Chapter 3: Permission
"I'm going," you said.
"No," said Gojo Satoru, "you're not."
It was the first time he had ever said no to you. You both heard it land. He was leaning against your kitchen counter with his arms folded and his blindfold on, and he hadn't moved in ten minutes, and the air in your small apartment had gone so cold and still you could see your breath.
"They summoned me. Personally. If I don't go, they'll send people."
"Let them send people." His voice was light. It didn't match the air. "I'll send them back in small pieces. I'll go to Kyoto myself, today, and I'll walk into that hall, and I'll take down the screens they hide behind, and I'll have a little chat with every wrinkled old coward in there about the word 'no.' It'll take an hour. Less." His mouth curved. "I've been wanting to do it for years. You're just a good excuse."
"And then what? You erase the entire leadership of jujutsu society over breakfast because I got a letter?"
"Sounds efficient."
"Satoru." You set down your coffee. "We made a deal. Last night. You don't decide things for me."
His jaw tightened. "That was about dinner dates."
"That was about everything." You crossed the kitchen to him. You put both hands flat on his bare chest, and felt his heart going hard and fast under your palms, and knew that underneath the light voice and the easy smile he was frightened. Gojo Satoru, the strongest, was frightened for you. "They want me to make a blade that can kill you. I want to look them in the face when I tell them I won't. That's mine to do. Not yours."
He was quiet a long time. Then he reached up and pulled the blindfold down, and looked at you with those impossible eyes, and you saw it there: the whale, the abyss, the thing that would burn the world for you without thinking twice. And under it, smaller and more desperate, something that looked like a man who had never in his life been asked to wait outside.
"If they touch you," he said, very quietly, "I won't ask. I won't tell you afterwards. I'll just do it."
"I know," you said. "That's why I trust you to stay outside until I call."
Then you picked the tanto up off the counter, sheath and all, and put it in his hand, and folded his long fingers around it. He stared down at it as if you'd handed him your heart still beating.
"Hold on to that for me," you said.
The higher-ups met in a hall in the hills above Kyoto, in a compound of dark old wood behind gates that took two guards to open. You'd never been there. Almost no one had. Your grandfather had been summoned once, decades ago, and had come home and refused to speak of it, and taken up drinking for a month.
They didn't let you see their faces. You knelt on tatami in the centre of a long dim room, surrounded on three sides by tall paper screens, and behind each screen sat a shadow, and the shadows spoke to you in old dry voices that came from everywhere and nowhere at once.
They were very polite. They complimented your grandfather's work. They complimented yours. They had heard of a remarkable blade, they said, one that closed distances, one that could pass through barriers that nothing else could pass. They were curious. They would like to commission another. Larger. Stronger. For the security of the jujutsu world. There were, they said delicately, certain individuals whose power had grown beyond any reasonable means of control. It was only prudent to have a safeguard.
You knelt there with your hands on your thighs and listened, and you thought about a man on your kitchen counter eating your mochi, and about his face when your blade first touched his hand. Huh. There you are.
"No," you said.
The shadows rustled. "We don't believe you understand the request."
"I understand it perfectly. You want me to forge a weapon to kill Gojo Satoru." Your voice was steady. It surprised you. "I won't. Not for any price, not under any threat. You can't make me, because the binding vow I put on the first blade only works if the smith forges it willingly. So you'll never get another one out of me."
A long silence. Then one of the shadows, the one in the centre, spoke in a voice like a dry leaf being crushed.
"Then we will have the first one."
"You can't."
"You are a smith with no clan, no allies and no technique. You are alone in a room in Kyoto, surrounded by our people. Give us the blade, and you may leave."
"I don't have it," you said.
The shadows went still.
"I gave it away," you said. "This morning. Before I left Tokyo. I gave it to the only person in the world it was ever really made for." You lifted your chin. "I put it in Gojo Satoru's hand myself. And then I told him to wait outside."
There was a sound behind you, very soft. The sound of a hand sliding a door open.
You didn't turn round. You didn't need to. The air in the long dim room changed, all at once, as if the whole building had taken a breath and was afraid to let it out. Every hair on your arms stood up. Behind the screens, the shadows were rising to their feet.
"Hey," said Gojo Satoru, from the doorway. "Did somebody call?"
You hadn't. Not quite. But you'd said his name, and he'd always been listening.
He walked down the length of the hall with his hands in his pockets. He wasn't hurrying. The guards who'd lined the walls made no move to stop him; you weren't sure they could have moved if they'd tried. He came to stand just behind you, close enough that you could feel the faint cool pressure of his Infinity settle over your shoulders like a cloak, and the screens in front of you, every single one of them, tore themselves in half down the middle with a long soft ripping sound.
Behind them, a row of old men in dark robes stood frozen, faces grey.
