Work Text:
He’s early. Rings the door bell before she’s even had to time to put on her face. She pads over to the door, and there he is. Casually dressed, leaning against the railing, one hand waving. Same black uniform. Same blindfold. Same grin. There’s something grounding in that stability.
“You’re early? Has the world ended?” She says.
He shrugs and laughs.
“Got something later.”
And he walks in. Takes off his shoes. He’s so tall, he has to duck down. He had complained loudly when she had moved in. Said this is what she got for never drinking her milk, conveniently forgetting he was shorter than her when she had first met him.
This isn’t the first time. He knows her place. Not that there is much to know. Her apartment is a floor but it’s a rather small one tucked in an alley. She had only gotten it because the windows were large, and the sunlight was so beautiful in the afternoon, she had to take it. Satoru had scoffed at the west facing windows, but he also helped her move in so it was a draw.
She has her hair up. Is still in her pajamas. And has on those little under eye patches she bought in bulk on sale at cosme.
“Hot,” he says as he looks at her. And she rolls her eyes.
“I haven’t even made coffee,” she says.
“I can wait.”
They’re in the kitchen now. Her kettle simmering. She had gotten a pour over after being mesmerized by one on her route back from a mission. She ordered a cup, and the flavor was so divine, she had forgotten she still had blood over her kosode until she had gotten home. Today is her day off, and this is her treat. She is a green tea kind of gal, or wanted to be, but something about Satoru requires black coffee.
He goes to the cabinet where she stores the sugar cubes. They both know she always has it. For guests in general, she always says. And he always nods.
(Not just for him. Of course not just for him.)
She’s already set down newspapers on the tile and her kitchen chair - one of three she owns. The fourth breaking which Shoko had chided her for because it had been ancient and she should’ve let it go years ago - was long gone.
“Do you have-”
“It’s in the back of the fridge,” she says from the bathroom. She is washing her face. And he appears with a little melon soda. He’s put it in a glass, and she is mildly annoyed he used her whiskey stones as ice cubes.
“Just give me a minute, ok?” She says.
He looks at her but says nothing. She sighs, truncating her morning routine. His time is more important than hers, every second of his day accounted for. He probably blew something off to even show up. She dries her face, and tries not to think about the day when he won’t.
She goes to the kitchen, and lays out two mugs. One with a frog logo on it. The other one a gift he had gotten for her on one of his missions. And although the English had faded, there was still a pink patch in the middle. It’s got your face on it, he had said. My face is not a mug, she said. But she had kept it, of course.
He is sitting on the couch now, waiting for her to finish up. Drinking a soda. His feet resting on her coffee table. Well resting for him. One foot still tapping up and down. The motor inside him, never asleep.
“Use a coaster,” she says.
“Why? This thing is a piece of shit.”
“Don’t call my coffee table that,” she says.
He doesn’t move. But neither does she. And like two people who have known each other for almost half their life, they simply continue.
She’s never had a boyfriend longer than six months, and she knows his dating life is as chaotic as him. Shoko has never quite gotten over first break up. Nanami would never confess his crush on the girl at the bakery even though he went everyday. Yaga-sensei’s divorce was what caused him to make his own dolls, who would never be able to leave him. People grieved the dead. Sorcerers grieved their own life in real time. She knows this. She has metabolized this. She wouldn’t- couldn’t -
(But if she did think - if she did ever allow her mind to consider-
These were the moments when she wondered what it would be like if they stopped pretending, stopped hurting long enough to claim this. Mornings not snatched from their lives, but long and languid. Honey on the tongue. Melting away in the everyday.)
The kettle goes off, and she pours the water over the grounds. Making sure to wet them first. One time she let Satoru make it, and he had fucked up the process so badly she swore she would never allow him to make coffee again. It’s just bean water, he kept saying. You’re a menace. She had said.
Satoru puts in six cubes of sugar, and she says her usual piece about how his teeth will fall out, and he says he’s the strongest everywhere including teeth. But she’s already turning to her wall where she’s hung up a cd player. She thumbs through her collection until she finds the right one and slots it in. There is a pause, a tick, and the machine whirls, spinning up the cd so fast its cover art becomes a silver blur.
“I don’t know why you insist on CD’s. It’s so old fashioned.”
“I happen to like physical media ok? What happens when the digital world goes poof?”
“If our entire IT ecosystem goes down? Well then I’ll ask to borrow your cd’s in between fighting off hordes of roving gangs.”
She rolls her eyes because she knows Satoru is in the middle of his zombie apocalypse phase and has been obsessed with cannibals and stuff like the end of the world. Last time she was in Tokyo she debated with him fast or slow zombies. It had got so out of hand, Shoko had to put a moratorium on all mentions of the undead. Forever.
“Besides you like Akiko Wada. I know you do.”
“I never claimed to have good taste. You’re the one pretending.”
He says as he takes off his jacket. He always throws it around leaving it on the couch or draped it over a chair. Shedding bits of himself the way a snake rubs against sufaces to get rid of the skin.
He’s already down to a white t shirt. His button down that probably cost her entire wardrobe haphazardly flung somewhere. She clucks her tongue at him, but he is already moving to the bathroom. She can hear the water run.
She’s already laid out her scissors and comb and when Satoru sits down, rubbing his wet hair with her hello kitty towel. She scowls a little.
“That’s for guests.”
