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Glass clinks on hardwood.
Utahime exhales in bliss, her first beer of the night drained. The bubbly residue glistens on the sides as it slides down, always there to greet her at the end of a full day, good or bad. Today has been worse, but, the bar hums with its happier patrons, and not to mention the TV is turned to an already exciting baseball game on just the second inning— that and her limbs finally melting into that giddy warmth, all of which makes her think the night is just starting to get alittle brighter.
Pressed against the side of the thick wood bar, she beckons the bartender over, gestures to her glass, and the guy takes it, asks if she wants the same draft beer and she says yes absolutely .
The bartender is a nice guy with a small smile, tall, nose piercing, thick eyebrows that seem to always be sizing up patrons, maybe concerned for other ones. In the past she’s watched him step in to calm a couple of bar brawls. Scars poke out of sleeves rolled-up about to his elbows that make her think knife fights, bouncer, bodyguard. She half-expects to see a tattoo under his collar. Though, it doesn’t bother her.
Leaning forward a bit, she can see behind the bar. Muscled forearms flex as he pulls the lever and foam guzzles to the rim of her glass, and she’s glued. Yeah, the white marks on his skin don’t deter her in the slightest.
When the glass spills over a bit, he tsks, wiping it with the corner of his shirt, and a kind of flutter happens in her chest at his want to keep her glass clean.
He starts back over, and she settles back into her stool, tries to picture how to smile, how to change her tone into something sweeter than her usual. She clears her throat as he reaches her, “Um... Takeshi, right?”
“Tsukasa.”
“Tsukasa! Right. I, um— well I was wondering if you—”
“Napkin.” He snaps his fingers like he’d forgotten, reaches under the bar and retrieves one for her. “Sorry about that, enjoy your drink.” A quick smile, and he walks away to help another patron.
Farthest end of the bar, it’s a young flare of a woman, tight dress like a Chinese finger trap with her tits about to burst out of the top. Tsukasa lingers with more than just a small smile for her and her big fake laugh.
Utahime drops a sigh into her drink. Was she aging out of this already? She’s only thirty-one. She likes to think she doesn’t even look thirty-one. Out of her traditional garb, she’s sporting her new tank top with crisscross straps similar to that sick sports bra her favorite soccer player wears in the treadmill commercials all over TV right now. Low black jeans slick against her thighs. Her hair is up in a ponytail, tied with a dark navy ribbon. She looks good, in her book at least.
The fake laugh at the end of the bar is loud though, and she takes a hard swig of beer.
Her mind begins turning loose and wobbly, and she drifts, thinks of how maybe she should try that different lipstick Shoko gave her, or maybe more concealer. She has to catch herself from touching the tossed skin that’s the scar across her face.
As the drink settles deeper in her gut, those thoughts slip into memories. Stupid, horrible memories that rise like bile. Molten flesh and the rough grip of a katana. Lightning and rain. Cold blade by her side dripping water and color, staining stone that breaks under the weight of five arms and ten mouths broiling towards her again. Copper rings sharp on her tongue, and it’s suffocating, her nose pouring it, her eye shut from the lightning rocketing through the nerves on the right side of her face. Spitting blood, she hears herself yell, feet hitting stone as she charges.
It’s a lightning strike that startles her. A second later she realizes it’s just the pool balls clacking. Laughter rumbling from the booth behind her, the TV to her right blares a baseball game quietly under the bar roar.
Raising the beer to her lips, she finds her hand shaky, the glass clinking on her teeth. She forces herself to stay on the baseball game, to immerse herself in that LED green field. The rumble of rock music just starts to be comforting when her eyes catch it.
A guy. Sitting at the right end of the bar glancing over at her. Looking away with a smile when she catches him.
It’s enough to bring her back.
Stocky set shoulders push tight under a dark button-up patterned with white sakura blooms. Jet black hair moussed back, tousled a bit in the front over earthy green eyes soft with care. Soft with concern. It’s a kind face framed by cheekbones she finds she desperately wants to cut her lips on.
Jesus. She feels seventeen again. Light-headed. Fluttery.
