Chapter 3: Folding Screen
The crow waited on the sill with the patience of something that was paid by the hour.
Nobody spoke. The lamp hissed. Snow ticked against the paper of the open window, and the cold came in around your bare ankles, and you stood there holding a talisman that was meant to go on the chest of the man who'd just made love to you.
It was Gojo who moved first, and he didn't move at all. That was how you knew. He stayed sitting on the futon, white hair wrecked, sheet around his hips, but the air in the room went still the way the air goes still before a storm breaks over a mountain. The lamp flame stopped flickering. It stood straight up, perfectly steady, as if nothing in the room was allowed to breathe without his permission.
"Satoru," Geto said quietly.
"I'm fine."
"You're not."
"I'm completely fine. I'm just thinking about Kyoto." Gojo's voice was light and pleasant and you had never heard anything so frightening in your life. "I'm thinking about how far it is. It's not far. It's like two hours. I could be there before the crow."
"Satoru. She hasn't done anything."
"I know she hasn't." The Six Eyes turned to you. There was no anger in them for you, none at all, and somehow that made it worse, because it meant all of it was pointed somewhere else. "I know. I'm not mad at you. I want to be really clear. You're not the one I'm thinking about."
You looked at Geto.
He was sitting with his back against the wall, hair down around his shoulders, looking at the talisman in your hand with an expression you hadn't seen on him before. Not fear, exactly. Recognition. Like a man looking at a letter he'd always known would come and had stopped checking the mailbox for.
"They've been waiting for this a long time," he said. "Since I was nineteen, I think. A curse user who swallows curses. Sooner or later one of them has to go bad in him. That's the theory." His mouth moved, not quite a smile. "Some days I've wondered if they're right."
"They're not," Gojo said flatly.
"You'd say that."
"I'd say that because I can see it, Suguru. I've been looking at it every day for ten years. I'd know."
You looked down at the talisman. Dense black sutras, old, powerful, the brushwork of somebody very senior who had taken a long time over it. One push of cursed energy and it would lock anything it touched into stillness for a hundred years. It was the kind of thing you'd use on a cursed object in a vault. They'd sent it to a woman they'd known would need her clan's debt cleared badly enough to use it.
And here was the thing: two days ago you might have. That was what made you feel sick. Two days ago, if someone had told you he was dangerous, you'd have believed them, and put it on him, and gone home, and told yourself it was duty.
You crossed to the lamp. You held the corner of the talisman in the steady flame.
It didn't want to burn. Old seals never do. The paper smoked and curled and fought, and the sutras flared red one by one along the lines of the brushwork, and you held it there until your fingers were scorching and Geto said your name sharply, and only then did it go up all at once, with a soft sound like an exhale.
You dropped the ash in the lamp tray.
Then you knelt at the low table, shoved the case files and the cream puff box aside, uncapped your ink, and turned the order over to write on the back. Your hand was perfectly steady. You'd find that interesting later.
Report, you wrote, in your grandmother's best formal script, the one she'd made you practice until your wrist ached.
Conduct of the special grade pair: insufferable.
Conversations: mostly about sweets.
Use of technique: excessive, effective, and in one instance, beautiful.
Signs of instability: none detected. The seal has been destroyed by the undersigned.
Please review my family's debt however you see fit.
You signed it with your full name and your clan's name, because you weren't going to hide behind anything ever again, and you blew on the ink and rolled it tight and tied it to the crow's leg yourself. The crow regarded you with one bright black eye.
"Tell Mei Mei it's a big tip," Gojo said from the futon, "and to bill the Gojo clan."
The crow went out into the snow.
You slid the window shut and stayed there with your forehead against the frame, because your legs had decided to stop working. Behind you, the room was silent. Then you heard Gojo Satoru begin to laugh.
It started low, a disbelieving huff, and it built and built until he was flat on his back on the futon with his arm over his eyes, howling. "Insufferable," he wheezed. "In one instance, beautiful. Suguru. Suguru, she called Red beautiful. In an official report."
"I didn't say which instance," you said into the window frame.
"You didn't have to!"
When you turned around, Geto was not laughing. He was looking at you, and there was something very bare in his face, like a sliding door had been opened in the middle of winter.
"They'll come after your family," he said.
"Maybe."
"They will. You know they will."
"Then they'll come," you said. "My mother's been afraid of them her whole life. My grandmother was afraid of them. I've been afraid of them since I could hold a brush." You took a breath. "I'm tired. I don't want to be the kind of person who'd put that thing on you to get them off my back. I'd rather owe them forever."
"You won't," said Gojo, sitting up, entirely serious now. "Owe them anything. I'm going to have a conversation with your clan's accountant."
"Satoru, I'm not going to let you pay my—"
"I'm not going to pay it." He smiled, and it was not a nice smile. "I'm just going to talk to him. With my sunglasses off. For a very long time."
You didn't remember deciding to cross the room. You only knew that you were back on the futon, on your knees in front of Geto, and you had his face in your inky, singed hands.
"Hey," you said. "Look at me."
He looked at you.
