choosing to marry a man so dreadful that her family has to be compensated for the loss is comical, and her mother, when she receives the check, will know that. She’ll probably laugh and do something stupid like put in a pool because the bride-price means nothing; Utahime would never marry somebody so obscenely rich if the money she’d marry into wasn’t going to keep her parents comfortable for life.
But she doesn’t particularly like this weasel-faced elder, and she does very much like playing with naïve men who think they are her superiors, so she pastes on a genteel smile and asks, as kindly as she knows how, for an extra three zeroes to be added to the number her parents will receive.
“I…I’m sure we can arrange that.”
The little weasel of a man looks like he’s going to start to sweat soon. His impeccable tea doesn’t seem to offer much comfort.
“Good,” she says. “I’m so glad we’re on the same page.”
He doesn’t even have the wherewithal to glare at her. She doesn’t think she’s ever so successfully talked one of these envoys into a panic before, not even when she was trying to drive them off.
“I’m…glad to have reached an agreement,” he says, wiping at his forehead with a cloth produced from his pocket. “This…will be a beneficial alliance, I’m sure you know.”
“Beneficial,” she says. “Yes.”
Long gone are the days when Utahime was young and unblemished and naïve. She had imagined herself then with a simple, kind man, maybe one who wasn’t much to talk about, but a constant, reliable, steady husband who would care for her. Someone she could grow to love. That had been before. She’d only been eighteen when the proposals had begun, and it had taken years to make herself admit that the people chasing her were only after one thing.
Not love, certainly, and not beauty, even when she had had it; not status, money, even heirs. Her power was a means by which they meant to make themselves powerful. That had been all.
No kind, simple man had ever materialized, and in that absence, kind and complicated would suffice.
She had known since childhood that her hand in marriage would be the most powerful piece she had to play. She’s always meant to wield it like a weapon until somebody earned it. And maybe this man has not, but he wouldn’t hurt her, and he wouldn’t – rarer still – use her to hurt anyone else. Not unless she deemed it necessary. Not unless she allowed herself to be used.
Gojo Satoru might be the only man with the means to fight for her hand who knows and accepts that she isn’t going to do that.
She hadn’t thought he would make the offer, but if he was going to, she would put herself in the only hands she trusted, no matter how irritating the thought, even if it felt like torment itself.
“Well,” the Gojo envoy says, smiling nervously, “we’ll be in touch, won’t we.”
“Shortly, I hope.” She does not. She hopes, actually, for the longest possible engagement. Let her have the cover of that promise without the constant sound of Gojo’s nattering voice in her ear. Let her, for a little while, live in the peace she’ll never have again once her name matches that of the colleague she’s wanted to haul out and deck more times than any of the others.
But what she says, because Utahime knows how to play a chessboard, is, “I’ll be looking forward to it.”
**
“But…she’s accepted.”
“Yeah, and? I refuse.”
“Surely you realize-“
“I said I’m not doing it.”
Kensuke is not one of the more gifted Gojo elders at reading a room. Instead of, as anyone sane would do, capitulating, he lowers his horn-rimmed glasses, looks through unfocused eyes at Satoru, and pinches his lips into a fishlike frown.
“I’ll admit I can’t make you,” he says, “but I can implore you to consider the good of the clan.”
“Yeah, by, what, marrying to some chick who can help me kill people you don’t like?”
“Satoru-sama-“
“You know I don’t need any help to do that, right?”
“But the bargaining power we would gain-“
“Don’t need it.”
“But what if she were to marry into another clan?”
“She won’t.”
“You can’t be so sure of that.”
“She won’t.”
“Well, she was willing to marry you, wasn’t she?”
“I gave you my answer.”
“Satoru-sama…”
He lowers his glasses, folds them, wipes the lenses on his shirt before he slips them into the pocket of his unzipped uniform jacket. Eyes bare and hard and cold, he eyes Kensuke for a moment before he answers.
“And I don’t ever want to hear that woman’s name from you again.”
**
They let her in, of course. No one listens to him. It’s not like it’s a surprise.
He still wants to curl in on himself when she shouts something at him from the doorway in a voice too outraged for a greeting.
“What’s that about, huh?”
Her little fist pounds at his door as if there’s any chance he hasn’t already heard her. It must hurt to keep hitting it against hardwood like that.
“I know you’re in there, you idiot!”
He could open the door. He thinks about that for a moment, considers what he would do if he could. He likes to think he’s had enough practice to rebuff her. He is not, in actuality, sure if he could do anything so prudent right now.
