Chapter Text
No one immediately involved in this story recognises the beginning when it first arrives. You, of course, who I will call the Kind Observers, understand that we begin here. This is because you have the unfair advantage of arriving after the damage is done. Iori Utahime and Gojo Satoru have no such luck.
Maybe for the sake of the story, this is for the best. Because at least one of them would have objected on principle. So we begin the tale not with a confession, nor even with tenderness, but with two teenagers locked inside a curse-sealed storehouse at a forgotten mountain shrine. Both these teenagers (again, one more than the other) are absolutely refusing to admit that they are frightened.
The storehouse sags at the edge of the world, threatening to fall into the abyss. According to the mission report, it has been abandoned and other things have slithered in. On approach, the wetness of foliage had something sour beneath it, something like plums left too long in a paper bag. Utahime, now forty-five minutes wiser, realises the smell was curse activity. Inside, the air is colder than it should be, and all along the walls hang split festival masks, moth-eaten ropes, and rows of porcelain foxes whose painted eyes seem to move whenever Utahime looks away.
She is not frightened. Obviously, she would prefer it if the barrier keeping them in were slightly less committed to the bit, because the groaning beams, the fox masks, and the damp little whispers gathering in the outside corners are beginning to feel like a particularly over-the-top kimodameshi.
Utahime has the book-trained awareness of a final-year jujutsu student, and so she is aware that the sliding doors have sealed themselves with a wet sucking sound, and that this cannot be good. Also, she now senses that the curse is somewhere in the rafters, making the slow, delighted clicking noise of a tongue against teeth. Also, Gojo Satoru, who is supposed to be assisting her, is smiling.
He has a stupid face, she grumbles internally, and that stupid, annoying smile on his stupid face doesn’t help matters.
Why is he always smiling? Utahime, who has spent the entire mission thus far attempting not to be provoked by him, tells herself that he is only smiling because he is fifteen and he has not yet realised that the barrier has folded around them and how badly things are turning out.
Before she can tell him to wipe that provoking expression off his mouth, the curse pours itself down, white and viscous as boiling sugar.
It comes down from the rafters in one long pale spill, and Utahime moves before she finishes thinking, throat opening around the first note of her technique as her feet find the packed earth floor. The sound catches in the storehouse, multiplying strangely, her chant snagging on the walls and returning to her in fragments. For one shining second, the sound is like a flock of shining birds turning together in the dark of the storeroom.
Gojo laughs.
It takes Utahime a further, discordant second to realise that he is not mocking her. He has already moved through the narrow space faster than she can track, white hair flashing. He is laughing because the pale thing from the rafters is dead before the notes are fully out of her mouth.
Sort of dead.
This little bit of it is destroyed, perhaps. It’s reduced to wet scraps of spite, something wriggling and fibrous in the slime, but not fully dead. Utahime feels this before she understands it, because the air remains cold, the doors remain sealed, and the rows of porcelain foxes along the walls keep watching with the same, reduplicated, painted, hateful smirk. Whatever Gojo has killed is only one expression of the curse, one hand thrust through the surface of something larger, and the barrier around them holds them like a locked jaw.
Utahime hates him a little for it anyway, because she dislikes a show-off. She has moved faster than most people would have managed, but not faster than the shriek of splitting wood when the floorboards erupted beneath her. He obviously killed the thing indelicately, churning the floor without a care for where she would move and before Utahime can parse all these things (his laugh, the almost-dead curse, the floor splintering, her dislike) she is sailing through the air. But Gojo is there before she has time to fall properly, catching her sleeve in one hand, which is the precise moment the laugh leaves his throat.
Kind Observers, this is not a romantic tableau.
The curse’s guts have burst against the ceiling, white slime and black entrails. Gojo’s grip does not gather her tenderly against his chest, nor does the storehouse arrange itself into anything like pretty moonlight and suspended dust. Instead, Gojo catches fabric rather than person, momentum takes her, and Utahime is slingshotted sideways into a stack of boxes with enough force to knock the breath from her lungs and her dignity briefly out of her body.
Pain sparks through her hip, sharp. The storehouse shudders, but the barrier still does not break, and some masks come raining down like startled faces.
Something tears at Utahime’s hair with a sharp metallic snap. Her hand flies up. She feels the loosened weight of her hair sliding over her shoulder.
This has all happened in the space of five seconds. Utahime knows, with disproportionate devastation, that her silver hair ornament has broken.
Let me explain, Kind Observers, because I know we are all used to the image of our beautiful Utahime with a bow in her hair. Unfortunately, to imagine this scene (indeed, to imagine this story best) you need to know that Utahime has had her hair twisted up into an elegant knot and kept in place by an antique, silver hairpin.
It is obviously not a valuable pin. However, Utahime has recently turned eighteen on a bitter, overcast February day and ever since then, she has been trying to grow into herself before anyone else notices the effort. To this end, she has started experimenting with new ways of wearing her hair. The pin is part of this campaign, pretty in a severe little way, a worked silver crescent with a filigree sakura motif, and three dangling beads that click faintly when she walks.
Feeling the defeat of unspooling hair, she has already decided she will go back to the pigtails.
The broken silver crescent lies near Gojo’s shoe.
Utahime sees it at the same time he does.
“Don’t touch that,” she snaps, but Gojo has already bent, quick as a magpie, and swept the piece from the floor.
Kind Observers, there are many things one may say about Gojo Satoru at fifteen and you’ve heard them all. But he does not laugh at the broken ornament. He looks at it for half a second, his thumb resting against the cracked silver.
