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For a man who prided himself on adaptability, Seijiro Gojo was, in this particular moment, utterly and spectacularly out of his depth, and his mind, insufferably arrogant and usually three steps ahead of everyone else in any room, had hit a wall and was scrambling to catch up, bleeding pride all over the place.
Unfortunately, he had not one but two immediate problems: one was outside the shoji, calmly outlining the downfall of a child-regent with all the subtlety of a kabuki villain; the other was inside the shoji, plotting his downfall with even less restraint, looking up at him with an expression that screamed: Get off me, you absolute fool.
Seijiro—the fool in question—was still stuck mid-spiral through the seven stages of grief; he remained frozen in a room far too small, in a situation far too precarious, with Kaoru Zenin of all people pinned beneath him.
...Pinned? Oh no.
Apparently, since the room was too small and he had nowhere else to move, he had one hand braced against the wooden wall beside her head, undeniably inappropriate in retrospect, and the other… The other hand was still fisted into the fabric of her kamishimo, right over what was, now without a shadow of a doubt, her breasts.
Eunuchs did not have breasts; Seijiro was not a scholar, but he knew that much.
In a kind of moment that could shatter dynasties, their gazes locked with mirrored horror flashing between them, Kaoru's murderous, and Seijiro's… blank. Stunned and offensively slow. His heart stumbled into an uneven rhythm, his thoughts stuttered, and for one agonizing second, he genuinely forgot how to be a human being.
Then, because the kami were always cruel with him, his mind decided that was the perfect time to roll out a rapid-fire montage of every single idiotic thing he had ever said or done in front of—no, toward—his rival over the past months.
Every insult; every fight; every casual arm slung over her shoulders; every time they'd slipped away from the council like delinquent children; the one time he had almost suggested her visiting a brothel; every time he had engaged with her in the kind of banter that was supposed to be harmless because they were both men; every single time he had called her Eunuch; worse, every time he had called her—
—Pretty boy. Pretty. Boy.
The word detonated in his skull with now new clarity, and then the rest of his face followed, relentless, exquisitely humiliating, becoming too red too fast.
That look. That face. The delicate features he'd long attributed to good breeding and luck, that authoritative voice of hers that could cut a room in half, and yet, when she was tired, softened; the way her hair, when it came loose, framed her face a little too perfectly; the way his stomach had turned into a tangled mess every time Kaoru smirked at him; the curve of her collarbone, visible beneath layers of fabric, he very much should not have been gripping this tightly in retrospect; the lips, frustratingly full in a way he had noticed and then immediately filed under irrelevant because men could have pretty mouths, obviously, and he was not that kind of pervert—
...He was not that kind of pervert. Right?
A slow, dawning horror crawled up his spine. Every inappropriate thought he had ever had about Kaoru Zenin, every stray, fleeting, dismissed "huh" of his attention, a man who merely appreciated beauty in all its forms, was not, in fact, a stray musings.
A delicate face doesn't make a man any less of a man, he used to tell himself, smugly, like he'd cracked some philosophical truth.Well. Holy hell. Not a man, not a eunuch, not even a delicate-faced pretty boy. A woman, a woman who, at this very moment, was staring up at him like he was five seconds away from a violent, immediate death.
How the hell had he missed it? For someone blessed with the famed Six Eyes, he had never felt more blind.
A strangled noise clawed its way up his throat as he felt the insane urge to shove her away and gain distance as proper etiquette demanded from a man and woman of their status, but he swallowed it down with sheer willpower. If he moved too fast, the floorboards would creak, and just outside the thin shoji, Mitsunari and his lackeys were murmuring in low tones about treason; if either of them so much as breathed wrong, they'd both be discovered and sentenced to death before sunset.
Which meant, unbelievably, inexcusably, Seijiro had to stay exactly where he was, and thanks to the closeness, he became painfully, brutally aware of everything; Kaoru hadn't moved a muscle, still pressed between him and the shoji, head tilted up just enough to maintain that damnable eye contact with him; the tilt of his head brought his breath against her temple, and stray strands of white hair ghosted over her forehead; her cheeks were red in fury and maybe not only that, her breath came in indignant hitches, furious little bursts that he definitely shouldn't have noticed.