You picked your brush back up off the floor. You drew one stroke in the air above the futon, and another, and the ink bloomed and hinged, panel after panel, unfolding around the three of you: pines, a crane, a moon over water, gold leaf glowing in the lamplight. Six panels. A closed screen, a little painted room inside the room.
"Nothing gets in here," you said. "No crows. No Six Eyes either, if I don't want."
"Rude," murmured Gojo, delighted.
"Nobody's watching you in here," you told Geto. "Nobody's waiting for you to go bad. It's just us."
Geto made a sound low in his chest. Then he pulled you down into his lap and kissed you, and it wasn't patient anymore. It was deep and hungry and almost rough, his big hands spread across your back under the yukata, holding you to him like he thought you might fold up and disappear. You pushed the yukata off. You wanted him to have all of you.
"Tell me what you want," he said against your throat, and his voice was wrecked.
"You," you said. "Like this. Please."
He lifted you, and you sank down onto him slowly, both of you watching it happen, his eyes on your face the whole way. When he was fully inside you, you stayed like that, wrapped around each other, forehead to forehead, not moving, just breathing. You could feel his heart hammering against your breasts.
"Okay?" you whispered.
He laughed, shaky. "I should be asking you that."
"I'm asking you."
"I'm okay." He pressed his face into your neck. "I'm better than okay."
You started to move. Slowly, rolling your hips, and he groaned and gripped your waist and guided you, and the painted moon on the screen behind his head shone gold. You felt the futon dip behind you. Gojo's long body fitted itself to your back, warm and bare, and his hands came around to cup your breasts, and his mouth found the place where your neck met your shoulder.
"Can I join?" he breathed. "Or do you two want—"
"Join," Geto and you said at the same time.
Gojo laughed into your skin. "Okay. Okay, bossy."
He reached past you for the little bottle of oil on the low table. You felt his fingers, slick and careful, slide down the cleft of you and press in, gentle and slow, asking. You'd talked about this, half joking, in the dark between the first time and the crow. You'd told them you wanted it. You wanted it now so badly you were shaking.
"Still yes?" Gojo said. "You can say stop anytime. Anytime. I mean it."
"Yes," you said. "Satoru. Yes."
It was a lot. It was slow, so slow, Gojo easing into you with Geto holding perfectly still beneath you, both of them murmuring to you and to each other, and then both of them were inside you and you were so full you couldn't think, couldn't breathe, could only hold on to Geto's shoulders and let your head fall back on Gojo's chest and feel them, all of them, everywhere.
"Breathe," Geto said softly. "Breathe for me. Good."
They moved together. Of course they did; they'd been fighting side by side for ten years, and they read each other the same way here. Gojo set the rhythm and Geto matched it without a word, and every stroke drove you higher, and you came apart between them faster than you'd thought possible, crying out, clenching around them both. Gojo swore. Geto pulled your mouth to his and swallowed the sound.
They didn't stop. They kept you there, held you up between them, Gojo's fingers sliding down to circle where you were stretched around Geto until you were sobbing their names, and the second time you came Geto went with you, shuddering, buried deep, and Gojo followed a moment later with your name and Geto's name tangled together in his mouth like he couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.
The painted screen glowed around you until long after the lamp burned down.
In the morning, there was snow on the yubatake and someone was frying eggs downstairs, and you woke up between them in a pile of white cotton with Gojo's leg thrown over both of yours and Geto's hand spread over your stomach, warm, possessive, asleep.
You lay there a while, and looked at the ceiling, and let yourself have it.
"Hey," Gojo said, without opening his eyes. "You're thinking really loud."
"I didn't know you could hear that."
"I can see it. It goes all spiky." He cracked one blue eye. "Come to Tokyo."
Geto stirred. "Satoru. Let her wake up."
"I am letting her wake up. I'm just saying it now so it's the first thing she hears." He propped himself up on one elbow. "Come to Tokyo. Live with us. We've got a huge apartment. We'll buy a third futon. Actually, we'll buy one enormous futon, custom, the size of a car. Suguru can pick the color. Not orange."
"I like orange," Geto said, into the pillow.
"I know. That's why I said it."
You looked from one of them to the other: the strongest pair, the two most dangerous men in jujutsu society, arguing about futon colors with their hair in their faces.
"I like you," you said, and it came out a lot smaller than you meant. "Both of you. It's stupid. It's been four days."
Geto opened his eyes. Gojo went completely silent, which you were learning was the rarest thing in the world.
"It's not stupid," Geto said.
"It's the smartest thing anybody's ever done," Gojo said. "Is that a yes?"
"That's a yes."
He whooped. Geto put a hand over his mouth. You were all three laughing when the phone on the low table began to buzz, and Gojo grabbed it, saw the name, and put it on speaker.
"Hey, Shoko!"
"Don't 'hey' me," said Ieiri Shoko's voice, deadpan and hoarse with no sleep. "What did you three do? The Kyoto higher-ups just called an emergency session. You're summoned. All three of you. Next week." A pause, and the click of a lighter she'd officially given up. "They used the word 'conspiracy.'"
Gojo grinned at the ceiling, wide and sharp and delighted.
"Oh good," he said. "I've been wanting to meet them."