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Touka is already pretty far along in her pregnancy when someone pops the question.
“Sassan, I’ve been wondering. Did you and Touka-san elope?”
“E-elope?” Sasaki scratches his head. “Um, no.”
“Ah, I see, I see.” Shirazu nods. “So, you just went to sign a marriage certificate, then?”
“Not…exactly…”
The squad waits for him to elaborate, and when he does not, an uneasy atmosphere droops across the table. Urie breaks the silence first, eyes hooded as he searches for the next song to play on his headset.
“No wonder that old man in the cafe doesn’t like you.”
“I-it’s not that I don’t want to,” Sasaki stammers. “I just — I mean — there’s so much to worry about already, with what the child is going to be, or if it will even make it…”
They stare at him. Sasaki coughs and continues.
“I-in any case, no matter what happens, I’ll be there for her. Well, for as long as she wants me around. And besides, my name isn’t even…and it’s not like either of us have family to attend a ceremony, really…so…”
They continue watching as he struggles.
“That does sound like a lot of things to worry about,” Mutsuki says.
“Yeah,” Saiko murmurs, approvingly. “That’s a lot of excuses.”
Sasaki scratches his head. His voice quiets.
“I know I should just ask her,” he mutters. “Especially since she’s…you know…pregnant. With my…you know.”
“With your whatever-it-is,” Urie says. “Yeah. We know.”
“Why are you so nervous?” Mutsuki asks kindly. “Touka-san doesn’t seem like the type of person to be concerned about rings or ceremonies or anything.”
“I-it’s just…” Sasaki’s face is getting redder and redder as he flails. Finally he just lets the words burst out of him, helplessly.
“What if she says no?”
The atmosphere droops again, this time with a palpable pity. Saiko puts her hands over her mouth, and her voice is muffled when she says, “Poor Maman.”
“Well,” Shirazu sighs, “we’re not really getting anywhere today anyway.”
With one sweep, he pushes aside all their plans for their next operation, and lays out fresh paper on the table.
:::
Touka is already pretty far along in her pregnancy when Sasaki and his squad start acting strangely.
“Touka,” Sasaki calls one day. “The cherry blossoms are out, I think. How about we pack some food and go to see them?”
Shit, Touka thinks. She’s been vomiting all morning already and the very idea of smiling pleasantly at him while choking down some cold, slimy, maggot-textured riceball is enough to make her feel faint.
“I’m really not in the mood,” she tells him, this time and the next three times he asks, and for some reason on the last time Sasaki glances at Mutsuki, and Mutsuki scratches the skin underneath his eyepatch with a flush and a cough.
That’s strange. She glances at the rest of the squad to see if they’ve noticed Sasaki and Mutsuki, and realizes that for whatever reason, they all look sort of downcast in general. She clears her throat.
“Well,” she amends, “maybe it would be good to go out for a bit,” and their immediate brightening does nothing but make her incredibly apprehensive.
Is this some kind of trick? Did they figure out she’s a ghoul? Is she going to open up that picnic basket and to find a suitcase waiting for her? When they arrive at the nearby canal lined with cherry blossom trees, she gazes out at the pink boughs, feeling ill.
“Y-you’re pretty quiet, Touka,” Sasaki says. He pushes the picnic basket toward her, and her stomach churns. “Why don’t you eat something?”
“S-sorry, Sasaki.”
“Sorry? For what?”
“I’m think I’m going to throw up,” she groans, and they rush back to Sasaki’s apartment so she can do so.
Things don’t get better from there. Despite being more well-fed than she’s been in her whole life, Ken (she thinks of it as “Ken” already, secretly) is more troublesome than Kaneki ever was as a new ghoul. It seems determined to rearrange all the organs in her body, and is voracious; during meals, Touka struggles not to shovel down all the food Sasaki gives her. One of the few things that can keep her distracted are Saiko’s games, but when she asks Saiko for another one, Saiko coughs.