Alright. Calm down. Act natural. You’re an adult. You can use your head. Just think and use your words to communicate to another adult that you want to continue to communicate like with a phone number. Yours. A piece of paper. That’s simple enough, right?
The guy is looking at her again. And she does this painfully weak half-wave to him.
She was so screwed.
Scrounging her eyes tight, she takes a hard chug of beer to her left and hopes she did a good job of hiding it from the guy. Clinking the glass down, she turns to her right to try her hand at this stupid game called picking up guys so she can at least go home satisfied and without—
“Utahime!” A mop of snow white hair plops into the stool on her right, effectively stopping her from leaving.
It’s Gojo fucking Satoru in her bar. “ The hell are you doing here?!”
“It’s a bar. Anyone over twenty can come in here and get wasted at their own leisure. The sign at the front says so! They don’t exactly have an age cap though, fortunately for you.”
“What— You jerk! We’re not that far apart!”
“Hey hey hey! Don’t be tossing me into the old-age pool with you! I haven’t grown past my twenties yet!”
“Or teens.” She mutters under her breath, resigns to hunching over her drink.
Gojo waves the bartender down, “Oh, a lemonade, if you’d be so kind! I’m a growing boy.”
Tsukasa gives him a look, shifting it to her. She hides under her hand.
“I’ll need another of these too. Both on my tab.”
“Oh-ho, so you are my senior?” He teases as the bartender leaves them.
“Do you need something, Gojo?” She sips her beer. Behind the bar, Tsukasa again spills the foam over her next glass and wipes it, but she doesn’t get butterflies this time.
“Actually… come to think of it, I’m not sure why I’m here.”
“Really? That’s crazy.” She throws back the rest of her drink.
“Maybe I was here wondering if you needed anything.”
She swivels to him, the motion alittle dizzying. His expression even more so.
His weekend sunglasses are angled towards the bar, so that his eyes meet hers bare.
And he looks... concerned.
“Do... Do I need anything?”
“Yes.”
It’s genuine. And she has no answer for it. “Do you think I need something?”
“Well, a boyfriend for starters.”
She had an answer for that one, “Screw you, Satoru.” Her new drink clacks in front of her and she takes it happily, drinks. Warmth ebbing away the tension between her brows.
He clears his throat, his usual sing-song tone returning, “Utahime listen, if you need pointers for picking up guys, I’d be more than happy to—”
“I already have one.”
“One what?”
She stifles a burp. “A boyfriend.”
“You?” Gojo barely tries to suppress a laugh. “You have someone? Who’s the poor man?!”
He’s wearing a huge shit-eating grin that she wants to shove her shoe in. Shaking her head cooly, she shrugs, “He’s just some guy.”
“Some guy? He’s a saint! Where is he?”
Lying to Gojo Satoru seems to be so much easier— and so much more satisfying— than she’d envisioned, that it slips out like sugar, “He’s at a club, doing I don’t know what.”
“Younger?”
“Older.”
Gojo whistles. “Gold digging, huh? Lucky ducky, you are. Hope you’ve struck gold.” He raises his lemonade to her as a toast.
As he drinks with that smile he wears so loose— like a lie she finds herself wanting smashed on the ground— maybe the warmth has gotten to her and now it’s a fire rising into her chest.
“Why are you really here? Just to make fun of me? Because if so then you’re really rude a-a-and invasive and just overall plain mean to show up here just to poke me, you know that?”
“Oh, I’ve been told similar things plenty of times.” It’s a half-hearted response, his eyes seeming to catch somewhere else.
“Is it so hard to believe I have someone?” She spits.
He doesn’t answer. Talking to her isn’t even worth his time anymore, he’s had his fun, and now his gaze roams the bar, brows pinching.
“Hey! Are you even listening?!”
He’s watching the TV, ignoring her. “Do you know who’s playing?”
“Hell, if I know! It could be the damn Boston Red Sox! Gojo, for once in your life could you actually give a shit about someone else?!”
His gaze drops on her, sticking like glue.
Her mind fumbles, now that she has his attention she can’t look at him, and the mutter over her beer is louder than maybe she wanted, “I swear it’s like we’re all just ants. Just fucking ants for you to play with.” Her fingers tug her scar without thinking, without registering the name, “That’s all Hiroto was to you, not even a student, just shit on a shoe.”