Then the storehouse screams again, not from the rafters this time, but from the walls, from the foxes, from the wooden mouth of something hidden deep inside the room; and a new battle, brief and ugly, begins and ends.
The walls bow outward. The fox masks split along their painted mouths. The floorboards ripple under Utahime’s feet as though something enormous has turned in its sleep beneath them, and from every shelf, every beam, every dangling rope and cracked festival drum, ugly cursed energy gathers into itself with slow malice. It’s probably exactly the sort of moment in which an ancient horror ought to rise to its full height and reveal the true scale of its grief, its hunger, its terrible inheritance of fear and wrongdoing.
It gets as far as one shoulder, possibly an elbow.
There is a wet, unfolding sound, like a shroud being pulled out of someone’s throat, and the true heart of the curse begins to assemble itself above the fox statues, vast and white and many-jointed, its head pushing through the rafters.
But Gojo flicks two fingers at it.
Utahime knows to expect it now and she is pouting as thing explodes. Because of Gojo, there is no dramatic exchange of force, no noble contest between monstrous resentment and prodigious human talent. There is no meaningful opportunity for quick, clever Utahime to reassess the situation and produce a useful tactical observation. There is only Gojo, standing in the mess of broken masks with dust in his hair and that stupid, moon-bright expression on his damn stupid face.
For a second, the unfinished curse body remains standing, absurdly headless, still apparently under the impression that it is about to become the most frightening thing in the room. Then the rest of it realises it has been obliterated and collapses in a horrible, boneless sluice across the floor, mixing with the dust and creeping towards Utahime’s shoes.
She feels briefly sorry for it. It feels so undignified, like a stage villain who has spent three acts preparing an entrance and who is immediately crushed by falling scenery.
Gojo, less sympathetic perhaps, snorts out a juvenile laugh.
The doors slide open onto a world made anaemic by rain, the sky a little misty over the eastern ridge. Utahime stands in the doorway with her hair tangled down her back, one sleeve torn, her cheek bruised. She feels childishly robbed, her earlier fear all for nothing, almost silly, like she’d been scared of a pantomime witch. Gojo emerges beside her looking, infuriatingly, as if he has had an invigorating nap. He stretches.
Utahime considers pushing him down the shrine steps, pique bubbling up inside her.
Instead, she holds out her hand.
“My hair ornament.”
Gojo blinks, as though the request has travelled by telegram.
“Your what?”
God. He is stupid too.
“My orn-a-ment,” Utahime repeats, like he’s on the wrong side of a zoo enclosure.
“Oh,” he mumbles, cartoonishly patting every part of his clothing like he can’t find it, in a way that irritates Utahime afresh. “Your hair thingy.”
He produces the broken crescent, silver dulled by dust but still bright along the fracture. For a second, she thinks he will hand it over. For a second, she is relieved. Maybe a bit of solder will be all it takes and, after a quick trip to Administration to request she is never paired with this idiot again, she can move on.
Gojo does not hand it over.
“I’ll fix it,” he says. “I’ve got both parts.”
Utahime stares at him. The morning birds begin singing somewhere in the wet trees.
“No you won’t.”
“I’m great at fixing things.”
This is surely such a profound and offensive lie that Utahime is almost struck dumb by it.
“Give it back.”
Gojo, naturally, lifts his hand.
Not even very high, because he is tall enough that keeping it out of her reach requires almost no effort at all, which Utahime finds insulting. She has to step forward to snatch at it, and immediately resent the fact that his elbow bends, the hair ornament vanishes behind his back, and his grin widens.
“Careful,” he teases. “You’ll break it more.”
“I’ll break your face more!” Utahime snaps angrily, admittedly not her best work.
A small, undignified scuffle ensues. She makes another grab for it, and this time her fingers close around wrist, which would be humiliating enough on its own if Gojo did not slip on the rain-slick threshold and misstep back with her, gripping her kosode reflexively and jerking her forward. His back hits the shrine wall, Utahime is yanked against him. Beneath all of that there is the strange electric hum of him, not quite touching her skin and yet somehow always too present.
Utahime becomes aware of his long fingers gripping her clothing, the closeness of their bodies, the broken ornament clutched behind his back as if he has rescued it from her rather than stolen it.
Gojo stops laughing.
This is also less than a second, probably. Utahime’s face goes hot, and Gojo’s stupid expression falters into something briefly blank and startled. The morning birds continue their idiotic little chorus, so loud at the worst moments, emphasising silence.
Utahime yanks her entire body back, wrenching the fabric of her kosode out of his grip.
“Fine,” she snaps, because retrieving the hairpin now would require more grabbing, more reaching, more of whatever that had just been, and she would rather walk barefoot through the curse’s goopy remains than acknowledge it. “Keep it.”
And so there it is, then: the stupid loss she will pretend not to mind. She decides it is easier to mourn a broken hairpin in private than to stand here, red-faced and furious, while Gojo Satoru looks at her like that, like she might have done something so mortifying even he doesn’t know how to react.
Gojo looks down at the pieces of the crescent in his palm, then back at her, blinking once as if he has misplaced the joke he was planning to make.
“I’ll fix it,” he mumbles. “I promise.”
Kind Observers, I am sure you know that Utahime does not easily retreat. She does make tactical withdrawals, and this is one of those. This, as we have discussed, is only the beginning. Years from now, there will be other versions of this argument, some softer, some stranger, some conducted with the intimacy of people with the same grief. But that is not where she is yet. For now, she only turns sharply toward the shrine steps, dragging her tangled hair over one shoulder, fuming.
She decides, savage with teenaged fury, that the grown-up hair experiment has been an unmitigated failure.
So back to pigtails, then.