She told everybody she would marry him. Everybody knows. She would marry him.
“We have nothing to talk about,” he calls hoarsely.
His door is locked, but the knob still turns a few seconds later. He’s not even a little bit surprised.
“Nothing to talk about?”
Satoru is too weak not to turn.
When Kensuke presented the marriage offer, he knows she must have looked impeccable. She would be wearing something fussy; her hair would be perfect, her face made-up. Now, she’s in overalls, one shoulder falling off over an oversized blue shirt, her hair falling out of a haphazard braid, a Seibu Lions cap shielding her face, and he does not know what to think.
She wouldn’t have come here like this if she weren’t either too angry or too dejected to think that her clothes mattered. He’s seen her pull the strings enough times to know that.
“I’d be doing you a favor, you know,” she snaps. “You might actually be in your family’s good graces for once.”
She’s red in the face and a little breathless, and Satoru turns his face away. He can’t look. It’s too much, too tempting, too dangerous. He can’t agree with her. He can’t accept a single reasonable excuse.
“Too bad I don’t care, then.”
“Damn, Satoru, am I really that repulsive?”
“Not everything is about you!”
Silence. He still can’t bring himself to face her, and that is all that greets him. For once, he doesn’t even what to know what her face looks like right now.
“Maybe not.”
It can’t be that easy. He waits.
“But have you ever thought about the position I’m in?”
“Yeah. You could have anyone else.”
“I know you’re not this cold,” she says, her voice as frigid as she foolishly wants him to believe he’s not. “And I know you know how these things work.”
“Yeah. You have men falling all over you.”
“Men who want a weapon they can sleep with.”
Satoru’s fist clenches. She can probably see it. He’s too angry to care.
“And I know you know that if I haven’t given in yet, I’m never going to.”
“And I’m saying that none of that matters ‘cause it won’t be me.”
“None of that matters.” Utahime laughs harshly. “I risk my life with you for ten years, and none of that matters?”
“I’m not going to marry you as a favor.”
“It’s not a favor.”
“Whatever it is you’re calling this.”
“Would it kill you?”
Satoru, if he had any less practice pushing away guilt, would feel its weight for the rest of his life, but right now, that’s not an allowance he can grant himself. For everything he has ever wanted to do, there’s been something that he has to, and both can rarely coexist.
“Utahime.”
“Mm.”
“Please leave.”
“Satoru.”
“I told you to leave.”
“I’m a good judge of character,” she says. “And I’ve never actually wanted to kill you, so I know you’re not this cruel.”
“Can you just-“
“So what aren’t you telling me?”
**
Maybe it really is just that he finds her repulsive.
She wants to think that wouldn’t be like him. He teases her relentlessly, but he’s always trusted her enough to stay. She has never thought of Gojo as the kind of man who would throw a woman out for the scar on her face or the scrawniness of her figure, or, really, throw a woman out at all. But now…
Maybe it’s her.
If it is, she knows better than to dwell on it, but it’s disappointing. He was supposed to be better than this. He was going to be her way off this conveyer belt of suitors who don’t want her for any reason she can accept. She’d gladly live with a fair and reasonable husband who didn’t want her at all before she’d give in to one of the ones who might claim to care for her but mean it only as far as he could profit off her power.
That isn’t a choice he’s giving her. He’s made that much abundantly clear. And if he’s not going to tell her why, she might as well take the hint and move past the idea that she’s ever going to land in a perfect safety net.
(It’s not as if she hasn’t had plenty of practice climbing without one, but the little pinch of sadness in her chest tells her that doesn’t really matter.)
**
He could have called it a mistake. When she came knocking, he could’ve recanted. He could’ve told her it was a miscommunication or a ploy to discard her and welcomed her in and said all kinds of things she would’ve rolled her eyes at. He could’ve. It would have been so easy.
But a woman with useful abilities will never be more than currency in his family’s eyes. A life of buying and selling and trading and changing hands, providing a return on investments, a life lived under a microscope – that is not what hers will be. He can be cruel for a moment because they would be crueler for a lifetime if he was not. She won’t be a prized laying-hen, a useful tool, a producer of even more useful heirs. Not Utahime.
She plays the game well. Even Satoru, who isn’t given to humility, can admit that. She wouldn’t have risen so far in the ranks with natural inclinations so far from proper if she didn’t. But this time, he knows better than she does whose hands she would be playing into. She didn’t think of her happiness when she chose. Naturally; she doesn’t prize it. He, then, must prize it for her.
So he makes a move on her behalf. It is the only worthy gift he can give the woman he loves.