He stands up fast.
Something she can’t place—wants to call surprise, worry, maybe even grief— streaks across his face like a slap. It’s a new look on him, and it’s ice in her teeth.
An apology broils up her chest, “I... Listen, Gojo, I—”
“Utahime.”
He’d breathed it, that delicate something laced in the syllables and she wonders what an overdose feels like.
“Something’s off.” He says, and that sobers her.
The bar has gone on around them, unchanged, a white noise she’d gotten used to. Billiards clink, a fresh break. Though— What game were they playing to already be breaking again? From the jukebox, With Or Without You starts back up again, and it’s only then that she realizes she’s heard it three times tonight. The same rowdy workers in the booth whoop at a homerun on the TV. There were three before that, if she’s counting right, all within the past couple minutes. She recognizes the game, too. A re-run? No—
“Gojo—?”
But he’s gone.
She’s kneeling in a house. Not hers.
A traditional washitsu room, screen doors pulled back to frame a luscious garden, the summer’s breath and cicada blares spilling into the house. Leaves swing like muffled wind chimes in the breeze, snowbell blooms looking like snow-capped trees on a mountainside, the sight and the stifling air making her miss winter. Though, the honeysuckle buds by the edge of the porch preen with sugary dew, fresh from the morning rain.
Steam curls from a cup of tea on the table in front of her, freshly served, but no host to be seen. Sluggishly, like waking from a dream, she recognizes the home as an elder’s house— one of the Gojo clan’s.
Gojo.
The image flashes like a sharp aftertaste.
In the bar, a massive claw had slammed through his back, talons jutting out of his stomach. His infinity breached somehow.
It’s like she swallowed too fast and only now is registering what she ate. Her breath too slow for what she just saw. Her stomach too calm for what broils up delayed adrenaline in her limbs.
Blood mingled in his cough, on his lips.
She stands. Sees what had to have been just seconds before now—
The claw yanking him backwards. The one gasp of air she had before reaching for him, the tips of his fingers like electricity on hers for that horrible split-second spread too thin— like eternity was just dashed blood on cobblestone, left, forgotten.
His sunglasses dropped on the floor of the bar. The booths and walls and jukebox and people swirling into a black abyss at the bottom like the bath drain at her apartment.
Then she was in this house. Abruptly. It made no sense. The peace, the suffocating quiet, all of it a thick blanket that should be satisfying and comforting.
But her breathing is unsteady when she calls out, “Gojo?!”
Tatami mat rough on her bare feet, she pumps her legs through her hakama pants and moves through the house, sliding door after door open. No one’s home. Finally she reaches a shoji door at a hallway’s far end, painted purple blossoms trickling along the screen.
She throws it open. A small room, bare and beige except for a bookshelf on the left, a table and some cushions pushed against the wall to the right. In the middle sits a boy, seeming to be overlooking the garden through the open screen, his hand steeped in a spotted cat’s fur.
The cat shoots a look at her first. A fast thing, piercing her with blazing orange eyes, and she almost misses the boy turn.
Soft chubby cheeks lead up to a forehead crowned with white fluff like clouds, weighed down by eyes that watch her from the bottom of the ocean, the sun’s rays dancing on the surface only give the illusion of light blue irises.
It’s Gojo Satoru, maybe five or six years old, and they’re in a domain. It’s the only explanation. But then was this—?
“Do you need something?” His voice is tiny, like from under a rock.
It pinches her chest, and she takes a step, “I-I’m Utahime Iori,” she bows slightly, “and I’m looking for Gojo Satoru.”
“Why?”
“I need to talk to him.”
“Why?”
“Well, it’s about grown-up stuff.”
“What kind?”
Definitely Gojo. She switches tactics before she blows a fuse. “Is that your kitty?”
The little face lights up alittle, “Yes! His name is Mochi.”
“Is he nice?”
Gojo nods, “The nicest.”
“Mind if I pet him?”
“You can if you want.”
Sliding the door closed behind her, Utahime comes to lower beside him, the cat between them.
A creamy long-haired cat with dark splotches all over, she scratches under his chin and earns a hearty purr almost immediately.