"So," Gojo said pleasantly. "I hear you wanted to talk about safeguards."
"Gojo," the one in the centre said. "This is a sanctioned assembly..."
"I've got her knife, by the way." He drew it from his jacket, the little plain-hilted tanto, and turned it over in his long fingers so it caught the light. "She gave it to me. You know what that means? It means the only thing in the world that can hurt me is mine. I'm holding it. She put it in my hand." He smiled. It was a terrible thing to see. "I've never been given anything that nice before."
He took a step past you. Just one. The old men flinched back as one, as if he'd swung at them.
You could see what he wanted to do. It was in every line of him. You'd seen that look on the landing outside your door. You could feel the energy gathering in the air around him, blue and red, a pressure in your back teeth, and you knew that in about four seconds the hall and everyone in it was going to stop existing.
"Satoru," you said.
He stopped.
The energy in the air hung there, trembling, like a held breath.
"We had a deal," you said.
He didn't turn round. His shoulders were rigid. The old men behind the torn screens were staring at you, and you saw them understand it, all at once: that the only thing standing between them and nothing was the smith they'd tried to threaten. That the strongest man alive was waiting for your permission.
"Can I?" said Gojo Satoru, without turning his head. "Please?"
"No," you said. "Not today."
A long moment. Then he exhaled, and the pressure went out of the air like a tide, and the trembling light faded. He put the tanto back in his jacket.
"You heard her," he told the higher-ups cheerfully. "You're alive because she said so. Remember that, next time you think about sending a letter." He turned at last and held out his hand to you, palm up, the way he had over your counter the very first day. "Come on. Let's go home. I'm starving and I already ate all your mochi."
You took his hand. Nothing stood between your skin and his.
He didn't wait to get you home. He got you as far as a ryokan on the edge of Arashiyama, a quiet one with a private bath and paper lanterns, and you got him as far as the futon, and the door was barely shut before he had you up against it.
"Can I?" he breathed against your mouth, fingers at the tie of your jacket, and you laughed and said yes, and then yes again, and then simply, "Satoru, you don't have to ask every second, I'll tell you if you need to stop."
"I like asking," he said. "I like hearing you say it."
So he asked. He asked to undress you and he asked to kiss your throat and he asked, his voice gone low and unsteady, to lay you down on the futon and look at you, really look, without the blindfold, in the soft lantern light. And when you said yes he knelt over you and just looked, for so long that your skin went hot all over under his gaze, all that impossible attention resting on you and only you.
"Here," you said, and reached up and took the blindfold from where it hung around his neck. "Your turn."
He went still. "What?"
"You see everything," you said. "All the time. You said you can never turn it off." You held up the strip of black cloth. "Let me turn it off. Just for a while. You don't have to watch me. You can just feel."
His eyes went very wide. For a moment you thought he would refuse. Then he bent his head, and let you tie the blindfold over his eyes, gently, and when it was done he knelt there in the lantern light with his lips parted and his chest rising and falling fast, blind for the first time in his life by somebody else's hand.
"Oh," he said softly. "It's quiet."
You pushed him down onto his back. He went, easily, trustingly, his hands finding your hips as you straddled him. You kissed his chest, his stomach, the sharp lines of his hips, and he shook under your mouth and swore and said your name over and over, blind and helpless and completely yours. When you finally took him inside you, sinking down slowly, he arched up off the futon with a cry like something tearing loose.
You rode him slowly. You set the rhythm and he let you, his hands spread on your thighs, his head thrown back, his mouth open. He couldn't see you. He didn't need to. He felt everything: every roll of your hips, every gasp, the way you clenched around him when he pushed up to meet you. He told you so, babbling, in that rough desperate voice, that you were everything, that he'd never felt anything like this, that he'd give you the world, that he'd give you his eyes if you asked.
"Don't you dare," you gasped, and kissed him, and felt him laugh into your mouth.
He came first this time, with a shout he muffled against your shoulder, his whole body bowing up under you. Then he rolled you both over, still blindfolded, and found you with his fingers and his mouth by feel alone, slow and patient and devoted, until you shattered under him with his name in the lantern-lit dark.
Afterwards, you lay curled together in the ryokan futon with the blindfold pushed up into his white hair and his arm locked tight around your waist, the way it had been the night before, as if he thought you might be taken away while he slept.
"I'm still going to watch you," he said into your hair. "You know that. I can't help it."
"I know."
"Every minute."
"I know." You turned in his arms and looked at him, at those eyes, the sky at the top of the world, fixed on you as if nothing else existed. "Watch, then. Just tell me when you erase things."
He smiled slowly. It was the wide, bright, beautiful one. The whale moved underneath. You found you didn't mind it any more.
"Deal," said Gojo Satoru, and kissed you, and somewhere behind his eyes, you knew, he was already watching the road home.