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Yuuta’s started seeing them everywhere.
He doesn’t know what prompted it, if anything at all, but now that he’s noticed they seem to be everywhere he looks. Strollers sit at the corners of every street he waits to cross; Maki will talk him into running on their mornings off and the park will be full of families. It’s uncanny, almost – the more he notices the signs, the more they seem to appear. Evidence undeniable: everyone is having babies.
At first he notices the signs passively. They’re odd, but he doesn’t connect them to anything that makes him want to dwell on them; they are as distantly relevant to him as the changing colors of the leaves now that it’s not summer anymore. Parts of the environment, irrelevancies. Nothing more.
Nobara tells them three weeks later that she is pregnant and Yuuta starts to wonder if that perfectly logical assessment is still correct.
He’s thought a few times about telling Maki how strange a coincidence he thinks that is, but he’s always deemed it unwise. It would sound like he was insinuating things. And now, she always looks strange when she’s just been with Nobara; he thinks he must have been right not to bring it up. Surely the last thing she wants to hear in the wake of that change is that her fiancé has started seeing babies everywhere for no reason he can put into words, so he doesn’t mention it.
Seven months later, Nobara looks up at Maki with pleading eyes from her hospital bed and asks her to hold her baby, and she doesn’t refuse. Yuuta watches, notices the tension in her shoulders and face and the flicker of doubt in her eyes, and he’s struck – by what, he doesn’t know. But by something. Something strikes him in that moment that he knows without any reason is going to stay with him.
He stays in the background until the moment passes, Maki is quiet on the train back to her apartment. He takes that as another sign that he was right not to tell her.
So when it starts to seem as if every couple he sees is pregnant or pushing a stroller or wearing a baby sling or holding a toddler’s hand as they cross the street, he knows that it is best to keep his observations to himself.
**
Maki doesn’t really get much of a say in the matter of the picture.
It is Itadori’s idea, to nobody’s surprise, and no one is particularly enamored of it. Yuuta worries, Maki glares, Megumi glowers, Nobara practically bares her teeth – but it’s Itadori, and he really does think it’s a great plan, and so before anyone can do much to stop him he puts the baby in Maki’s arms and tells her to smile.
Tact is not Itadori’s strength, and the first few pictures he takes show an alarmed Maki trying not to lose her grip. Haruki is a year old now, and heavy; the slippery green satin of the plain dress she’d chosen for her afterparty gives little traction – her first moments on camera are occupied in trying not to drop him. Then, after she shifts him in her arms so he won’t fall, she glares into the lens of Itadori’s camera. It is only after she gets that out of her system that she manages an expression she and no one else considers neutral.
There is nothing remotely motherly about the pictures, and in most of them, Maki looks put-out, not protective. But she is beautiful in green and the chignon she had allowed Nobara to spend an hour on for her wedding and in some of the pictures she looks down at the baby with enough worry to seem, if not protective, at least cautious.
Yuuta thinks about those ones too much.
When it comes to matters of the heart, Maki is clumsy, but Yuuta has never let it bother him. There is a sweetness about her attempts at loving him that is all her own, and he loves her all the more for it.
But sometimes, when he sees her trying to be cautious, lecturing Yuuji when she returns the baby not because she’s upset he’d forced him on her but because ‘I could’ve dropped him,’ acknowledging even if not fondly that his little life means something, he thinks about what Maki might grow into with time and love and it makes him ache.
Later, when they have retreated to their suite, he kisses her and thinks of the way she’d looked in the dress that lies pooled at her feet now, holding the baby, and he barely gives himself a moment to feel guilty for wishing he could tell her how beautiful she was.
**
They’ve been married seven months when he chances upon a runaway passenger on the early-morning shinkansen to Niigata.
She looks too young for kindergarten, which he guesses might have something to do with the reasons she’s wandering around a near-empty train car at five in the morning, and she’s carrying a stuffed animal he can’t quite identify from this distance. He wonders where her parents are until he realizes that, at this hour of the morning, they’re probably asleep; it’s easy to piece together that she’d probably realized no one was going to stop her from exploring if they weren’t awake to do it.
It is shortly after he arrives at that conclusion that she runs down the aisle in Yuuta’s direction and stops next to his row.