Outside is serene. She can see more of the largest snowbell tree in the garden from here, a pond stretched out as its shadow beneath, and in it, glimpses of bright fish scales sparkling in the sun.
It’s lovely. Something out of a children’s book to describe Heaven. And it's about to be hell on earth if she has to hold Gojo’s dying child form in her arms within the next minute.
She has to find the owner of the domain. Find a weapon. Find the real Gojo. Hopefully in reverse order.
It takes too long for her to notice the blue eyes watching her.
“You’re... not from here, are you?”
She misstepped, assuming that the domain “inhabitants” were friendly. It’s a mistake she won’t be able to take back if suddenly those little ears sprout horns or a second mouth rears from his jaw to—
The cat yowls loud, claws at her nails clenched in his fur and she lets go with a yelp.
They watch the cat scurry off.
Big Gojo puppy eyes look up at her questioningly.
“S-Sorry,” she collects herself, “I guess I was too harsh with him.”
“It’s ok,” the little voice offers. “He’s tough but... you shouldn’t do it again. I don’t really like seeing him do that.”
“Yeah,” her voice comes small. “Me neither.”
It’s a long pause. One where she wishes the cicadas could be louder, drown out her memory of the bar.
“Mochi has always been the nicest.” The little voice starts, a patter like rain. “Even when everyone’s gone, he’s here.”
“Do you know where everyone else went?”
“No. Usually I don’t.”
It wasn’t said with emotion, more as a matter of fact, and that pinches in her chest all the more. “Do you get left often?”
The little shoulders shrug, “I’m boring. I understand why they don’t take me to interesting places.”
“Boring? You?”
He hums as a yes. Fiddles with his feet, some dirt he flicks off. “But I’ve decided today that I won’t be boring anymore.”
Real curiosity tickles her, “And how are you going to do that?”
He looks at her, a big ‘I have no idea’ slathered across his forehead.
Her heart sinks, and the teacher in her wells up before she can stop it, “Well, what’s the opposite of boring?”
He thinks, bright color calculating beneath those little brows before he says, “Funny?”
“Right! Yes! S-So, by that logic, just be funnier!” She definitely did not have a master's in children’s education and boy does it show sometimes.
Though, it shines in those two blue ponds gazing up at her. A spark glinting in them.
Desperately Utahime hopes this is all an illusion, not some complicated time-travel technique that makes her the reason why Gojo Satoru inflicts so much suffering on everyone every day. On her. Shit.
Though, warmth ebbs through the small face like ripples, and suddenly a little smile appears that she thinks will crumple her.
The breeze rustles through a lower branch, a bird chirping there three times before he speaks.
“If he comes back, you can pet Mochi again if you’d like to.”
“I... I’d like to. Thanks.”
Air continues to sigh past them, lapping on the edge of the porch, each one light and fresh with the promise of a clear evening sky. Snowbells tug free from the branches, their spins making her think of toy tops, that snowflakes could just be toys some unseen child releases from a spinner. The white dots drift into the pond, koi sparkling into view below them. Absently, she wonders if Gojo ever fed the fish, or was told to and didn’t.
Her spine prickles right before the garden explodes.
It must have been a meteor with the heat she feels hit her face, arms, and back as she throws herself in front of the kid.
His hair is soft under her chin as she presses him close.
Land mashes into water behind them and the ground shakes beneath. When the debris settles, she chances a look.
A giant catfish the size of the garden itself lays wriggling, ten eyes along the head and four arms sprouted from the gills. Whiskers throw like whips lashing at something on its back.
Her heart skips, “Gojo!”
Hunched with his feet slipping on slimy scales, he holds some of the whiskers like reigns. He looks up, bright blue finding her, and his shoulders sigh as he breathes something to himself through a smile. He waves a hand up, singing, “Yo, Utahime! You like my new ride?”
The fish jolts a bit, tries to buck him off, and he has to refocus on reigning it in, on summoning Ao.
She sighs, “Idiot.”
Piercing blue light whirlpools out from his fingertips, the scales and gills and freakish eyes banished into a black hole for all eternity.
As the last scales vanish into the void, she brushes debris off her shoulder, turns, “Alright, kiddo, looks like it’s time for me to...”