“And?”
“You’re not a guest.”
He grins an obnoxious little thing.
“Whoopsie.”
But he knows what he’s doing. He’ll leave coffee cups or wrappers there. Pop in and drop out at his convenience. He creeps in bit by bit, and no matter how throughly she cleans her apartment, she’ll still find some bits of him. She’ll find his hair long after he’s left. Tufts of silver in every crack.
His wet hair smells like what must be his conditioner. He uses whatever he has on hand, and she can smell the familiar scent of pine from Tokyo technical. Guess he was back to that insane schedule again.
She tucks the smock around his shoulders. The same wide shoulders upon which the Jujutsu World depended on. And he pulls off his blindfold, as she begins.
“You’ve let it go a little longer,” she says.
“More for you to cut,” he says.
The first time she had met Satoru, he had short almost buzzed hair. He said it was from a family ritual sort of thing, and Utahime had assumed it was some of that weird clan stuff. But then he let it grow out. He hadn’t let anyone cut it until he had shown up at her dorm room, saying something about Shoko’s bob cut looking good. It’d been that way since.
For a while he had sported a man bun, well really a man pony - it wasn’t that long. And after a disaster that she labeled the mullet era, he had started asking her for a fade, an undercut that let him survive the in between months.
“Just get a subscription like every other business man in Tokyo,” she had said.
“Nah. I have you,” he had said. “I want that intergenerational knowledge. I’m a historian.”
“What the hell are you saying?” she says.
Utahime’s mother worked at a salon for over 20 years. After school, Utahime would walk over to the store and spend some time reading all the fashion magazines. The air always smelled like the blue liquid they suspended the combs in. Alongside the humid wetness of shampoo and acrid sting of chemical perms. She picked up a few things and could easily navigate her way around a pair of scissors. She could still measure with precision exactly 10 centimeters of ends. Probably would until she died.
Her mother was a single mom, and Utahime a good kid. Sometimes she wonders if her mother was still alive what she would think about her daughter, a teacher, standing in the kitchen casually clipping the ends of the strongest sorcerer of their age. Probably would ask if he was single. She always was so funny like that.
She looks to at the window. It was still early enough that the light wasn’t too bright. Sometimes, she lowers the blinds. She’s been doing this so long, she probably could do it in the dark. She knows the shape of his head, the exact curvature of Gojo Satoru. That he lets down his infinity just for this, and if she thinks about that too long-
Well she does not.
She begins a the top, lopping off errant ends and trimming bits that had gotten wayward. She hums as she clips here and there.
It’s short work. She makes sure to buzz what is needed. Until she can run her hands through the ends and almost see scalp.
(Pity.)
She’s fluffing it back, wondering if he’ll let her blow dry his hair. She brushes off the small pieces with her hands, letting the white strands fall onto the newspaper below.
She holds up a mirror so he’ll see. He turns his head one way and then the other, shaking it until his eyes sear into hers.
“You know,” he says. And she braces herself. The CD has long since stopped, leaving the two in silence. And she swears she can hear his heartbeat as loudly as she can hear her own.
“It looks good. You know you should consider quitting. Making a go of this. I bet you’d run a pretty amazing salon.”
“Not this again,” she says.
She moves to leave, but then she feels it. His hand is on hers. And she is weighed down so heavily by the warmth, his warmth.
“I would be your number one customer. Even if it’s just once a year. I promise to make it worth your while.” He says. His voice a murmur. They’re so close. The flimsy back of a chair, a white t shirt, her pajamas are all that separate them. That and the distance between the strongest and everything else. She is having trouble breathing.
“I can’t,” she says. Her mother had died so young. It was violent and horrible, and she had seen it first hand. It’s how she had manifested her powers. Despite being 16, practically geriatric for power manifestation, she had been the only one to graduate from her class. So she knows, exactly the weight of a sorcerer’s time. She knows exactly why she does what she does. In the same way, Gojo Satoru could not stop being Gojo Satoru - she could not stop being Iori Utahime.
Satoru was in the middle of saying something incredibly sarcastic when his phone buzzes. He frowns as he pulls his phone with one hand, his blindfold the other. And the warmth recedes and in its place: absence.
He makes a call, listens, and then hangs up on Ijichi half way.
She is already undoing the smock. She knows how this goes. Their moment is over. Or would be soon.
He is up now, moving towards his clothing. And she cannot help but follow. Sometimes she wonders if her entire life would be orbiting this man, the gravity of whom she cannot escape.
(But would she want to?)
He grabs his shirt, and she can’t help it. She reaches out, letting her fingers work. One button at a time, she laces him back up. Prepares him for the day, the only way she can. She leaves the top button open, because that’s how he likes it. And she-
He steps away. Well, technically he walks away, his jacket on his shoulders. She knows his infinity is back on. And there he goes, grabbing his shoes, making his way out of her house, out of her sight, out of her life once more.
“Sorry. Some of us have things to do, you know.” he says. “I’ll have to convince you another time.”
“Good luck with that,” she says.
“The strong don’t need luck. That’s for the weak,” he says.
They have done this a hundred times. And by now she understands. Don’t die is what he’s trying to say. Stay safe. Because beneath all that bluster, all that attitude, somewhere inside him was the beating heart of a young man.
“You shouldn’t let it go so long,” she says. But what she means is: come see me again, soon, please.