He feels a little flustered at having been selected – because that is undoubtedly what this is – out of all seven passengers she could have hunted down, and his cheeks are flushed when he waves at her.
For a few seconds she only stares.
“Hi,” she says, once she’s decided he’s worth her greeting.
The stuffed animal, upon further inspection, is a beluga whale. An obscure choice for a toddler, he thinks. “You’re up early,” he tells her.
She nods.
“Are you going to Niigata, too?” he asks.
He notices that she bites her lip when she’s uncertain and clutches the plush whale to her chest like someone is going to snatch it if she isn’t careful. Maybe he’s unusually susceptible, but it’s hard not to be charmed.
She shakes her head. “Gunma.”
“Oh, I see.” He wants to ask why until it occurs to him that a child so young might not even have the vocabulary to explain her reasons. “Are you with your parents?”
“They’re sleeping.”
“I thought so.” Yuuta smiles. “You exploring?”
She brightens. “Mmhm!”
A responsible adult, he thinks, would tell her to go back to her seat and try to go back to sleep, but he doesn’t like thinking about the way her face would fall if he told her that. She’s not in any danger doing this, anyway – he smiles. “Do you like the train?”
She shakes her head. “It’s boring.”
“Yeah, it can be.”
“Too long.” She frowns. “I don’t like naps.”
“Really? I love naps.”
“Why?” the girl asks, almost offended.
“I get tired a lot.” He finds himself smiling without meaning to. “Sleeping is hard for me.”
She studies him, lips pursed, as if she doesn’t know what to make of this.
“I know,” he says, laughing. “That’s pretty weird, isn’t it?”
“Mmhm.”
“You got a name?” he asks, leaning down to get closer to the girl’s eye level.
“Hana.”
“Hana. That’s a nice name.” He inclines his head and isn’t sure whether he’s being playful or polite. “I’m Yuuta.”
“Yuuta-san.”
Yuuta thinks he’s going to melt – he doesn’t even know this little girl with pigtails and a whale plush who he should probably send back to her parents and he thinks he’s going to melt. There’s something so irresistibly sweet about her thoughtless confidence, the way she’s sure that she’s said the right things.
“And what about your whale? Does he have a name?” he asks.
Hana gives him a crabby look. “It’s a she.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” He tries to look properly penitent. “What’s her name?”
“Ruka.”
Ruka like shiroiruka – it’s not very creative, but he smiles. “That’s a nice name, too.”
“She’s my friend.”
Hana looks so deathly-serious, saying that. It makes him ache, that kind of innocence, and he never knows whether the ache is from the sadness of knowing she won’t stay like that or the secret things he always feels when he sees parents and children.
He’s never really given himself permission to think about it, but a part of him can’t help but put himself in the place of those parents.
Children, to Yuuta, are all of the things his life is not. They’re innocent, untainted; they haven’t yet learned how much there is to loathe and fear in this world, and they can be artless and playful and sweet because nothing has yet taught them to believe that those things will be their undoing. They trust the way Yuuta wishes he could and there is something warm and inviting about the thought of protecting and preserving that trust. To Yuuta, children are comfort as much as everybody else says they’re hope.
But he’s never really let himself stop and think that through, because to Maki, children are something entirely less sweet.
She’s never really said much about it, but Yuuta knows what Maki was probably taught about babies growing up: that they were her duty, and all she was good for. The Zenins saw children at once as an obligation and as a tool and he doubts that Maki, who has known both of those roles, would ever choose to return to either. If he let himself think about it, Yuuta thinks that there would be few things he wanted more than a baby of his own. If Maki thought about it she would probably want to cry.
If he let himself wish, he would only hurt her, make her feel as if she alone is not enough and the man she loves expects the same things of her that her family did. So he doesn’t.
Still, he looks at Hana and cannot help but see pieces of Maki in her and wish with all he has that there were more.
**
“You’re thinking too much again.”
Yuuta, half-asleep, turns his head on the pillow to meet Maki’s expectant eyes. He doesn’t say anything, but Maki, wide-awake and leaning on her elbow, looks at him like she’s waiting for something.
“Not really,” he says, rubbing at his eyes just to keep them open. “’m sleepy.”
