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The first time Satoru saw Utahime encounter a spider also happened to be the last time she called him by his last name. Miraculously, albeit unsurprisingly, the two events were intertwined.
Satoru heard the first piercing note of Utahime's shriek and jumped off the couch in the teacher's lounge before it was even over. He didn't even give it a second thought. By the time he reached the hallway where she stood with her back against the wall, eyes wide and jaw hanging open, the echo hadn't yet begun to travel.
“Utahime, what's the matter? What's wrong?” He was breathless. Not from the running, but because he stopped breathing when her voice made that sound unlike anything he'd ever heard from her before.
She looked at him with wild eyes, almost deranged, and he could see her cursed energy in knots around her.
“G-Gojo,” she started, her voice shaking in a way that he was used to with women, though not necessarily in this context. “Get out of the way.”
Satoru blinked. There was no other cursed energy in the vicinity but theirs. Unless Maki went rogue without him knowing, they were completely alone. “Huh?”
“I said get out of the way!”
He took a step towards her.
“Not that way!”
He took a step back.
And that was when he saw it. The spider. One of those giant black spiders with a stripe of red down the middle and an ass-to-body ratio that Satoru couldn't dream of replicating without steroids. It dangled on a string of web down from the ceiling mere inches from Satoru’s face.
To be clear, Satoru wasn't particularly keen on spiders, he tended to bug bomb his apartment once a month just to ensure that he'd never have to see one in the flesh, but he also wasn't going into cardiac arrest like Utahime.
“Are you shitting me?”
A part of him felt stupid for rushing all the way here over nothing, but another, much larger part of him counted his blessings for having the rare opportunity to witness the prim and proper Iori Utahime cowering into a wall as though she was being held at gunpoint. By a spider.
“GOJO, YOU DUMBASS! BACK! AWAY!” She somehow screamed this while also hissing at him, which meant that he was truly in dangerous territory where her temper was concerned.
So of course he did no such thing. In fact, he got closer to it.
“What's wrong, huh? Are you scared of this little guy? He can't hurt you, you know.”
“She,” Utahime said with disgust, never once taking her eyes off the spider, which stirred up a sense of envy in Satoru that he did not want to address. “That's a female spider.”
“Wow, sexist much?”
“Gojo!”
“Would you be acting this way if she was a boy spider? Does feminism not apply here? I swear, the glass ceiling keeps getting further and further away as the years pass.”
He reached out his hand directly under the spider, though he kept his infinity turned all the way on. No way was he going to touch that shit.
“Gojo,” she said, breathless and in shambles. How come he couldn't be the one to reduce her to that state? Why was it a spider that did this to her? This was such bullshit. “Gojo, she's pregnant.”
“I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to discriminate against pregnant women in the workplace, Utahime.”
“Brat!”
He could get used to her calling him that a few hundred more times under a different context, but now was probably not the time to bring that up. “That's my name, don't wear it out.”
Utahime tries to back away further into the wall before scaling sideways to put more distance between herself and her new sleep paralysis demon. “She's probably going to burst at any moment now. Do you have any idea how many eggs spiders can lay at once?”
“Uh…”
“Hundreds! Thousands, even!”
That sounded like an exaggeration to Satoru, but he was an educator by profession and had made a vow long ago to never argue on any particular topic without doing a Google search beforehand. Sometimes it was hard being so smart and responsible all at the same time.
“Yeah, sure.”
“Gojo! It's true!”
“I literally just agreed with you.”
“Ugh! You're such a brat!”
That one did something profound to his brain chemistry, he had to admit.
“How about this: I'll kill the spider and you only call me ‘brat’ from now on. Deal?”
Utahime narrowed her eyes and leered at him like he was a cockroach. “What kind of proposition is that?”
“I have my reasons and they're none of your business.”
“You're such a b-” she stopped herself and quickly pivoted. “A bug. You're such a slimy little bug of a man.”
Satoru sat with that for a moment, rolling it around in his head. “Yeah, you can call me that, too.”
“Disgusting!”
He smirked, a little too pleased, even by his standards. “So, do we have a deal?”
She didn't immediately trust him, which was normal, but she was hearing him out, which was not. “How do you plan to get rid of it?”
“Did you forget who I am?”
