Chapter 2: Through the Wall
You didn't scream. Afterwards, you were proud of that.
You stood in your own doorway with your hand on the hilt of the tanto and looked from the man on the counter to the man on the landing and back, and said, in a voice that was almost steady, "Is he dead?"
"Very." Gojo swallowed the last of the mochi and licked powdered sugar off his thumb. "He came for your knife. Him and two friends. The friends are in a less convenient place now, don't worry about them." He hopped down off the counter, landing without a sound. "Somebody's put a price on that little blade of yours. Pretty big one. I'd guess somebody with old money and an old grudge, which narrows it down to about four families. I'll find out which."
"You killed him."
"I erased him," he corrected cheerfully. "It's tidier."
"On my landing."
"Would you rather I'd let him in?" For the first time, something edged into his voice, something cold and enormous. "He had a blade for cutting through barriers, and a binding vow to get yours by sunrise, and he didn't care what he had to go through to do it. I watched him walk all the way here from Setagaya. I watched him climb your stairs." He took a step toward you. "I wasn't going to let him get to the top."
You realised you were shaking. Not from fear, not quite. From the knowledge that you'd been walking home through empty streets with your head full of him, and the whole time he'd been watching you, and watching a killer coming for you, and you'd had no idea.
"How long?" you asked. "How long have you been watching me?"
He didn't pretend not to understand. "Since your knife touched my hand."
"Every day?"
"Every minute." He said it simply, like a fact about the weather. "I see everything, you know. That's what Six Eyes are. Every drop of cursed energy in the city, all the time, all of it, like standing in the middle of a stadium with every light on and everyone screaming. It never stops. I've never once been able to turn it off." He took another step. He was very close now, tall over you in the dark kitchen, and you could feel the heat coming off him. "Then you touched me. And for the first time in my life, there was something I wanted to look at more than I wanted to look away."
"That's not an excuse."
"It's not meant to be." His head tilted. "It's an explanation. I'm not sorry about the guy on the stairs. I'm not sorry about Morioka either, honestly. I'm sorry I scared you. That's the only thing I'm sorry about."
You should have told him to leave. You should have called someone, anyone, except that there was no one you could call about the strongest man in the world, and he knew that, and you knew that he knew.
"Take it off," you said.
He went still. "What?"
"The blindfold. If you're going to stand in my kitchen and tell me you've been watching me every minute for a month, you can do it to my face."
For a moment he didn't move. Then he hooked a finger in the black fabric and pulled it down, and his hair fell forward over his forehead, white and soft, and he looked at you with those terrible beautiful eyes, and you felt it, physically, like walking out of a dark room into sunlight. All of that attention. All of it, every bit of it, on you.
"Better?" he said quietly.
You drew the tanto.
He didn't flinch. He didn't put up a hand. He just watched you, eyes very wide and very bright, as you lifted the blade and laid the flat of it against his throat, right over his pulse, where nothing in the world should have been able to reach him.
It went through his Infinity like water. It rested against his skin. You felt him swallow against the steel.
"I could hurt you," you said. "With this. I'm the only one who could."
"I know." His voice was rough. "Why do you think I keep coming back?"
"Because you want me to?"
"Because you're the only person in the world I don't have to hold at a distance." His eyes didn't leave yours. "Do you know what that's like? I can't remember the last time someone touched me without me letting them. I can't remember the last time someone could. I've let everyone in my whole life bounce off a wall. Then you came along with your stupid little knife and just walked through it." His breath shuddered. "Yeah. I want you to. Hurt me, don't hurt me, I don't care. Just don't stop touching me."
You lowered the blade. You set it on the counter behind you. And then you put your hand where the steel had been, flat against his throat, and felt his pulse going wild under your palm.
"Here's how this is going to go," you said.
"Okay," he said, a little breathlessly.
"You don't get to decide things for me. Not who I eat dinner with, not who sharpens their naginata in my shop, not anything. You want to keep someone away from me, you tell me first, and you tell me why, and then I decide. Understand?"
"What about guys who come up your stairs with knives?"
"Those you can erase," you allowed. "But you tell me afterwards."
He laughed, low and helpless. "Deal."
"And you ask," you said. "Before you touch me. Every time. You've been taking whatever you want your whole life because no one could stop you. I can stop you. So you ask."
He looked down at you for a long moment, eyes burning.
"Can I kiss you?" said Gojo Satoru.
"Yes," you said, and pulled him down.
He kissed you like he'd been starving for a decade and you were the first meal he'd been allowed. His hands came up to your face, then into your hair, and he made a sound into your mouth that went straight through you, low and shocked, as if the feeling of being touched back was almost too much to stand. You walked him backwards until his hips hit your kitchen table and he sat on it without breaking the kiss, pulling you between his knees, and somewhere outside on the landing there was a dead man, and you couldn't make yourself care.
"Can I take this off?" he murmured against your jaw, fingers at the hem of your sweater.
"Yes."
He took it off. He looked at you in the dark like he was memorising you, which you supposed he was, with those eyes. "Can I touch you?"
"Satoru. Yes."
