Chapter Text
“Pretty, right?”
Gojo looks so proud, watching for her reaction. She turns her eyes out to watch the lights of the skyline blink on; his only want to watch her face.
“Well, damn,” she murmurs, and the tiny smile that lights up her face in the twilight sets off bursts like fireworks in Gojo’s chest. In a string of a thousand romantic moments, he cannot remember the last one that felt this way.
“I thought you might like it up here.” The moment’s close enough to over that he can move again, so he spreads out a blanket (he’d had to borrow it from Nobara, who has an absurd amount of beach gear for someone who never goes to the beach) and sits more gracefully than someone with legs as long as Gojo’s should be able to. When he’s settled, he reaches up for Utahime’s hand. “Do you?”
She leans on his offered arm for stability as she sits and it’s barely fifteen seconds before she sinks into his hastily-offered embrace. “It’s beautiful,” she says, and her smile doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. “How’d you find this place?”
“Research.” Or a lunch break spent frantically teleporting between sites alleged to offer nice views of the skyline at night. He’s always thought that these city views were too close to clichéd to bother with, but he’s starting to see the merit of corniness; this site had been selected out of fourteen he’d managed to visit in thirty minutes. (He’d almost been sick.) “I thought...well, if we can’t be in the stadium, we might as well look at the stadium.” He fishes his laptop from his bag. “While also, y’know. Watching what we’d be seeing in person if the government wasn’t so stingy.”
“Only you would get two all-event passes out of a bureaucrat and still have the audacity to call him stingy.” Utahime’s palm finds his forearm and traces a back-and-forth trail; she sighs contentedly. “But thank you.”
“Oh, uh...yeah.” Gojo shrugs. “You mentioned wanting roses, so I figured you like clichés.”
She swats his arm.
“That’s a good thing!”
“Is it, now?” Utahime asks lightly.
“It’s nice. Really enables my lack of creativity.”
“Oh, please.”
“Besides, isn’t this romantic?” he wags his eyebrows. “A beautiful woman, a gorgeous man, a night under the stars-”
“And a lack of privacy that makes whatever you’re thinking completely out of the question, Gojo. I know how your brain works.” She’s still grinning when she adds, “get your head out of the gutter.”
“But I like the gutter!”
“I am well aware.”
“And can you blame me?”
“Well, seeing as you’re an adult and you supposedly have full control of your mental faculties, I would have to go with ‘yes.’”
“But you’re so hot,” he whines.
“I am no such thing, Satoru.”
“Liar.” He flicks her upper arm.
“Hardly.”
“Ah, see? You just did it again.” He leans so close that his breath whispers against her ear. “You liar.”
“The thing’s about to start,” Utahime mutters, trying to ignore the prickly blush crawling up her neck unbidden. “Leave me alone.”
“Ah, but you forget that it’s wrong to lie.” He’s still too close and Utahime only wishes she minded. “ Doesn't that mean that someone have to teach you a lesson?”
“You are so shameless that it honestly surprises me that you’ve lived this long.”
And it’s true. She could write a whole book - Gojo Satoru’s Filthy Mouth and All the Ways It Might Get Him Killed Someday. Maybe she should; what with the way women fall at his feet, it’d probably be a best-seller.
Ew.
“Yeah, but I have, haven’t I?” Gojo seems to get the picture, and he backs away. “And I’ll live to bother you another day!”
“Oh, lovely,” Utahime deadpans. “More reasons to stress myself into an early grave.”
“Well, I know some excellent stress-reduction techniques…”
Utahime turns her head just to be sure that he sees the disgust on her face. “You’re not making a particularly strong case for yourself here, Satoru.”
“Oh?” Gojo leans in to steal a kiss. “I was only talking about that, Princess. What, did you think I meant something else?” He smirks. “Whose mind is in the gutter now?”
“You’re so stupid.”
“Then so are you.”
She doesn’t want to, but she guesses she can admit to being stupid with him.
**
“Satoru?”
“Utahime.”
He always answers to her calling his given name this way. She thinks it’s sweet without really knowing why.
“Thank you, Satoru.”
“For…?”
“For bribing the government.”
**
“You’re in a group chat with students?”
“Well, obviously. They’re the only people besides you that I can stand.” He swings their joined hands like they’re schoolchildren making their way to class without a care in the world but the far-off bell, and his free hand reaches up to bat the leaves of overhanging trees out of his face. It’s swelteringly hot even late at night, after the ceremony’s conclusion, but neither wants to head in yet. Gojo had thought this shaded park would afford them some cool; he’d forgotten that shade is only helpful when the sun is up. “So anyways, Itadori sends this blurry picture of someone who kind of looks like me next to someone who kind of looks like me. The thing blows up like you wouldn’t believe. Nobara’s demanding sources, Panda is just keysmashing, you get the picture. And that’s when I find out that some two-bit tabloid was taking pictures of couples in the audience at different events and some photographer saw us at every single event we went to.” He smiles sheepishly. “And took pictures.”