“Unfortunately, no.” She didn't have to say it like that, but Satoru’s pride recovered quickly. “But still, that doesn't really narrow down your options.”
“I'll just do the usual thing.”
“The usu-? Gojo, you can't use Hollow Purple on a pregnant spider!”
He scoffed. “Again with the sexism. Honestly, you should do some self-reflection. Seek therapy. Unlearn your internal biases and all that.”
“I'm serious! You'll wipe the entire school off the map!”
Satoru liked the way she looked at him as though she would burst a blood vessel at any given moment. It made him feel like he was always on the verge of being punished in ways he definitely deserved.
“What’s your point? This is Tokyo, not Kyoto, so it doesn’t affect you.”
“Wha- It doesn’t affect me? Tch, Gojo, you idiot!”
“Brat,” he reminded her. “Anyways, I’m a special grade, in case you forgot, so I think I can manage getting rid of a bug without as much fanfare as you’ve been displaying thus far.”
A blush crept up from her neck to her cheeks and Satoru couldn't take his eyes off of the way it shaded her entire face. “J-Just get rid of it!”
“So we have a deal?”
She threw her hands up in the air, an exhausted surrender. “Yes, fine, whatever. You're a brat forever. Happy?”
Satoru smirked. “Immensely.”
Did he have a plan to kill this thing? No. Did he have a plan to capture it and release it into the wild? Also no. But did he have a plan to use his abilities to whisk the mother spider elsewhere away from Utahime's nervous eyes? Alas, no.
He did, however, feel confident in his abilities to move it without directly touching it, which was more than Utahime could say for herself and her plan to merge and become one with the walls.
The concept was simple: he had the ability to push matter away from him - his red technique. If he implemented a microscopic amount of red underneath the spider with one hand and an equal amount of red over the spider with the other, then logically it would be trapped within a ball of matter. Once that was done, he could transfer it outside and toss it in a bush or something.
Oh, right. Her. He forgot this spider was a lady. In that case, he'd be more mindful to set her down gently.
Nothing could possibly go wrong. Mostly because Utahime was watching him closely and he couldn't afford to lose anymore credibility in front of her.
To Satoru's credit, capturing the spider within a vortex of red went smoothly. It didn't squirm or try to escape, it just remained floating in stasis between his hands.
“See?” He turned to Utahime and showed off his achievement. He wasn't expecting praise from her of all people, but he certainly would have liked some. Just a little bit to refill his ego from years of unspeakable damage she'd inflicted. “Told you I could handle it. Nothing to be afraid of anymore.”
Her shoulders relaxed and the stress lines that resided in her forehead retreated for the time being. “I suppose you have this under control.”
Heh. Yeah, he did.
Satoru nodded to the nearest window and Utahime, who may or may not have been a mind reader, rushed to open it for him. Once he had it positioned out the window, he released his red technique as gently as possible, though that proved to be fruitless.
It happened before he could even react, before he could even turn his infinity back on.
When his technique dropped, it had the opposite effect from what Satoru had intended: his power crushed the spider, thus causing the fury of hell to be unleashed from her womb -
Them.
Babies. Hundreds of them, just as Utahime said, erupting from the spider’s massive ass kicking and screaming, crawling down Satoru’s hand and up his arm like they were sent by the devil himself. Herself? Whatever. They fell from Satoru’s arm to land along his legs and torso just as Utahime shrieked, “GOJO, YOU BRAT!”
She ran for dear life, abandoning him to his fate as though she was being chased by a bear and her only objective was to outrun him to survive. Satoru quickly turned his infinity back on and rushed to the locker rooms to scrub off the top layer of his skin in a scalding hot shower. Any remaining spiders in the building were not part of the deal, so they were Principal Yaga's problem.
They didn’t speak for weeks after that, which was made worse by the fact that Utahime always made a point to turn and run in the other direction whenever they found themselves in the same vicinity. Three weeks later and she finally responded to one of his many, many text messages reminding her of their deal. Despite how it ended, he still got rid of the spider and he deserved to reap the benefits.
"Ugh. You're so annoying. Brat."
From that point forward, Utahime stayed true to her word and, regardless of the grotesque outcome, it was still the greatest deal Satoru had ever made.