No white hair. No blue eyes. There’s no little kid in her arms anymore, but instead she’s kneeling over a snowbell bloom.
She picks it up, and it’s not a bell shape. It dawns on her how she’s never noticed it, that snowbells in their adult stage aren’t really bells, but more like banana peels.
“Who the hell were you talking to?”
She jumps, shoves the bloom in her pocket and gets up, “No one.”
Gojo stands in the doorway. The light outside silhouettes him enough that it takes her a second to see the blood hemorrhaging from his chest.
“Wait— Gojo, you’re bleeding?!”
“Oh, yeah,” he looks down at it on his fingers, “I probably need a doctor. And you know, you’re real mean for pointing that out.”
It’s a pinch and she starts to stammer a quip back, distracted long enough to not notice him teeter.
His knees give out, both a heavy clonk on the wood floor before he falls forward.
She calls his name, barely catching him. He’s deadweight that she grunts and tries to heave back up onto his knees as the world melts around them.
His breath is thick, wet with blood as he manages a giggle. “Didn’t expect to be going home with me did you, Utahime?”
---
When the splintered garden dissolves, concrete stamps rocks into her knees as lights blare her right, they must be back. She’d forgotten they’d been in an alleyway. Shibuya at night, she remembers now. She’d called Gojo after the “small threat” report turned out to be something thicker, bigger. One glimpse of it slither into the alleyway, one step closer, and then... nothing. A gap, and she was in the bar. That bar.
“It was a memory-based curse.” She thought aloud while searching, finding a spot for Gojo to lay up against the alley brick wall.
As she helps him settle there, Gojo grunts, holding his side, “Must’ve been. I don’t remember finding you here.”
“Y-You didn’t. The domain must have been a projection of a memory I had in that bar.”
“That dingy pub? Why that memory?”
She says quietly, “I don’t know,” and undoes the zipper on his jacket, takes in the blood-soaked white T-shirt underneath. A ruddy tear stretches down his right side.
“You’re lying.”
She smirks wryly, “Maybe. It’s not important though.” She peels the jacket off of him, a process he grunts for and she does her best to keep his right side from moving, “No chance you’ll lend your blindfold for some quick first-aid wrapping?”
“No chance.”
She hums, and with a quick pull the T-shirt rips easy, something she expected more of an outcry from Gojo about, but he’s quiet, seeming to be preoccupied with breathing steadily. His chest rising and falling in an odd rhythm. Shirt gone, it’s a messy gouge that rips from the bottom of his ribcage to his right hip, where she can see bone. It pinches in her throat, and she focuses on that, on keeping her gaze from wandering as she wraps stretches of the cotton shirt around him. Her fingers brushing his skin earning a flinch from him.
She’s running a stretch behind his back, her ear close enough to feel it as a breath when he says, “Utahime.”
A shiver threatens under her skin as she pulls back, finishes fastening that round. “Hmm?”
“Why that pub?”
She looks at him then, sees sincerity and genuine concern behind his blindfold and it’s painful.
She huffs in amusement, “You really don’t have to do that.”
“I’m asking.”
“You’re pretending. And I don’t want to hear it.”
She whips out her phone, calls Shoko and gets them a ride. Traumatizing a taxi-driver with a bleeding Gojo wasn’t something she wanted to add to her list of Gojo-related incidents today.
After hanging up, she comes to sit beside him against the wall. It feels better to stare at the opposing brick than at him while they wait. Her thoughts are less wired this way.
Still, she thinks of snowbells.
He moves, fabric scraping on brick as he shifts to face her and she sighs tiredly, “Gojo. I don’t want—”
“It was that guy in the corner, wasn’t it? The black and white Sakura shirt?”
It’s ice in her veins and she’s not sure why. Not sure why her mouth gums up like she’s embarrassed to talk about it.
The guy in the corner who’d smiled at her, she’d gotten him to laugh. They had gone out for karaoke. She’d walked the streets with him, giggling. Spent the night at his place.
Air conditioning rolling over her flushed skin, she had laid there in the dark—sheets warm with the body beside her—wondering when she was supposed to feel better, when she would feel like she could live like this instead.
