Chapter 2: What the Steam Wants
You didn't take it.
Not that night. You looked at Geto Suguru's open hand, broad and calloused, dripping, and you said, "After the job." Your voice came out steadier than you felt. "Whatever you think you know, whatever I'm supposed to be, there are nine people missing in that field. After the job."
Geto lowered his hand. He didn't look disappointed. He looked, if anything, pleased, like you'd given the right answer on a test you didn't know you were taking.
"After the job," he agreed.
Gojo groaned and slid under the water until only the towel on his head was showing.
The curse came for you the next evening, which in hindsight you should have expected. It had been hunting smiles for a week. Yours were rarer, and it had noticed.
You were up on the wooden platform above the yubatake with your brush in hand and the curtain stretched over the whole field like a lacquered bowl. Below you Gojo was walking the channels with his blindfold pushed up into his hair and his hands in his pockets, humming. Geto stood at the far end of the field with a curse coiled around his shoulders like a fox stole, eyes half closed, listening.
The steam thickened. That was the first thing. Then it went sweet, a smell like brown sugar and cedar and something underneath you couldn't name, and through it, ten meters off, at the edge of the hottest channel, you saw them.
Gojo and Geto, close, in the steam. Gojo with his eyes uncovered and soft, Geto with his hair down. Both of them holding out a hand. And behind them, through the white, your mother's house in Kyoto with the gate fixed and the clan accountant's car nowhere in sight, and every bill paid, and nobody ever again telling you what you owed.
It was everything. It was so exactly everything that your feet were moving before you noticed.
"Hey." Real Gojo's voice, sharp, from far below. "Hey! Ink! Don't look at it!"
You were at the edge of the platform. The water below was boiling.
Then a hand closed on the back of your collar and hauled you backward so hard your teeth clicked, and you were sitting on the wet planks with Geto Suguru crouched over you, one arm across your chest like an iron bar. He was breathing hard. You hadn't seen him cross the field. You weren't sure anyone could have.
"Look at me," he said. "Not at it. At me."
You looked at him. The sweet smell broke apart like a cobweb.
Down in the field, the steam screamed.
It was a sound like a kettle the size of a temple, and the thing came up out of the water at last: a long pale body made of mist and scalded skin and nine sets of smiling faces pressed against the inside of it like windows. Special grade.
"Curtain," Geto said in your ear, very calm. "Can you hold it smaller?"
"How small?"
"Small enough that it can't get out and Satoru can't miss."
You stood. Your knees were jelly; your brush hand wasn't. You drew one long stroke, then another, and the great dome over the field folded down on its hinges, panel after panel collapsing inward like a screen being closed after a party, until it was a painted box the size of a tea house around the curse and nothing else. The curse slammed into the walls. The ink held. The ink always held.
Gojo Satoru stood in front of the box with his hands still in his pockets, grinning.
He didn't use Purple. You found out later it was because Purple would've taken the yubatake with it, and the yubatake was three hundred years old and he liked the manju shop next to it. Instead he raised two fingers and said, almost lazily, "Cursed technique reversal. Red," and the inside of your box became a single point of terrible, bright pressure, and the curse came apart like wet paper.
All except a small, shining knot at its center. It hung in the air in the ruined steam, about the size of a plum.
Geto walked over to it and held out his palm. The knot sank into his hand and compressed into a smooth dark sphere like a pearl, and he looked at it for a moment with an expression of profound, weary resignation.
"Do you have to?" you asked.
"It's a special grade," he said. "Waste not." And he swallowed it.
He didn't make a face. Only his throat worked, twice, and then he closed his eyes and stood there, one hand over his mouth, while the nine missing people dropped out of the dissolving steam onto the wet wooden channels, gasping and alive and very confused.
"What does it taste like?" you said, before you could stop yourself.
Geto opened his eyes. "Like a rag someone used to clean up vomit," he said. "Every single time. For years."
Gojo bounded over the channels, took Geto's face in both hands, and kissed him full on the mouth, long and deliberate, right there in front of nine traumatized tourists and you.
When he pulled back, he made a face. "Ugh. Yeah. Vomit rag."
"Then why do you always do that?"
"Because you always do that," Gojo said, like it was obvious, and he was looking at Geto with such ordinary, total love that your chest hurt.
Then both of them turned and looked up at you on the platform. After the job, you'd said. The job was done.
You were the one who knocked this time.
Their suite was dim and warm, one lamp, the two futons already shoved together into one wide field of white cotton. Geto was sitting on it with his back against the wall and his hair down, long and black over his shoulders, and Gojo was lying with his head in Geto's lap, blindfold off, eating a cream puff. Both of them went still when you came in.
You slid the screen shut behind you. You didn't sit.
"I need to say something first," you said.
"Okay," said Geto.
"I don't know how much you know. About why I'm here. I don't know what you think I am."
"We know why you're here," Gojo said quietly. "Kyoto doesn't send a grade 1 barrier specialist out of their own budget unless they want eyes on us. We figured it out on the platform the first day."
"Then why—"
"Because you went into that steam trying to save nine people who weren't yours," Geto said. "And because what it showed you was us." He held your gaze, steady. "Satoru's eyes see cursed energy. They saw what it pulled out of you. You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to."
"I want to," you said. "Not talk. I want..." The rest wouldn't come. So you crossed the room instead and knelt on the edge of the futon, and you held out your hand, the way Geto had in the bath.