Damn him, he noticed, thanks to the grip he still had on her clothes.
Seijiro wet his lips, inhaled slowly, feeling his throat so dry. Then, mercifully, the voices outside began to fade; footsteps receded, swallowed by the wood's creaking hush as Mitsunari's entourage continued down the hall, far away from their little hideout.
It was finally over.
Kaoru exhaled sharply, a breath more akin to a cat hiss; her shoulders dropped from that battle-ready tightness, but she did not move, did not step away, did not take her eyes off him, as if still trying to process the whole sequence or maybe just deciding how she would kill him.
To his credit, Seijiro let go fast, too fast. The instant his fingers released the fabric of her kamishimo, he lurched back and bumped into the shelf behind him; it rattled, and a cascade of dust and scrolls tumbled gracelessly to the floor after hitting him on the back of his head. Right. That was why he hadn't moved before; he'd been boxed in with Kaoru in front, shelves behind, and all his terrible decisions and bad luck stacked between them.
Dragging a hand down his face and exhaling through his nose as if plain pretending could scrub the embarrassment out of his face. He stared at the floor, at the shelves, at anything that wasn't her. Fine; everything was fine. Nothing had really happened, not really; it was still salvageable. Yes, he had spent an unspeakable amount of time convinced—convinced!—Kaoru Zenin was a man; yes, he had just realized, with painful, humiliating clarity, that she was very much not a man; yes, Pretty Boy—no, not Pretty Boy, just… Kaoru?—was currently staring at him like he was the lowest form of life. But that wasn't new; she'd always looked at him like that. The world was still intact, and no one else knew; he could make it all unhappen.
So Seijiro Gojo—prodigy, heir, undisputed master of bullshitting his way through reality—did what he did best: he pretended the last five minutes had not happened.
He dusted imaginary dust from his sleeve and flicked his silver ponytail over his shoulder, pulling his signature lazy smirk into place. Then, he turned toward the shoji as if he had not just accidentally groped the heir of the Zenin clan in a storage closet while overhearing political treason. "Well," he drawled, "we still have a cursed spirit to deal with, Kaoru-sama—"
Steel met flesh, and Seijiro froze.
The cold kiss of a blade pressed to the skin of his throat; he hadn't even seen her draw. Every muscle in his body locked, and slowly—very, very slowly—his gaze dropped to the katana barring his exit, then he followed the length of the arm holding it, up the sleeve of her black kamishimo, until his eyes met Kaoru's face.
Oh. Oh, he should have seen it coming.
She was going to end him. And she could, probably. That realization settled deep in his bones; if she really wanted to, she could cut him before he could blink. He knew it, and she knew it. The real question was: did she want to? His heartbeat executed a complicated maneuver, something between an instinctive jolt of panic and an utterly inconvenient thrill of anticipation.
Carefully, deliberately, he raised both hands in a loose, exaggerated gesture of surrender; still, a smirk twitched at the corner of his lips, even with the blade resting against his throat. "…So," he said, because he was an idiot and apparently committed to dying as one, "I'm guessing we're gonna talk about this?"
The blade pressed just a little deeper as Kaoru's eyes narrowed; Seijiro's smirk faltered, and for the first time in his life, he completely forgot how to be an arrogant bastard.
His voice dropped lower, and the humor evaporated. "Kaoru."
Not mocking. Just her name.
Something flashed across her expression, too quick to catch; maybe a shadow of hesitation, or maybe it was just his imagination. The katana did not lower, but her grip… shifted, subtle and barely there, but enough for him to see.
She didn't want to do it, deep down, and that meant he had to stop her before she convinced herself otherwise.
Seijiro inhaled, choosing his words like they were stepping stones over a pit. "You do realize," he tried lightly, "that if you kill me here, you're going to have to explain why to the entire council and our fathers."
