Chapter Text
There once was a girl named Takeuchi Nozomi. She was a semi-fledged member of jujustu society (strong enough to get rid of a fly head easily, but unable to attend Jujustu Highschool). Nozomi’s family was poor, Nozomi’s mother had died from some disease or another (as mothers seemingly tend to do in both fiction and reality), and her father was a drunkard.
Her talents included cooking, sweeping, mopping, scrubbing, and braving the worst of her father’s temper. She couldn’t read very well, and had trouble hearing what her teachers were saying. Nozomi’s teachers whispered in the breakroom that she wouldn’t accomplish much in life. Nozomi had a pretty oval face and dark eyes, and her ears were lumpy and frayed, like heads of cauliflower from her father boxing her head often.
To make things worse for the already hapless Nozomi, she could see things. Unnatural monsters that wobbled and moaned liked to tease and torment Nozomi. She had learned the hard way never to let her gaze linger. She could never let the monsters know she could see them, or else they would know that they could hurt her.
One day, however, Nozomi looked too long at a monster. It wasn’t her fault, she promises. She was just too afraid, she didn’t mean to. The monster swung it’s four lidless eyes to fix onto Nozomi’s eyes and she froze. It was at that point where she was introduced to the world of jujutsu.
It turned out Nozomi wasn’t crazy, that what she was seeing was really there. Nozomi had blessed eyes and promptly was employed by the Zen’in family as a maidservant and poison taste tester, the latter task due to her semi-useless innate technique of immunity to ingested poisons.
Zen’in Naobito, a man who had never been denied anything in his life, was not the worst person to housekeep for. He was rude, loud, and always smelled like rice wine, but that was it. He never cuffed her cauliflower ears, he never broke his bottles on Nozomi’s back, and he was never horrible(beyond an occasional grab). He never made her feel small or harmed.
Zen’in Naoya, a strapping young man and Naobito’s son, was different. He didn’t like when Nozomi talked (which was seldom.) His hair was fried and bleached to shit, and his ears were hung with black titanium rings. Naoya tasted like cherries and salt, like expensive candy and raw fish. Naoya liked to press himself against Nozomi, his sugar spun lips and marble statue body. He was proud of it, too, parading his wealth and competence whether you wanted to see it or not.
Naoya had few hobbies outside of training. He worked day and night to uphold the title of fastest in the clan as Naobito celebrated his 50th birthday. Naobito's joints had been worn down as the years passed by, Nozomi sometimes heard the clicking sounds his knees made when she served him. His technique with projection sorcery was immeasurable compared to Naoya's, but speed was a young man's game, and as someone pushing 16, Naoya had youth in abundance.
In his time spent outside the dojo, Naoya strutted around the Zen’in estate and property as much as a man could strut. If privy to the inner machinations of Nozomi’s mind, Naoya would argue that “men do not strut ”, but he wasn’t and probably didn’t want to be. Nozomi suspected that Naoya wouldn’t care if she held an entire hard metal concert or political smear campaign against him so long as she kept it sealed behind her painted lips and kept looking pretty. Nozomi trailed behind him. Three steps behind his trailing gait. He walked slowly. Two of hers to one of his. His legs were long. Twenty four movements to one second. He grabbed her wrist. His breath made her hair stick to her forehead.
He made her feel sick and happy, but mostly sick. Sick like a settling cold, and each time she laid eyes on him she grew colder. Unfortunately, she didn't have many other places to look. White-ish futon, green-ish tatami, the open shoji screens, the rice paper stretched thin between the dark oak lattice. When he told her to look at him when he touched her, she would unhappily glare at his face. Pale skin, unmarred by sun or age or any birthmarks, unnatural eyes, nose like a classic painting. Naoya's face bugged Nozomi. Stubborn. Self satisfied. The rigidity of somebody that believed they could do no wrong. Nozomi was annoyed by the arrogance in his face, or maybe she was just annoyed by his face, period.
Naoya was warm. Warm like a fever, warm like a bed in the morning, warm like a man made fire. His hands burned where they touched.