At the sound of his name he shut his eyes for a second as if you'd hit him. When he opened them again they were darker, the pupils blown wide. His hands spread across your bare back, burning hot, and he pulled you in and put his mouth to your throat, your collarbone, the top of your breast above your bra, and you dug your fingers into his shoulders and felt how hard he was trembling.
"You're shaking," you said, wondering.
"Yeah, well." His laugh was ragged. "Nobody's ever done this through the wall before. Turns out it's a lot."
You got his uniform off him somehow, the high collar first, then the jacket, then the shirt underneath, and he was all long lean muscle and pale skin under it, so warm he felt fevered. You put your hands on his chest. He sucked in a breath. You moved them lower, across the hard flat plane of his stomach, and his head dropped back and he said your name, not a request, not an order, just your name, broken in half.
"Bed," you said. "Now."
"Yes, ma'am."
He picked you up. He did it easily, like you weighed nothing, and carried you down your narrow hallway to your bedroom with your legs around his waist and your mouth on his neck, and laid you down on your unmade sheets, and then he knelt over you on the mattress and looked at you, and asked, every time, the way you'd told him to. Can I. May I. Is this okay. Tell me yes. And every time you said yes, his face did something that made your chest hurt.
He undressed you slowly. He took his time with it, as if he wanted to see every inch of you in every kind of light, kissing each new stretch of skin as he uncovered it. Then he settled between your thighs and asked, "Can I taste you?", his voice gone so low and rough you barely recognised it, and you said yes so fast he laughed against the inside of your knee.
He was good at it. Of course he was good at it. He was good at everything, and worse, he could see you, every flicker of your cursed energy flaring and pulsing under your skin, and he followed it like a map. He found the exact pressure and rhythm that made you arch off the bed, and held you there, his big hands pinning your hips, his mouth hot and relentless. You came with his name in your mouth and your fingers knotted in his white hair, and he groaned against you like it was him coming apart.
When he lifted his head, his eyes were wild and his mouth was wet and he was grinning.
"I could see that," he said hoarsely. "Your energy. It went off like fireworks. It was the prettiest thing I've ever seen."
"Come here," you said, reaching for him. "Come here, come here."
He came. He kicked off the rest of his clothes and slid up your body, all heat and weight, and kissed you deep and slow so you could taste yourself on him. You reached between you and wrapped your hand around him, and he was hard and heavy and so hot against your palm that he hissed and dropped his forehead to yours.
"Ask me," you said.
He looked down at you. The blue of his eyes was almost gone.
"Can I have you?" he whispered. "Please. Can I?"
"Yes," you said. "I'm yours. Yes."
He pushed into you slowly, so slowly, his whole body shaking with the effort of it, and when he was all the way inside he stopped, and buried his face in your neck, and just breathed. You felt it then, the strangest thing: a pressure, all around you, faint and cool, like being wrapped in the eye of a storm. Infinity. He'd let it close around you both, so that nothing in the world could touch either of you. Only each other.
"Mine," he said into your throat, roughly, almost to himself. "Mine, mine, mine."
"Then move," you said, and he did.
He moved like he was trying to memorise that too. Deep and slow, pulling almost all the way out and sinking back in until you were gasping, then faster when you dug your heels into the backs of his thighs and demanded it. He kept his eyes on your face the whole time. He told you things in a voice you'd never heard from him, low and urgent and filthy and adoring all at once: that he'd been dreaming about this since the day you touched his hand, that you felt better than anything, that you were his, that he'd erase anyone who ever tried to take you, the whole world if he had to. You should have been afraid. Instead you pulled his mouth down to yours and kissed him, and said "Then don't let go," and felt him shudder from head to foot.
He slid a hand between your bodies, and found you, and you broke a second time, clenching around him, crying out into his mouth. He followed you over a moment later with your name on his lips and his hips stuttering against yours, the Infinity around you flaring blue-white for one instant, so bright you saw it through your closed eyelids, like being inside a star.
You woke at dawn to grey light and an empty bed, and a moment of cold panic, before you heard the clink of mugs in your kitchen.
You pulled on his uniform shirt and padded down the hall. The landing outside your door was empty and spotless, as if nothing had ever lain there. Gojo was standing at your counter in only his trousers, blindfold back on, making coffee exactly the way you liked it.
He didn't turn around. That should have been your first warning. Gojo Satoru always turned around for you.
On the counter, next to the coffee, was a long white envelope sealed in red wax with a crest you recognised from your grandfather's oldest ledgers. The jujutsu higher-ups. Kyoto.
"It came through your mail slot at five," he said. His voice was perfectly light. "I didn't open it. I didn't have to." He finally turned. Even with the blindfold on, you could feel the full weight of his attention land on you, and it was colder than you'd ever felt it. "They want you in Kyoto. Tomorrow. Personally."
"Why?"
He smiled. It was the smile from the shop, the bright beautiful one, with the shadow of the whale moving underneath.
"Because somebody told them about your little knife," said Gojo Satoru softly. "And they want you to make them another one. A bigger one." He set your coffee down in front of you, very gently. "For me."