“It was after Hiroto, right?”
Right. Because it was Gojo’s fault.
She chuckles dryly. Rubs her face to hide the tremble starting. Rubs the scar.
“You know, being the strongest, people look up to you.”
He’s quiet beside her, dare she say reverent.
“And it’s not just students,” she mutters. “So, when you screw up, royally— ” she thinks of lightning and the taste of her own face ripping, “—enough that other people have to step in for you and fail in your place...”
Her katana clatters to the ground with her knees.
Hiroto had been torn shoulder-to-waist by the broiling arms, the mass now finally dissipating behind her. A fresh look of terror carved forever on that usually so carefree face. Nothing she did could help then, but she couldn’t stop the crying that came then.
“It drives people to think that, if the strongest leaves for a snack and just lets stuff like that happen, then maybe... maybe this career choice isn’t the right one.” She tastes saltwater on her lip. Wipes it fast and sniffs. “But you wouldn’t understand that feeling. As human as it is.” She starts to get up.
But he grabs her arm, and it’s not weak.
“Utahime. Please.”
It’s how that sincerity sits unmoved, how it asks her honestly that gets her to sit back down.
Gojo takes a breath, resettles against the wall. “I’m not going to tell you I understand. Because that would be pretending. And apparently that’s the wrong answer.”
She huffs.
“But don’t think I don’t care.”
It’s quiet, something she hopes he strains to hear. “Why did you leave then?”
“I thought Hiroto could handle it.”
She grunts in dry amusement, in thawed pain, “He wasn’t a strong sorcerer at all . And yet you left me to protect him only to get my face sliced open like a damn can of—!” She bites her lip to keep it from trembling, unable to look at him anymore.
She feels his gaze boring into the side of her head, and she’s about to get up and leave for sure this time when she hears—
“I made a mistake, Utahime. And you shouldn’t have had to pay for it. Or Hiroto.”
It’s genuine. In his tone is a genuine Gojo admitting responsibility apology and yet hearing it doesn’t feel as good as she wanted. She thought it would be sweet on her ears, but instead it’s bitter on her tongue, ashy with mourning. And by how he’d said it, she realizes that bad aftertaste is something they share.
She pulls her knees to her chin, thinks of the pucca—always strawberry filled—cookie boxes Hiroto would hoard in his backpack. How he froze up when he found a rat eating them in his bag, telling his teacher in private how it’d been a curse with a rat body and teeth that had torn his sister apart a year prior. And she remembers watching how, despite it, Hiroto was gentle with the little being when he released it out into the night.
Utahime says, “He shouldn’t have been a sorcerer. It would’ve caught up to him sooner or later.”
And Gojo says nothing. Just allows the silence to breathe between them, stretching out the air like limbs after a long and cramped car ride. She didn’t realize how relieving it would be until she felt the tension sigh loose between them.
And in its place—
“Gojo?”
“Hm?"
“...Swear you won't tell anyone about the guy in the bar.”
Gojo sits up, and she can almost smell his bullshit smile. “Worried about your image now, teach?”
“Yes. Well I mean—!” Her forehead pinches, “Ugh! I— You— Y-You wouldn’t understand, the obsessed narcissist that you are!”
“I’d say that makes me the head authority then. And by the way, I do understand.”
She bellows all of the air out her nostrils, forcibly puts her hands behind her head to look at the sky. “You don’t.”
“You hate yourself.”
Despite the words and despite that it’s coming from Gojo, it doesn’t infuriate her, doesn't jar her for any reason other than because he’d said it to her kindly.
“You shouldn’t though,” he says. “People have different ways of coping, Utahime.”
She hunches over her knees, mutters, “Yeah, and mine was just running away? Giving myself away like a lollipop and turning coward. The two best things for students to see in their teacher.”
“It’s escapism. Cut and dry. Everyone wants a little fantasy to hide from reality sometimes.”
She’s thinking of little Gojo in that massive house, alone. Snowbells left on the porch.
“We all have our fantasies to escape to. You just suck at it.”
It’s more of a tickle than a pinprick, “Really now?”
“Yeah. Sakura shirt was just you trying to play at a classic action-movie escapism route. But it didn’t work for you, because it was you pretending to be someone you’re not.”