***
The days following directly were uneventful and drab, following the conventions of days past. The week after Naoya had chosen her as his favorite (like a toy, or pet, and how it burned to escape a life of drudgery in favor of an almost vulgar existence, no matter how lavish) she was serving him tea when a wave of nausea overcame her. She asked politely to be excused, and advised him not to touch the pale green, malt powdered tea cakes. Naoya was reclined like a buddha statue in front of the irori. He hummed vaguely in agreement, toying with the small cluster of pine needles that came as garnish on the gray ceramic plate.
Nozomi rushed to the restroom feeling her face numb before throwing up the thin rice porridge she had made for herself that morning in the low toilet. She held her head stationary, fixing her autumn leaf kanzashi which had been jostled from the run with one hand and wiping her mouth clean with the other and a wad of toilet paper.
“Nozomi, come here.” Naoya called from down the hall. The corridor floor was charcoal black, developing a shiny blue-ish sheen with the early-noontime sun filtering through rice paper walls.
Nozomi pawed at the pilled residue of tissue around her mouth. Her knees knocked as her head spun on the way up. Like a newborn calf, she wobbled back to Naoya. He laughed from his place next to the pale ashes, still emitting warmth despite being reduced to silvery dust.
He repeated himself, and Nozomi nodded slowly, shuffling to him.
***
One day, Naobito summons Nozomi to him. "You're gaining weight. Lose it, or I'll fire you." Nozomi finds it quite hard to lose the weight, and is promptly fired.
Naoya corners Nozomi on her way out, her ears still scabbed over from when he pierced the lobes. "Make them more pretty," he had said at the time, "make them more like mine," he undoubtedly had thought. Nozomi's arms were laden with expensive silk that Naoya had bought her. Nozomi was excited to wear jeans again.
"Stay." He ordered, mouth twisting. "I'll keep you, even if you're fucking fat."
Nozomi’s own mouth developed a wry quirk. “'Even if', really? I thought you liked women a bit more…” she elegantly lifted her wrists, letting stiff go-sho-doki patterned silk fall, to make a crass groping gesture. Buxom, her hands finished for her.
“I do.” Naoya said shortly. “So stay.”
"No." Nozomi whispered, before repeating louder. "No, I'm not marrying you, Naoya- sama ."
He recoiled, as if burnt, before recovering composure almost immediately. "Whoever said anything about marrying you?" He scoffed, eyes flitting to her face, to her stomach, then back up at Nozomi's dark eyes. "It'd just be messy to leave you alone. If you explain it to papa, he'd let me keep you."
"I'm not a dog." She said quietly.
"You got knocked up like one."
Nozomi went quiet at that, and her hand strayed to her growing belly thoughtlessly. Her fingertips were calloused, still. The rough skin caught on the threads of her silk obi. The weave was bamboo brocade. Nozmi hated her rough hands. She hated the way that clorox smelled, how the bleach would leave chalky residue, how the tips of her fingers would crack. Nozomi hated the feeling of salonpas underneath her clothes, the smell of tiger balm that trailed after her, the sting of arnica on her knees. Nozomi hated the spit stain on her sock given by some haughty, flatfooted highborn girl.
Nozomi glanced up at Naoya through her eyelashes. She had been given less cleaning work to do after she met him.
“... I'm pregnant.” she mouthed out slowly, her head hung like a broken doll’s. “And Naoya- sama is very kind and generous. I suppose a meeting with your father is overdue.”
Naoya smiled widely at that. It was a terrible, self satisfied thing, spreading boyishly from pale cheek to pale cheek. Dimpled. Nozomi hated how his smile was guileless and stupid. She hated how he looked like a boy who found out his crush liked him back. Nozomi felt something snakey coil in her gut, in the same place that held her unborn child and his not-yet confirmed bargaining chip.
Naoya stepped closer to her, quickly, and grasped her wrist in his hand, tugging her as he quickly strode back to the main estate house.