“S-sorry, I kind of let someone else borrow them.”
“You let someone borrow...all of them?”
“Uh...yeah. I can give some to you again when I get them back,” she offers, and Touka smiles through her disappointment.
“Thank you.”
“Y-you want to play games, Touka?” Sasaki says. “Would you want to come to an arcade with me?”
Not really, Touka thinks, and is about to say it when she catches his hopeful expression. Touka swallows.
“Alright,” she says, and they go, but she spends the majority of the time trying not to inhale cigarette smoke, and watching him fumble with trying to tip a rabbit plush out from a crane game.
“Here,” she says finally, with some irritation, “let me do it.”
“N-no!”
“No?”
“I m-mean — it’s just — I really wanted to get something for you myself,” Sasaki mumbles. After another fruitless hour, however, Touka reassures him that it’s alright to give up, and they trudge home.
The next day, she wakes up to a hideous smell. She coughs, eyes watering, and shuffles to the kitchen with a scarf wrapped over her mouth and nose. There, she finds Sasaki baking up a storm.
“Good morning, Touka!” he says cheerfully. “How are you?”
“...great,” Touka tells him. “What...what are you making?”
“Mocha cupcakes,” he tells her, without looking up from a cookbook.
“That sounds delicious,” she says weakly. “What’s the occasion?”
“Hmm...no occasion, really. I just thought I’d do something nice for you, and Shirazu gave me this book. Does it smell good?”
“...yeah. Great. Really great. It’s...it’s a little hot in here, though. Is it okay if I open a window?”
“Oh — I can get it for you — just sit. Relax.”
He pulls out a chair for her, and Touka plops down, staring blankly at the odiferous goop and various ingredients scattered on the opposite counter. Ken thrashes, as if sensing the worst, and she puts a shaking hand on her belly.
Hang in there, she thinks. We’ll survive this. Somehow. Probably.
It takes the better part of the day for him to finish making the cupcakes. They’re small, but elaborate, and Touka stares down at the frosting wobbling on the top of the one that she’s given, which reminds her uncomfortably of shaving cream and smells just as toxic.
Sasaki sits across from her and hands her a knife and fork. He smiles, apprehensively. She stares at the cupcake, at the chocolate on it that looks precisely like something that was scooped up from out of a gutter. Fuck. Shit. She needs to do this.
Do it. Do it! Just do it!
Normally she cuts up human food, to give the impression that she is savoring every bite, rather than steeling herself for them. But right now, she’d rather get this over with. She stabs the cupcake with a fork and stuffs the whole thing into her mouth at once.
“T-T-Touka?! What are you — why are you —“
“Mmph,” Touka replies, and tries to close her jaw. Okay, maybe this cake wasn’t as soft as it looked. It does, however, have the precise consistency of mold, and slime, or maybe slimy mold, and she claps her hand over her mouth as her body heaves.
“T-Touka — don’t eat it!”
She gives him a glare that says, I’m going to eat it.
“No, I’m serious, don’t eat it, don’t — uh — overexert yourself — Touka, please, really, don’t —”
She swallows, just a little bit, and she feels the blood drain from her face. Sasaki looks pale as well, and fumbles for a plate, and sticks it in front of her just as she disgorges all the mush from her mouth. She spits until every little trace of cupcake is gone, and then stoops over the table, panting.
“I’ll clean it up,” she gasps, but Sasaki has already whisked the plate away.
“No — it’s okay — don’t worry about it. I’m sorry. I should have thought about your sensitive stomach.”
“I’m sorry,” Touka coughs as he turns his back to her and starts washing the plate contents into the sink.
“Sorry,” she repeats, but again, he doesn’t seem to hear. At the sink he sighs, with something that sounds suspiciously like relief.
“Sasaki?” Touka calls, and he jumps. “Is everything alright?”
“Y-yes! Everything’s fine,” he stammers. And sure enough, his hand is at his chin.