“So we’re all over the internet.”
“If one reads bad tabloids and knows where to look.”
“Ugh. Great.” With her free hand, Utahime pushes her loose hair out of her eyes - she’d decided to wear her usual bow as a headband tonight for no reason at all, and it’s sticking to her sweaty forehead in the heat. “So much for privacy.”
“My students are trying to decide what our ship name should be.” Gojo looks far too pleased by this. “I don’t think any of them are winning yet.”
Utahime really wishes she didn’t know what that meant.
“Really?”
“They’re teenagers who could be eaten by curses at any time, Utahime. I’m not in the practice of stopping them from having their fun if it’s not hurting anyone.” He shrugs. “Sure, it’s kind of invasive, but it’s kinda nice. Like...that they care enough about their beloved Sensei to be invested in his relationships-”
“The last thing I want is for my students to be invested in my relationships,” Utahime grumbles, even though she can’t argue with that.
“But you know what’s good about all of this?”
Utahime gives him a weary look. “Please do enlighten me.”
“We have to stay together now!” Gojo says brightly. “For the children!”
“Hilarious.”
“Hey, now, parental divorce is terrible for impressionable teenagers.” He thinks she doesn’t see his I-win face in the darkness, but she does, and she rolls her eyes. “So now that our kids know-”
“Now that your kids know. Mine don’t know anything.”
“-we have to stick it out! Fun, right?”
“Hardly.”
“You say that like you didn’t stop me five minutes ago to kiss me until I thought I was going to pass out.” He taps her forehead with his index finger. “You’ve got to work on that, Hime. Do you want me to suffocate?”
“You’re actually the worst, you know that?”
“And by that you mean ‘goading you about kissing technique problems you definitely don’t have because I want to give you an excuse to kiss me more often when you won’t do it without one’? Yeah. So awful.”
“Idiot,” she mutters. “I can’t believe I got myself stuck with you.”
**
Four Years Later
July 20th
“That was obviously a foul!”
“Satoru, be quiet.”
“Outrageous!”
“Satoru.” Utahime clamps a hand over his mouth - that technique hasn’t lost any of its efficacy since she first tried it. “We’re going to get another noise complaint.”
(She doesn’t even want to think about the last one.)
Satoru knows exactly how to counter her initial offense, though. Kissing is no longer foreign enough to throw Utahime off, so he pushes his tongue against her palm until she drops her hand with a yelp of disgust. He smirks - works every time. “Says the one who almost got us kicked out of the rugby finals last time for the exact same reason?”
“These walls might as well be made of cardboard.” Utahime half-expects the people in the neighboring room to knock on their door and demand they vacate their suite before they deafen them. This, though, is par for the course; she shakes her head. “I can’t believe I got myself stuck with you.”
“Mm, but’cha did.” He lazily kisses her shoulder, and she squrims a little to adjust her position against his chest. “Sorry, Princess.”
“...that was a terrible call, though,” Utahime admits.
“See? See?”
“That doesn’t justify getting us asked to change rooms.”
“They haven’t done that yet, though.” Satoru wraps his arms around her shoulders, leaning against his chest, and squeezes. “And if they haven’t had a problem with us yet, I don’t think they ever will.”
“But they have had a problem with us.”
“Yeah,” he concedes, reaching for her hand so he can fiddle with the silver band on her ring finger. “But everyone expects that sort of thing from honeymooners.”
Utahime loves and hates how he still knows exactly how to make her blush. “I was talking about you heckling the referees!”
“Oh, you were? Huh. I was under the impression that those noise complaints were for something else.”
“ Gojo-”
“Careful there, Utahime. That’s your own name that you’re about to start cursing, you know.”
“- Satoru!” Her face is beet-red now and she knows it. “I wasn’t cursing anything.”
“I know, Uta. I’m just teasing.” He kisses her hair, then brushes it back to reach her cheek, then - because he knows she hates it - draws up to his full height so he can lean down far enough to kiss her forehead from above. She hates to be reminded of how small she is in his arms but he’s never known why when she looks so precious this way; it’s a thing of beauty, the way he surrounds her, the way he always has to bend to kiss her. “And I’ll try, but if the referees are idiots, I don’t claim any responsibility for that.”
“Fine,” she huffs.
“But as for you-”
She turns in his arms, trying not to laugh when he keens in complaint at the loss of contact, and rests both elbows against his chest to hold herself up. Her eyes sparkle, and she thumbs the tip of his nose. “I’m going to stop you there.”