Kaoru didn't blink. "I can be very creative," she said flatly.
Seijiro almost laughed. Oh, kami above, she's terrifying, and to his absolute horror, a very stupid part of him found that deeply attractive. He had always known Kaoru Zenin was dangerous; he'd known it when they crossed blades in Iga, when she outmaneuvered him in the council chamber, but a blade to the throat had a way of clarifying a man's mind, and this?
This wasn't about pride, nor about honor, not even about him. Despite the ice in her expression, he could feel it radiating off her: panic. Absolute panic, the kind that stripped away logic and left only survival instinct.
And the worst part? He understood why.
Seijiro wasn't a fool, not when it mattered; he could connect dots fast when he wasn't being a monumental idiot, even if he still missed most of the context. Kaoru Zenin had never been a man, but if she had lived as one was because she had needed to, because if she hadn't, if the truth slipped, if the wrong person saw what he had just seen—
The Zenin clan was not kind, and the jujutsu world was even less so. There was no way a man like Takahiro Zenin would have accepted a woman at the lead o fthe clan, and that meant he probably knew nothing about the farce. But Harunobu? Her loyal shadow? There was no way he didn't know. And if the Zenin elders learned the truth, learned that he had helped her in this farce for all those years, Harunobu wouldn't just lose his position, he'd lose his head.
To her, this wasn't a hilarious mistake to be brushed off like he wanted it to be; to her, to Harunobu, this was life-or-death.
One word, one slip, and it was over.
Kaoru knew this, and that was why she wasn't weighing options; she wasn't deciding if she should kill him. She was about to. Seijiro saw it a fraction of a second before it happened: the tightening of her grip, the shift of her weight, the faintest exhale, the one every warrior takes in the split-second before a strike.
Kaoru moved.
Seijiro's body moved before his mind could fully process it under survival. He twisted, ugly and instinctive, just as the blade hissed past the place his throat had been a heartbeat ago, carving nothing but air and the dust drifting in it. Wood groaned under their feet; the archive was too small for both violence and them, too cramped and full of shelves and scrolls and brittle paper that had survived wars only to die because two heirs couldn't keep their hands—or their secrets—to themselves.
Unlike Seijiro, Kaoru didn't care about the archive at all; she slipped into the thin band of shadow between a shelf and the wall too quickly. One blink, she was there; the next, she wasn't; then, only the cold bite of her blade cutting toward him again from his shadow on the opposite side.
Seijiro stumbled sideways, shoulder scraping a pillar; his haori snagged on a protruding shelf, and he yanked free just in time to bend backward at the waist, and avoid a horizontal slash that would've opened him from neck to ribs.
This absolutely stunning, murderous little bonsai.She's actually trying to kill me—
No, not quite. The tip of her katana had sliced his sleeve, but it had felt more like a warning and less of a kill attempt. If Kaoru truly intended to end him, she would have called on her shikigami by now; her Divine Dogs would already be at his ankles, her Great Serpent would have him pinned, her Nue would have turned the entire archive into a smoking ruin, and probably something bigger would be chewing on his head.
She wouldn't be wasting time with close quarters if she meant execution. That was the only reason he was still breathing: she wasn't fighting at full strength.
Which must probably mean something.
Another slash, fast and brutal, that Seijiro ducked; the blade shaved a strand of his hair, silver falling like snow to the floow. He backpedaled, heel catching on a fallen scroll, and his shoulder slammed into a shelf with a crack; ancient bundles toppled, raining dust and parchment around them. Fucking archive. Fucking too cramped space—
Kaoru flowed through it and didn't flinch; she cut through a bundle of drifting paper like it wasn't even there.
Seijiro caught the arc of her next strike trowing his forearm at her wrist, with an instinctive parry enough to knock it off his throat line, then retreated again, shoulders twisting between shelves as Kaoru slipped into his flank through shadow, blade already angling for his ribs. He lurched, slammed a hip into the shelf to gain space and scrolled bundles cascaded down, thudding against his head and shoulders.
