Chapter Text
Innocence distinguishes Satoru’s earliest memories of the Utahime he sees on festival days.
She is eight to his five and a head taller than him when his mother brings him in full haori and hakama to the shrine for observance of his Shichi-Go-San. He is five, and no assassin’s blade has grazed him though many have tried, and his whole clan is here to celebrate a child surviving to five. Well-wishers lay at his feet rolls of silk worth manors and weapons with lineages nearly as pedigreed as his. Bored of it all and itchy in his new haori, Satoru returns again and again to wheedle the pigtailed girl for another stick of chitose ame. She gives him the first bag of candy with the same smile she gives to his cousins of similar age, dangles the second with an admonishment to save it for after dinner, and surrenders the third only after he swipes one of her white hair ties.
She is thirteen and kneeling on the wooden platform above his head, her white sleeves billowing as she leans down to accept hamaya arrows from Hatsumōde visitors on New Year’s Day. “I lost the wish card,” he tells Utahime when she glances questioningly at his arrow’s bare shaft. Sighing and mindful of how long the queue is behind him, she loosens her white hair ribbon, scrawls on it ‘ake-ome Gojo,’ and ties it around his arrow before blessing the completed good-luck charm and handing it back to him with a shooing gesture.
She is eighteen and aghast at how she has to straighten her back and stand on her tiptoes to raise her left handful of purifying water to Satoru’s lips. She is even more aghast when his tongue flicks out and licks her palm. Though the kannushi of the shrine scolds her vociferously for trying to murder one of the heirs to the three great clans with her water ladle, Utahime’s stinkeye over the priest’s shoulder tells Satoru that it won’t be decorum that saves him from her.
When he enters Jujutsu Tech three class years below hers, Utahime acts as if she never sees him outside of school, which is easy enough for an upperclassman devoting more and more of her time to missions off-campus. Satoru’s fine with it, really, and with pretending like they both don’t spend their holidays observing customs and traditions that he has already begun to view as pointless. He wouldn’t even bother attending most of the time if it weren’t also a chance to watch Utahime bristle at having to dance or sing or generally maintain composure in front of him.
In the late summer before the start of his second year though, Satoru begins to wonder if Utahime might have another reason to avoid his eyes on and off campus. His clan visits and patronizes the shrine which raised Utahime for the same reason the other great clans do. The clan-elders regard Gomahime Shrine as more dedicated to preserving the rituals of ancient Shinto, and on one August night, Satoru realizes that a chasm of difference divides the rituals he observed as a child and those in which Utahime would partake before him.
On the feasting hall’s central strip of tatami, the miko have just sat down on their knees after performing a kagura dance when Naobito Zen’in slides a dish of rice and an empty sake cup towards Utahime.
“Are you participating tonight?” the Zen’in clan head demands.
Lowering her dark spray of lashes, Utahime nods, looking every inch the shrine maiden who is docile and accommodating for everyone but Satoru.
“Then I’d like a cup of kuchikamizake from you.” The Zen’in family’s head drunk leers as Utahime raises a small ball of rice to her lips and begins to chew. Satoru’s watched the making of kuchikamizake before, but usually, Utahime shields her mouth with her sleeve while spitting the white meal into the sake cup.
Naobito however pulls her right arm away, his fixated eyes and wizened lips smacking of lechery. “Keep going. You don’t need both hands for this. Slower now. Let’s see it drip from that pretty, little mouth of yours. Now take another mouthful.”
Laughter ripples through many of the men in the hall while their wives look down at their now-cold tea.
Satoru has never been more thankful for his shades as he watches the viscous white slick drip and drip from Utahime’s mouth — and fuck, the old mustached fool is right at least about how pretty and little her mouth is, spitting a continuous trickle of white.
When she hands Naobito a filled cup, he toasts the room before passing it to a servant to be sealed. “A drink to look forward to! I’ve always found that the best sake comes from the spit of a virgin.” His mustache twitches. “Not one for long though.”