He looks dumbstruck, lying beneath her, tendrils of her hair brushing against his shirt. (After four years of the “tank tops aren’t shirts” argument, she’s given up.) “‘kay,” he replies, a little dazed with unexpected happiness.
“Yeah.” Neither is watching the game anymore, even though it’s the first round of the men’s volleyball tournament (they’ve decided since the last Olympics that it’s Satoru’s favorite sport of the ones that don’t involve Swarovski crystals) and they’d both said that they wanted to pay attention. “Mmhm. Whatever you were gonna say…”
Neither cares anymore, no matter how offensive it was at the time.
“Not gonna say it.” Satoru closes his eyes then pulls her closer so she’s no longer propped up but reclining, draped across his body like a weighted blanket. “Mmhm.”
“Good, ‘cause I wasn’t going to let you.” It’s too cold in their cabin and the walls are too thin and even in the honeymoon suite they can hear a family of four noisily arguing down the hall and a group of shrieking children pounding on the thin metal floor above, but neither is aware of any of that right now. “Satoru…”
“Utahime?”
She closes her eyes now, too. “Can I tell you a secret?”
“Yeah.” The TV announcer’s getting louder - this must be an impressive rally, the kind that Satoru would normally narrate so loudly that the echo of his cheering would bounce off every door and wall on their deck. But Satoru isn’t thinking about volleyball now, or anything but the thin fabric of his wife’s tank top beneath his fingers and the bare skin of her calves against his own. “Whatever you want.”
“Satoru,” she says, almost sleepy. “I think I might be in love with you.”
“Oh. Oh, wow.” He squeezes her waist so tightly that she squirms in his grip, starting to laugh because she knows he’ll let go if she wants him to. “I’m honored. Truly. And you are a very lucky woman-”
“Don’t make me take that back, Satoru.”
“I don’t plan on it.” He smirks. “Also, I had a thought.”
“Oh?”
“If I ever got asked, I’d feel kinda bad telling a student that bribery was wrong.”
“Hm?”
“Because bribery got me all of this.”
“Bribery didn’t get you anything, Gojo.” Utahime snort-laughs - she never used to do that, knowing he’d never let her hear the end of it, but she does now - and her fingers trace the length of Satoru’s forearm. “Sure, it opened the door, but wouldn’t something else have come along and done the same thing if not that?”
“I’d like to hope it would.”
“Me, too.” She pokes his arm. “But I think so. You’re kinda like mold, that way.”
“...mold?”
“At first, you want to get rid of it, but once you find out that you can’t, it just keeps growing and growing.” Utahime is beginning to see that this is a bad analogy. “...kind of. You know what, that was a bad example-”
“No, I like it.” He nestles his chin in the crook of her shoulder. “It keeps growing until one day you realize it’s become one of those fancy French cheeses that rich people always serve at parties, and you can’t imagine throwing it out because it cost a month’s paycheck.”
“Actually...you’re not half-wrong, Satoru.”
“Am I ever?”
“Oh, shush.”
“No, I’m glad you told me that. Just don’t stab me with the cheese knife when I get you gorgonzola for your next birthday.”
And there will be a next, strangely, wonderfully - a next year, a next birthday, a next anniversary, a next Olympic volleyball tournament to get upset about, a next kiss and a next morning waking up side-by-side and a next fight and a next reconciliation. It’s amazing how many nexts the silver bands they both wear can hold, how much life fits in the stone set into the ring she wears below it.
Amazing how strange the story of all those nexts sounds when she tries to relate it to anyone who hadn’t been there.
“I won’t,” she promises him. “Since I plan on giving you a petri dish.”
“Wow. So now I’m mold and bacteria?”
“Fitting, given how filthy your mouth is.”
“Oh, we’re going there?”
She grins. “Why not?”
“And that’s set two for the Venezuelan team!”
“Wait, what?” Satoru sputters, indignant, sitting up so fast he almost knocks heads with Utahime. “When did that even-”
“How-”
“Unbelievable!”
“We had that bagged!”
“This is ridiculous,” Satoru huffs. “Why do they even bother pretending to be impartial?”
“Beats me.”
“Maybe they took a bribe.”
And it makes no sense at all - how would that even have happened? - but Utahime can’t help bursting into laughter.
“Yeah,” she pants in between gasps for breath. “I think that’s what it was.” But she’s not done laughing yet, and the moment she looks back up at Satoru, she dissolves into another fit of giggles and buries her face in his shirt ( tank top) .
And Satoru…well. He’s never been able to resist, either, when there is no greater pleasure than laughing with his wife. He gathers her into his arms, watching the game out of the corner of his eye with the crown of her head as a headrest.
“Unbelievable,” he mutters.
(He isn’t talking about the game.)