"Kaoru—" Seijiro started, because apparently, he still believed words could fix this.
She didn't hear him; or she did, and she chose not to, because right now, he was the biggest threat she had ever faced. Her mind wasn't anymore in the archive or in the council, it wasn't even in the present. It was inside the airless cage of one single truth: Seijiro Gojo, of all people, knows. If he leaves alive, I die. Harunobu dies.
Her breath came quick and controlled only by violence, hands steady but knuckles white as her blade moved again, not with her usual precision but with the harsh movements of a woman cutting a rope before the noose could tighten around her neck.
Kaoru felt like a cornered animal, or a cornered heir; same thing, really.
She had spent her life watching her father wield her like a weapon, shaping out her future in the blood of a system that never questioned him. A son, a male heir, a prodigy; she had given him everything, she had become anything he ever wanted her to be, she had learned twice as fast, fought twice as hard, just to be enough. A deception so intricate, even she sometimes forgot the shape of it.
But if Seijiro walked out of this room alive and spilled everything, her father wouldn't even have to act himself; the moment her secret slipped, her entire existence would unravel, Tokugawa Ieyasu's favor, her birthright to lead the Zenin clan, and her life. And Harunobu—oh, Harunobu, the one who had raised her more than her father ever had. He would die; his wife and his son would die too. All because Seijiro Gojo had put his hands where they did not belong. And that bastard had the audacity to smirk and pretend nothing ever happened?
She would not let that happen. The problem was—
Seijiro wasn't fighting back. He didn't counter; he didn't even use Infinity. The insufferable, arrogant, Seijiro Gojo, wasn't trying to win, instead, he weaved between her strikes, dodging, deflecting, evading, letting her come close, letting her reach him, which meant he was either stupid, suicidal, or…
Trying to prove something.
Kaoru, who could read politics in the way other people read weather, read that immediately and hated it; if he wasn't fighting back, if he was choosing not to crush her, then Kaoru had to face the terrifying truth that he wasn't going to ruin her, that he never had been her enemy, and that was so much worse.
Trust was fragile; trust got people killed.
So she pressed harder, slipped into shadow, out of shadow, in again; a blink, and she was at his shoulder; a breath, and she was at his throat. Seijiro took another hit by accident, a glancing slice across his shoulder, fabric parting and skin stinging; he hissed, more at the insult of it than the pain. Still, no strike back.
Kaoru's eyes narrowed in irritation. He's not even trying.
That infuriated her; she should just summon something big and drag the entire Fushimi Castle down with their fight.
Seijiro exhaled, ducking under another slash that ruined the shoji. "Oh, come on—" he muttered, half breathless now. "Are we really doing this, Kaoru?!" He pivoted, hands still raised, not really a surrender, but clearly a refusal. He wasn't letting himself become her victim, but he also wasn't letting himself become her executioner. "Stop—"
She didn't. She slipped in close—too close—through shadow again, and Seijiro caught her wrist mid-swing on pure reflex. Her pulse was fast; Kaoru never got scared, not even when she had risked everything by saving him from her own father. But now? Now she was absolutely, utterly terrified of him, and that—that—was what made this all so wrong.
She probably thought he was going to ruin her, and—hell, the Seijiro that first met her six months ago probably would have; the realization pissed him off in a way he couldn't explain. Kaoru was not someone who trusted easily—neither was he—but the fact that she thought he of all people would betray her…
For a split second, their bodies locked, then she twisted like water, and her elbow snapped toward his jaw; he barely jerked back in time, preserving the integrity of his nose.
"You—" she breathed, like she didn't even have language left. "Stop being—" Stop being merciful, stop being careful, stop acting like this is something we can talk through. "—Being passive like a brothel courtesan! Fight back!"
Seijiro stumbled, boot sliding on parchment.
She was right; he could end this, he knew that, in the same calm part of his brain that catalogued the way her stance favored her right side. Infinity would make her blade meaningless, and he could take the sword from her hands if he really committed, but then Kaoru would read it as proof that he wanted to overpower her, and she would never trust him again.