It clicks. Like a jigsaw puzzle piece and she could strangle him for placing it before her. Quieter, “Someone I’m not, huh?”
“You were trying to live for yourself instead of others.”
Her eyes dart to him, wanting to glimpse what his face would even look like when saying something that nice, but his gaze is pointed determinedly at the thin sky between the tops of the buildings.
“It’s why I can’t tell you I understand. Because honestly,” He rolls his head then to look at her, “I think you’re going to keep getting hurt. As in, constantly, Utahime. The world won’t suddenly start seeing your way because you’re nice to it.”
She makes a ‘humph’, letting a smug smile tug on, “You think I’m nice?”
He huffs, “Yeah. Well, what else would I call it?”
“I don’t know, just— how would you know anyway, Gojo?”
“Are you saying I’m not nice?!” He tries to sit up fast, looses a small yelp.
She presses him back gently, “Sit back down, idiot. You’re going to hurt yourself more.”
Her hand on his chest feels too warm. The skin too soft, like she could melt into him.
“Hey—” He says and she jerks her hand back.
“S-Sorry.”
“No, I mean, you’re hurt.” He points to her arm.
Sure enough, a cut runs from her elbow halfway to her wrist, a single trail of blood just now reaching her smallest finger. “Oh, look at that.”
“Must’ve been from the garden debris going everywhere.” He says, and takes off the blindfold, holds it out to her. “Here.”
Dumbly, she stares at it, at him.
Blindfold off, white fluff falls and halos his face like he’s a dandelion. Twin pools laze about like glass, maybe with koi fish frozen deep inside. Overall, he wears an odd gentleness like the kind that could disappear in the wind if she lets the air in her lungs escape as fast as it begs to.
“Just take it, Utahime. My arm is getting tired.”
It shakes her back and she snatches the cloth, shoves down the heat in her cheeks.
A couple times around and finished with a knot, then her arm is wrapped. She settles back down beside him, arms laid over her stomach as she waits for the call that says their ride is here. Absently she notes how the blindfold is still warm from his forehead.
His hair free as he had held the blindfold out to her, and she's plunged into memories of high school. When everything was so much lighter, minds and shoulders and eyes, more hopeful.
Laying her head back on the cold brick of the alleyway, she closes her eyes, pretends to be fifteen again. Being jealous of Mei Mei’s long black nails. Shoko’s offer to help turned into their ritualistic 1 A.M. Thursday nights watching sumo wrestling on her dad’s small tube TV set up on the floor of her room. She’d mess up Shoko’s nails, always terrible on the smallest finger, but the younger wouldn’t care, just smiling and waving it off. Asking instead who Utahime liked.
Shoko was mercenary when it came to information, nonchalant about everything else— death and life both—but behind her calm eyes was a curated library of scarlet letters. Though, Utahime had never seen her use any of them. Didn’t understand why she collected at all. Didn’t see the harm in letting a few things slip over some chocolate Pocky.
Opening her eyes in the alleyway, she looks to the side. Doesn’t move her whole head, doesn’t want him the satisfaction of hearing her turning to look at him. It's stupid and silly —she knows— to believe for a second the strongest sorcerer in existence can’t notice her gaze on him, but she doesn’t care.
Sometimes it’s nice to pretend he’s human.
“It’s sweaty.”
“What?”
“The blindfold.”
“Oh, you’re welcome then.”
“I was saying it’s gross , Gojo!”
“Hey— There’s women all over who would kill for just a small drop of my— OW! The hell—I’m already injured!”
“Shoko can fix a punched face too, don’t worry.”
“Can’t fix an old hag’s attitude though.”
“Why you—!”
Needless to say, Shoko had a couple questions when she found Gojo shirtless, blindfold-less, and being beat to a pulp by Utahime in an alleyway that Friday night.
But, once everyone was settled in the car, all Utahime got was a head-shake and a chide that this is why she doesn’t get dates.
“So you lied about having a boyfriend?! How sad is that!”
Utahime then was so grateful for Shoko’s impeccably calm driving demeanor, as she could beat Gojo senseless without endangering anyone else on the car ride home.
~