“Don’t worry about your things, the staff can pick them up.” He said brightly. “They were expecting to be pretty busy, ‘cause honored uncle–” he made a face at the venerating address, “--was expecting, but they were duds, the both of them. Twin girls , can you believe it? Papa says one of them will be unable to use curse energy at all.”
Naoya snorted to himself, shaking his head, before continuing to chatter. “I doubt any maid will be willing to work with Ougi after this, and his failure of a wife’ll be responsible for cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the kids aaaall alone. A happily married single mother.”
His head lolled back and to the side to look at Nozomi, an unspoken threat in his eyes. Nozomi quickly glanced down from where their eyes met, heart beating fast.
“But don’t worry.” He hastily added on, squeezing her hand. Maybe he felt guilty, maybe he didn't want to jinx it. “That won’t be you.”
‘Yeah.’ Nozomi thought unsteadily. Her zori sandal caught on a cobblestone, and Naoya tugged her upright from her doubled over, stumbling posture by her wrist. ‘It’ll be worse than that.’
After Naoya brought her to his father, he congratulated Naoya. Naobito rather predictably found the whole situation hilarious, drunkenly laughing as Nozomi's foot fell asleep and her knees got stiff.
“I’ll hitch you two up. Wouldn’t do for your first child to be outta wedlock. Your second however…” he slapped his knee with a face-splitting grin, laughs like a braying donkey causing Nozomi’s mild headache to turn almost unbearable
.
Naoya laughed with him, not quite delicate, but high pitched and quiet. Nozomi’s head hurt more from it than it did from Naobito's earth shattering barks, annoyed by the soft hiccuping he made, how his eyes scrunched up and his shoulders shook completely innocently.
***
Nozomi had her life boiled down to a kind of peaceful routine. She was set to attend the main family due to her quiet nature and good face. After folding her futon away, getting dressed in a gifted kimono (far too nice for a servant, probably secondhand from one of Naobito's daughters), cooking and eating in the humble kitchen in the servant's hall, and doing whatever errand that some other employee asked of her, she took a quick 10 minute walk to the main family’s estate.
Nozomi would then help dress and feed Naoya, taking a bite of each dish before him and wondering how food could taste so rich, and tend to him throughout the day. Sometimes he would be sent out on a mission and Nozomi would find herself breathing much easier. She was doing quite well for herself, in all honesty. The Zen’in could easily afford to keep her and about 30 other servants, both living in and out of the estate, fed and clothed. Nozomi’s salary was much lower than her friend Haruka’s, but Nozomi lived in the mansion. Her uniform was barely one at all, lavish brocade in comparison to most of the other servants’ khaki wear. “I was hoping to steer as far away from the main family and their creepy family drama.” Nozomi would moan over a gentle cup of warm sake. “But I really can’t complain…”
“You really can’t.” Haruka would always reply. It was true. Nozomi was capital “p” Poor before scoring this job. She was a young girl, homeless, running away from her father and at the time, Nozomi was pretty sure she was on the edge of a psychotic break.
They’d laugh and finish up their drinks before going to bed.
Nozomi’s life changed very quickly after Naoya found out that he liked her (gag), and that she was pregnant (scary).
Naoya showered her with more gifts and moved her into the main estate. She would wake up somewhat early and cook breakfast for both herself and Naoya, he was fond of natto while Nozomi could barely stand the smell.
In marriage, an older servant had told her once as they scrubbed the enegawa, some sacrifices must be made. Nozomi doesn’t know how the topic of matrimony even came up, but at the time she had nodded and rolled with it. Nozomi understood the words of that servant more and more as each day passed, often feeling much like one herself.
Getting dressed was an ordeal that required a half remembered former coworker and rouge. She couldn’t reach over her stomach to put on her own socks or shoes anymore. Her walk shortened to two minutes on a particularly sluggish day to get from the kitchen to the dining room.
Nozomi did not talk to Haruka anymore.