He took it. Of course he did.
He drew you in slowly, giving you every chance to stop, and you didn't. He kissed you with one hand cupping your jaw, and he kissed exactly the way he talked, patient and certain, deep enough to make your toes curl into the cotton. His hair fell around both of you like a curtain of your own.
"Yes?" he murmured against your mouth.
"Yes."
When you came up for breath, Gojo had sat up beside you. He wasn't grinning. His eyes were wide open, impossibly blue, and he was looking at you as if he'd never seen anything like you before, which, given what those eyes saw, you didn't understand at all.
"Can I?" he said.
You reached for his face, and stopped a centimeter short, because you remembered. Infinity. Nothing ever touched Gojo Satoru that he didn't let through. Your fingers hung in the air.
He saw you remember. Something moved behind his eyes.
"Hang on," he said softly. "Let me just." And you felt it go: a pressure you hadn't even known was there, a sort of glassy hum at the very edge of hearing, gone. He leaned forward into your hand, and his cheek was warm and real under your palm, and he let out a breath like he'd been holding it for twenty-seven years.
"Hi," he whispered. "There you are."
Then he kissed you, and it was nothing like Geto. It was greedy and laughing and a little clumsy at first, like he'd forgotten something he'd only read about, and then very suddenly not clumsy at all.
They undressed you between them, and they talked to each other while they did it, low, over your head and against your skin. Geto untied the knot of your yukata and Gojo pushed it off your shoulders. "Look at her, Suguru." "I'm looking." Geto's mouth went down your throat while Gojo's hands found your breasts, thumbs dragging over your nipples until you arched and gasped, and you felt Gojo laugh against your ear, delighted, as if you'd done a trick. "Oh, she's loud. I love that she's loud."
"Satoru."
"What? It's a compliment."
You pulled at Geto's kesa until he shrugged out of it, and then you could finally put your hands on him: the heavy shoulders, the old scars, and lower, where he was thick and hot and already hard in your palm. He made a low sound. Gojo, behind you now, settled you back between his knees against his bare chest and slid one long hand down over your belly, slow, slower, giving you time to say no, and all you said was "please." His fingers found you wet. He swore, softly and reverently, into your hair.
"Suguru," he said. "She's soaked."
"I know," Geto said. "Hold her for me."
Gojo held you. His arm was a bar across your ribs and his fingers kept moving between your legs, maddeningly slow circles, while Geto bent and kissed his way down your body, between your breasts, across the soft skin under your navel, and then settled between your thighs and put his mouth on you.
You stopped being able to talk after that.
It was too much: Geto's tongue, unhurried and precise, the way he'd read a sutra; Gojo's fingers moving to make room for him and then sliding into you, two of them, curling; Gojo's voice in your ear the whole time, a constant, filthy, adoring narration, look at you, look at him, he's so good at that, isn't he, you're shaking, it's okay, we've got you. You came with your hand fisted in Geto's long hair and your head thrown back on Gojo's shoulder, and you heard yourself cry out, and you heard Gojo laugh, breathless, like he'd won something.
Geto rose up over you, mouth wet, eyes dark.
"Still yes?" he asked.
"Yes," you said. "Both of you. Yes."
He pushed into you slowly, a long stretching ache that pulled the breath out of you, until he was all the way in and his forehead was resting against yours. Behind you Gojo had gone silent for once. You felt him hard against the small of your back and reached back blindly for him, and wrapped your hand around him, and heard him make a sound you would remember for the rest of your life.
Geto began to move. Deep, steady, the rhythm of somebody who intended to take his time and had all night to do it. You moved your hand on Gojo in the same rhythm, and Gojo put his mouth to the side of your neck and his hand back between your legs and kept it there, and the three of you rocked together on the shoved-together futons in the lamplight like one thing, until you came again, harder, clenching around Geto, and he followed you with a groan buried in your hair, and Gojo came a few breathless seconds later, spilling hot over your fingers, whispering your name into your skin like it was the answer to a question.
For a long time nobody moved.
Then Gojo said, muffled, against your shoulder, "Okay. Okay, wow. Suguru. We're keeping her."
"She's not a cat, Satoru."
"I know. Cats can't paint." He pressed a kiss under your ear. "Can we keep you?"
You were laughing, helplessly, tangled between their two warm bodies, when something rapped against the paper screen of the window. Three sharp taps.
Gojo turned his head. You watched the Six Eyes look through the screen, through the snow, at whatever was on the other side. His face changed.
"It's a crow," he said. "One of Mei Mei's. The Kyoto office rents them." He sat up slowly. "It's carrying something for you."
You pulled your yukata on and slid the window open. A big black crow stepped in onto the sill and held out one leg. The paper on it was rolled tight and sealed with wax, and when you broke the seal there was a second paper folded inside it, stiff and covered in dense black sutras: a sealing talisman, the kind used on special grade objects that are too dangerous to destroy.
The note was four lines.
Report overdue. The curse manipulator has consumed a special grade. Observe for instability. If any is detected, apply the enclosed seal immediately.
You read it twice. Then you turned around.
Geto was sitting on the futon in the lamplight with his hair down around his bare shoulders, watching you. He didn't need the Six Eyes. He could see the talisman from there.
"Ah," he said softly. "So that's what they sent you to do."