Utahime holds herself as still as a statue, but says nothing between her pressed lips. If Satoru had said anything like that to her, he’s certain that she would’ve lobbed every cup within reach at his head, and yet here she is without a peep as to what’s happening...though what exactly is happening is still a mystery to him.
“It’s time for us to go home,” his mother tells him, and his aunts are similarly directing his younger cousins towards the door. Around the hall, the wives and concubines of the other clans are departing from the room as well with their children in tow.
“Father’s staying,” Satoru notes. His older cousins aren’t getting up from their seats either, and Utahime is still kneeling in the middle of the room with some of the other miko.
“In a few years,” his mother says. “You can decide if you want to stay too.”
In a few years, Satoru will be head of his clan regardless, and then he supposes no one will tell him that he’s mature enough to kill curse users on missions, but not yet old enough for whatever bizarre afterparty is about to commence.
It’s easy enough to placate his mother though by accompanying her in the car back to the hotel. By the time he warps back to the grounds of the shrine however, the energy in the atmosphere around the feasting hall has changed, though the accumulation of it doesn’t resonate as negative. Feeling like a boy filching sweets from the kitchens again, he kneels next to one of the sliding doors and applies a slight push of cursed energy to remove the recessed round handle before peering inside.
For the first time in his life, Satoru feels compelled to blink to re-confirm the sight before his eyes. Sure, he’s seen porn before, but not any with this many bodies. On every low table, dragged-in futon, or stretch of tatami are disrobed bodies or those well on their way to getting there. A startling tableau of bouncing tits and thrusting hips. While the women in the hall have their faces uncovered as well, the men appear to have all donned masks in the guise of horned or fanged kami visages as though any of them could play at being gods.
Satoru shudders. He’s certainly not opposed to orgies, wouldn’t mind coming across another one perhaps, but one involving this many people he grew up with, including relatives he can discern by their energy signatures and similarly pale hair? That’s more the stuff of nightmares than the curses he’s seen.
Then he remembers piercingly with thorns creeping into his throat that another person who’s grown up in his periphery must be here as well.
It’s a mess, trying to pinpoint Utahime’s energy signature among all the other roiling ones, and in purely visual terms, she’s almost easy to miss near the center of the room, her reclining form entirely subsumed in the shadow of the man on top of her. From the angle at which Satoru is playing voyeur, Utahime’s face and torso aren’t even visible. He’d almost be able to convince himself that it’s just another pair of milky calves splayed underneath a man’s snapping hips if it weren’t for familiar flares of her cursed energy. Satoru swallows. Her energy is often riled up around him, but not...like this, never like this. Her ink-haired partner — did she choose him or even know him — shifts further on top of her, displaying to onlookers the round globes of her ass, her flesh all cream except for the seam and hole where he keeps plunging into her.
It’s not like Satoru has ever really wondered about whether Utahime has been with someone already — weren’t shrine maidens supposed to be, well, maidens — but he never would’ve imagined that the girl who tells him ‘don’t sneeze with your mouth open, idiot’ would be game for losing her virginity at such a manic pace while other men are watching.
No. Not just watching, Satoru realizes as her first partner finishes — and she doesn’t, judging from how pained her aura still feels — and a handful of bystanders step forward, thrusting slips of paper at her. What the fuck. Are there rules to this orgy? Is it a take-a-ticket system?
Utahime doesn’t even look like she has enough energy to close her legs, and Satoru is not hard, damn it, at seeing the slow white trickle down her seam, the cum clinging to her pounded-red folds. Her head lolls to the side, but she looks like she’s actually reading one of the slips of paper handed to her. She reads a second, a third, and the fourth prompts her to raise her torso at a slant, her eyes heavy-lidded and tired but otherwise decided as she extends a languid bare arm to a second dark-haired man.