***
It was October when his newfound wife went into labor. It felt like a bad joke, to be bound to a common girl. Naoya thought Nozomi would be like the single file stream of women in and out of Chichiue's bedroom. It made him feel ashamed, his lapse of reasoning. After all, the mother of his oldest brother (an ugly man in his thirties, Naoya could count on one hand the amount of times he had seen him) had been married to papa. He wasn’t exactly stupid, no mater what Satoru -kun liked to say every time he got the chance. He knew what he was doing, even if aneue seemed to think differently. He didn’t know that it was that easy for women to get pregnant, however.
A part of Naoya wanted to punish the illiterate, half-deaf servant girl for letting it happen to her. Naoya wasn’t a brute, if she had been miserable or fought him when he had aggressively flirted with her and kissed her in those first thirty minutes of meeting her, he would’ve backed off. But instead, he was expecting to have a son (that’s what the doctors said, anyway, but they said that with Ougi’s wife, too, and everybody knows how that turned out) and Naoya didn't know what to think about that.
Naoya didn’t know what to think about it at all, so he didn’t. Instead of listening to Nozomi crying in the room over, he preferred to leaf through a hand-bound booklet of piawen couplets, he brought them instead of Ogura Hyakunin Isshu by mistake, none of that unmetered bullshit.
In the room beside the delivery room, a seasonal painting of a solitary persimmon on a spidery black branch hung beside a celadon plate. His father, older sister, and two of his uncles sat like furniture inside the makeshift waiting room.
Ougi was tense as a rock, hand clenching and unclenching crisp hakama fabric, dreading the thought of Naoya’s child upstaging his and his wife’s twin failures. His wife was much the same, a piece of muslin trapped under a stone, washed out. Spectral.
Aneue was still with disappointment, borderline cataclysmic at the thought of Naoya marrying a common woman. Naoya almost felt sorry for Nozomi, having to deal with the rage of such a catty woman, but his big sister was rather weak. Open-handed slaps and long nails only hurt so much.
Jinichi was an idiot. Naoya didn’t think that the second coming of Emperor Sutoku himself would get the man to do more than blink and scratch his head.
Chichiue was a laughing, gourd of sake missing in favor of a narrow necked flask and ceramic cup. Naoya was counting down the minutes until his father said “fuck it” and started drinking straight from the decanter.
Naoya himself was seated on an iron hard floor cushion, reading aforementioned poetry and trying very hard not to think about what was going on in the room over.
His hand was inching towards a bowl of lemon candies when one of the midwives slammed open the shoji screens with a clatter.
“It’s a boy!” She exclaimed, sweat pouring down her face and a splatter of blood on the front of her apron. She seemed happy.
The room slowly buzzed to life in that moment, Ougi and his wife shuttering with jealousy and disappointment, aneue warring with herself if she is pleased at Naoya’s good fortune or upset that Nozomi had produced decent stock, Jinichi standing up from where he had been slowly calcifying moments before, and chichiue downing his last cup of sake before rising to greet his newest grandchild. Naoya rose belatedly, jogging a few steps to join his father.
Nozomi was bloodless and wan. Wearily existing on sodden sheets, a screaming child in the doctor’s hands a few feet away.
“He’s ugly.” Was Naoya’s first words, walking over to the doctor, who showed him how to hold the wailing thing without snapping its neck. Naoya was unaware children cried so much. He handed his son back to the doctor “What should we name him?” Were his second, directed towards his father, who at that point started snickering, still standing by Nozomi’s feet.
“Nao…to? Naotsugu? …Naoyoshi? Nah…” Naoya’s father mumbled his thoughts aloud, scratching his mustache with one finger. “Naoyuki. Zen’in Naoyuki” He settled on.
Naoya preened slightly, while Nozomi smiled somewhat vacantly. She didn’t seem to understand the significance of that kanji, eight strokes damning him to success. Nozomi didn’t have much of a head for politics, he had found out. She was like a hina doll, glossy eyes and pretty smiles, hair that grew and fancy silk. Something to play with.
As Naoya traced the outline of Nozomi’s profile, Naoya hoped that his son would look more like him.