:::
The last plan left to try is Urie’s. Not that it’s much of a plan.
“Why does there need to be a whole scheme about it? Just ask.”
Sasaki sighs, and turns the ring over so its gem catches the light. Fortunately, it cleaned up pretty well after being almost consumed by the person he wanted to give it to. Having her somehow discover the ring in a cupcake was a little less romantic than pretending to find it at an arcade or having her discover it in their picnic basket beneath the cherry blossom trees...but it was somehow still preferable to just...asking her outright.
“Touka,” he rehearses quietly. “Kirishima Touka. Will you...”
Before he can even finish his throat begins to close up, and his face begins to heat, and he presses his palms against his eyes with a groan.
It sounds so stupid. He isn’t good at this. Isn’t there some other idea? Some other example he can follow?
“Sasaki,” he hears, and he clenches the ring in his fist and quickly pockets it. He spins his chair away from his desk.
“Y-yes? Is everything okay? Do you need something?”
Touka is hanging at the doorframe. Did she see him? Did she hear him?
It doesn’t seem so.
“Do you want to go to the bookstore?” she asks. “Just to check things out.”
“That…that sounds great,” Sasaki realizes, and they head out together.
:::
Life has flown past them so quickly that it seems like ages since they’ve been to a bookstore together, just to browse. Without agreeing on it, they find themselves taking the train to a particular store. Touka is sitting down, and Sasaki is standing beside her, and he laughs a little, remembering.
“Our first date?” she asks.
“What else?”
He had asked her out, but she was the one that had suggested going to a bookstore. The idea of it, at first, had made him strangely ill — but it had turned out to be unexpectedly fun. He’d learned that she still struggled with reading certain characters, and he eased her embarrassment into relief as he helped her think of ways to remember them. Despite her problems reading, neither of them had ever run out of things to say about books that they had both already read. And she had laughed at every one of his puns.
Sasaki feels his face warm as they enter the store. It was browsing these shelves that :re’s barista had turned from merely a beautiful person into someone that he couldn’t imagine ever leaving.
“I just remembered that there’s something that I wanted here,” he says, before he can stop himself, and Touka looks back at him.
“Oh? What is it?”
“It’s…um…hmm. It’ll be easier if I write it down.” He asks for a paper and small pencil at the cashier’s desk, and writes it out carefully, and returns to her. She frowns and squints as she takes the paper from him.
“This part is ‘will you,’” she says, and he nods as she glances up at him.
“But this other part...” She tilts her head, nibbles her lip. Sasaki waits, and tries to keep himself breathing.
“Oh!” she says. “It’s ’marriage.’ So it says, ’Will you marry me.’ Right?”
“U-um, right. Th-that’s right.”
She snorts. “What kind of a title is that?” she asks, and Sasaki shrugs helplessly, and she waits for him to elaborate, and he does not. It feels like it takes an eternity for it to dawn on her.
“Oh,” she breathes. “Ohh.”
“You don’t have to,” Sasaki stammers hastily. “I mean — I mean, you don’t need to — but whether you want to or not, I just want you to know — Touka — that I’ll be here for you, whenever you want. And being with you, the whole time I’ve been with you, has been — I’ve just been —”
He knows he’s babbling now, but can’t make himself stop. “I’ve been…really happy. Sometimes it’s like I’ve been waiting for you for my entire life. And…and please just know…that no matter what you want is fine with me, as long as you’ll be happy.“
He can’t make himself look at her. Finally, Touka sighs.
“Sasaki,” she says flatly, plucking the pencil from his hand. “How do you expect me to help you find this book if you don’t even put the author’s name?”
“The — um — the —?”
She braces the paper on a magazine. The pencil scratches. She hands the paper back to him, and he reads it.
Even though you chose a tear-able way to ask, of course I will.
His eyes sting. He looks up at Touka with a flush that matches hers, and then he laughs, so loudly that people look over and stare as he hugs her and lifts her into the air.