And Seijiro wanted her to trust him, desperately, irrationally. So badly it made him angry.
He twisted sideways, caught her wrist again, and this time he didn't let go; using her momentum, Seijiro stepped into her space before she could melt back into shadow and they collided. Kaoru's back hit the wooden frame with an angry thud that made shelves rattle and scrolls tremble. Seijiro snatched her other wrist and pinned it beside her head, tight, but not cruel, just what he needed to stop the blade. And suddenly—
Suddenly, because his timing was shit, they were back where it started: too close again.
Seijiro's pulse roared in his ears; he refused to look at the place his hands weren't touching now, he refused to think.
Kaoru's pupils went blown wide, katana trembling in her hand. "I cannot afford for you to leave this room alive, Seijiro-sama."
He swallowed. Okay, that? That was not a sentence he liked.
The moment of hesitation costed him; Kaoru's muscles tensed, and he realized too late she'd already read his grip, his weight distribution, the angle of his knee. She was smaller than him, and used it like a weapon; she feinted high, the katana flicking upward enough to steal his attention, then dropped low and swept his legs.
Seijiro's balance broke, and moments later his back hit the floor hard, knocking the breath from his lungs, puffing dust up around his head. He barely had time to blink before Kaoru had turned into a blade herself, too fast.
The katana flashed down and steel kissed his throat again.
Seijiro froze as his eyes tracked the line of her arm, the white-knuckled grip, the furious tremor she refused to allow herself. Kaoru was on him, legs locked around his waist, knees pressing into his ribs to prevent him from twisting her away, every muscle tight, every ounce of her weight pinning him down.
He couldn't move; not that he was really planning on going anywhere. That should have been infuriating for him, it should have been humiliating; instead Seijiro, against all odds, had other problems, as his mind did something profoundly unhelpful.
She's beautiful like this.
Not in the delicate, courtly way noblewomen were beautiful, oh no, Kaoru was beautiful in the way a storm was beautiful: otherworldly and terrifying, something you watched with your heart in your throat because part of you knew it could destroy you and part of you didn't care.
Considering she still had a blade to his throat, Seijiro decided that was deeply inappropriate and also completely irrelevant.
Right. Definitely not the time to admire her.
His head tilted back, baring more of his throat to the steel, and Kaoru nearly screamed at him because She had expected him to struggle at this point, to snap back with Limitless, she had expected Seijiro Gojo to be Seijiro Gojo.
Instead he let the blade press in, let the edge draw blood as he looked up at her calm and unshaken as if he already knew she wouldn't kill him. "I'm not going to do anything to you." Her grip tightened; his breathing slowed. "And you know that."
She froze; he felt the smallest hitch in her control. For the first time since this began, Seijiro saw a path out that didn't end in red.
Kaoru wasn't so quick to calm down. I should kill him already. The thought looped in her mind. He should be dead; he should be, that was her plan all along.Then why wasn't she moving? Why hadn't she ended it? Why was her grip shaking? Do it. End it. End him. And yet—
Seijiro had the gut to look absurdly at ease with her sword at his neck and his white hair spilling across the floor in a bright mess against the dark wood.
"Fight back," she snapped, unsteady.
He actually frowned. "You don't actually want me to."
She pressed the blade harder, and finally a single drop of blood slid down his neck, fell to the floor.
Seijiro inhaled slowly. "If you wanted me dead, Kaoru—" A ghost of a smirk touched his mouth as his voice stayed serious. "You would've done it already. You know it."
Her fingers locked on the hilt; she hated that he was right, hated how the warmth of his body under hers absolutely made it worse, the rise and fall of his chest, and the way he looked at her like... Like he understood. And Kaoru Zenin had never been understood,not by her parents, not by her clan, not even by Harunobu, not really. How could he? But Seijiro—damn him—was doing it now? There was no way he could understand, he had never lived the way she had to, not really.