He joins her on the futon, and her energy feels...lighter, relieved, and more relaxed when he turns her onto her right side and slings her left leg over his hip, his dick slotting more leisurely into her. Her second partner pumps into her for a long time, churning more and more slick from her while his hand pushes her ass to meet every thrust. Utahime likes it, if the more gentle thrum of her energy is any indication. What really makes Satoru’s groin tighten though is how she curls her hand around the man’s bicep and starts sheathing his cock into her of her own accord, her hips quickening as she chases her own release. He wishes he could hear her, both the desperate melody of her skin slapping against skin and her voice.
Her second partner finishes, and Satoru could cream his own fucking pants at glimpsing the white strands webbing between her inner thighs. Utahime moves to sit up and pull her kosode back over her shoulders, but the kannushi walks over, exchanges a few words with her, and Satoru’s hands clench against the urge to shove open the door when the priest flashes three fingers in front of her knitted brow.
There are men lining up again, and Utahime appears to hardly skim their offered slips of paper before gesturing almost carelessly at her third choice, a man wearing a mask crowned by antlers. Behind the antlers are two quickly knotted buns of white hair while the rest of the silvery mane brushes past the man’s shoulders. Satoru doesn’t even have to read the energy signature to recognize the man as Hajime, a distant cousin who’s currently making Satoru’s fingers twitch for a branch family pruning.
Hajime mounts her like an animal in rut, positioning Utahime on her hands and knees before driving into her from behind. Her arms shake after just the first thrust, bending until her cheek is almost planted against the futon.
Hajime doesn’t stop jabbing into her, his pummeling hips scooting her across the duvet until her hands clutch the very edge of it, and when Utahime lifts her head ever so slightly, she looks straight across the room. There’s no way her eyes are as sharp as his, and yet the drum of Satoru’s heartbeat picks up even more as her eyes narrow in his direction, at a blue eye in a hole of darkness.
Her arms straighten at the elbows, lifting her torso again, and even as Hajime keeps pounding her harder and harder, she keeps her eyes fixed on the door.
It’s probably just Satoru’s imagination that she’s looking at him. It wouldn’t be the first time his imagination has been wrong about what she likes or what will make her look at him again. He cums anyway, spurting into his own hand at the thought of it — that she might want to look at only him that way.
At school the following week, Utahime turns the most interesting shade of pink when Satoru tracks her down in the library to give her the painkillers Shoko asked him to bring.
With impressive success, Utahime avoids him for most of the school year after that. When he finally barges into one of her missions months later, she’s mad enough to throw a fit at him, and it’s almost like they’re children again.
Almost.
It’s mere curiosity, Satoru tells himself, that induces him to keep an eye on Utahime’s whereabouts every late August. For the subsequent handful of years, missions — increasingly time-consuming in his case, truly challenging in hers, and multiplied for everyone — have them both skipping the added exhaustion of being around family and out-of-touch traditionalists on festival days. Well, most festivals anyway. The way Hajime namedrops Utahime makes him wonder if his cousin’s had her more than once while Satoru’s somewhere across the country retrieving objects from amid curse guts.
The year Satoru becomes clan head however, the invitation from Gomahime Shrine changes. The last event on the invitation no longer reads ‘Dinner ,’ but rather ‘Utagaki .’ His thumb rubs over the embossed first character of the word, the same kanji as in Utahime’s name.
“It’s your choice of course,” his mother tells him upon noting the invitation in his hands. “But if you stay for the utagaki, just let us know which women you pick.”
Satoru cannot imagine a piece of information he would want less to share with his clan. “...Why?”
“Well, the whole point of it is to encourage fertility. We wouldn’t advise you to marry any random girl you meet during the rite, but if a child were to result from any of the unions, we’d certainly want to keep it.”
Shelved to the back of his mind goes this information, and it’s not until the day before the festival that Satoru takes a peek at the missions roster maintained by the school. Next to Utahime’s name is a time-off request for tomorrow, for ‘religious reasons.’
And that decides his attendance for him.
He deserves a night off anyway.