...But was that true?
After all the time together, after everything he had confessed about his family, she wasn't sure anymore. And now, the idiot had put himself at her mercy.
"You—" Her voice caught but she forced it out. "You're not taking this seriously."
Seijiro blinked. Then laughed, disbelieving. "Kaoru. I have a sword at my throat and a very furious Zenin heir straddling me."
She glared. "Shut up."
He sighed, like she was being unreasonable as his gaze traveled down to where her thighs bracketed his waist before returning to her face. "If you think I'm not taking this seriously, Pretty Boy, I don't know how else to prove it."
Her blood flushed her face, not entirely anger. "Shut up," she warned. "Shut up or I'll—"
"Will you?" His cut her, serious.
Damn him. Damn him, he's right.
He should not be this calm, not with her blade there, not when she could end him. And yet, he was letting her.
"You think I'm going to ruin you," he said. "You think I'll walk out and tell my father, you father, the council, the whole damn world that Kaoru Zenin, heir and prodigy of the Zenin that everyone's afraid of—" His eyes softened. "—is just a girl."
Kaoru didn't move; her blade did press down on his throat just a fraction more. Just a suggestion.
His smirk twitched at the side but he pressed on. "And yet, you haven't killed me. Because you know I'd never do that" Seijiro murmured, quiet. "You want to trust me. You just don't know how."
She inhaled sharply, furious at herself, at him, because she had known the second he let her cut him, the second he let her win, that he was telling the truth. She wanted to trust him, believe that Seijiro, of all people, would keep his mouth shut, that the nights they had spent slipping away from suffocating halls and scheming hands had meant something.
Kaoru had never wanted to trust anyone outside of Harunobu before. But him—him—she wanted to.
Her grip trembled. "...It doesn't matter," she bit out.
"Doesn't it?" His voice went softer still. "I've been lying to people my whole life. One more lie won't break me." Then, recklessly, he tilted his head further into the blade; the cut deepened, and blood slid again. "But feel free to finish the job, if it eases your mind."
Kaoru swallowed hard, her entire body seizing at the sight. Now she would kill him not because she had to, but because he deserved it for making her feel pathetic likes that. Her grip loosened just a fraction, and silence stretched thin enough to break the tension. Finally—
She eased off, not fully, still straddling him but no longer crushing him into the floor. "Damn you, Seijiro."
He teased, of course he did. "Already done, Kaoru."
That did it.
The sword vanished from his throat, but before he could do something even worse—like laugh—Kaoru grabbed his haori, hauled him up, then slammed him back down hard. Seijiro swore, inventing new insults on spot as the back of his head smashed against the floor.
Still, the smirk never fully left.
Kaoru didn't move off him, didn't let him breathe; she kept her hands clenched in his haori until the fabric strained, and for once, Seijiro had the wisdom to shut up. He swallowed hard, fighting down the deeply, deeply inappropriate thoughts trying to claw their way into his brain. This was actual danger; and yet, his body—his absolute traitor of a body—was focusing on the wrong things. His fingers flexed uselessly against the floorboards. What the hell was he supposed to do with his hands? Touch her and she will kill you for real. That much was clear to him.
Her gaze dropped to the cut on his throat, to the slow trickle of blood, and for the first time she looked regretful.
Then, before he could say anything—before he could make the mistake of speaking—she leaned in and his pulsed jumped. The space between them became nonexistent. He stopped breathing. Then came the murderous glare an inch from his face and the threat he had expected all along:
"Gojo Seijiro. I will kill you for real if you tell anyone."
Seijiro stared up at her too long. A smarter man would have nodded; sworn; stayed silent. But Seijiro had never once been a smart man, and so, ignoring every single alarm going off in his head, ignoring the fact that she could slit his throat if she wanted to, ignoring the fact that she should—
He laughed, light and utterly relieved. "Oh, Kaoru," he said, blood still running down his neck, "that's adorable."
As Kaoru slammed his head once again against the floor, Seijiro realized he had never been closer to death.