Maki finally gives up trying to look alert and lies down after that, settling into the pillows and reaching across the mattress to tug Yuuta’s wrist. “You’re distracted.”
“Tired.”
“That doesn’t mean you aren’t distracted.”
“Maki-chan,” he whines. “I wanna sleep.”
“Something’s bothering you, Yuuta.”
He wishes he could sink into his pillow far enough to drown because of course she knows. Maki always seems to know what he wishes she would miss.
“I don’t really wanna talk about it,” he says.
Doubt flickers across Maki’s face, but it doesn’t lose its determined set. “Yuuta.”
“You wouldn’t like it.”
“I don’t care, Yuuta. Something’s bugging you.” Tug, tug. “Can you tell me what it is?”
His palms are starting to feel clammy. “Maki-chan-“
“It can’t possibly be that bad.” Her eyes are soft, a rare occurrence, and she reaches across and caresses his cheek so tenderly he almost wants to come out with it. “Did something happen in Niigata?”
“N-no.”
“Oh. Good.”
“You don’t need to worry about me,” he says, letting his eyes flutter closed like he’s wanted to since she started talking. “I’m okay.”
“Yuu-ta.”
He knows perfectly well that Maki isn’t going to let up.
Caring for others has never been one of Maki’s strengths, nor one she was interested in cultivating, but she knows how to look after Yuuta. They care for each other and Maki knows how to give him the things he needs. She knows when he needs to be held, knows when her touch would help him recharge, knows what consolation he needs when he comes home dragging his feet. If given the chance, she knows he’ll bottle things up when he really needs someone to hear them; she knows to ask until he can’t hold out any longer. And Yuuta knows that she knows those things. She had been the one to press her palm to his chest after dinner when she had noticed he was low and ask him what he needed. He knows she won’t back down.
But he wishes he would, because the last thing in the world that he wants is to taint the heady sweetness of the last moments before he drifts off in Maki’s arms with the truth.
“I really don’t think saying it is going to help,” he tells her wearily.
“You always say that.”
“I mean it more than usual.”
She can deduce that this wasn’t a field accident, then. He never holds out this stubbornly when that’s all there was to it – she’s seen as many things on the job that she wishes she could forget as he has, and he usually shares them with a little prodding. It’s not about a friend or his family, or else he’d probably have offered it up on his own. And really, the only conclusion she has left to come to is that it’s about her.
He's probably trying to protect her from his own low opinion.
“I’m not that sensitive, Yuuta,” she sighs. “If you have a problem with something I did-“
His eyes widen in surprise that quickly turns to worry. “No! It’s...it’s not that at all.”
She inches towards his side of the bed until she’s close enough to rest on the opposite side of his pillow. From this distance, she knows, her eye contact is always a critical hit.
“Then what,” she says, brushing her thumb across his cheek, “are you not telling me?”
“I just...met somebody on the train this morning and I feel weird about it.” He pauses, realizes how that sounds, and hastily adds, “a kid. It’s not...it isn’t like that. That’s not, uh, not why I didn’t want to talk about it.”
He assumed she would assume he was talking about a woman, Maki realizes. It’s almost sweet how frantic he is to reassure her when, really, there’s no need to – it’s never really occurred to Maki that he might have eyes for anyone else. He’s too much of an open book for that. But the real answer is a little more interesting.
“Did something happen to this kid?” she asks.
“No.”
“Oh. Okay, good.”
“She was just...I dunno. Maybe three or four, and her parents were asleep, so she just kinda started wandering around and, um, she picked me, I guess.” He tries not to smile. “So we, uh, we talked a little. She had this stuffed whale.”
Oh.
He’s trying so hard to keep his explanations superficial, but Maki knows exactly what he isn’t saying. He is, again, too much of an open book; everything he wants to keep from her is written on his face.
He’d gotten attached, the way he had to Nobara’s little boy, and the Gojo children, and all of the babies she’s seen him watching in the street when he thinks she isn’t paying attention, and it had made him yearn. It always does. He thinks it’s a closely-kept secret, but he loves children, and she doubts he would be so unwilling to express that if he didn’t want his own.
She almost wishes she could tell him what she’s realized if only so he could stop thinking he has to go to such great lengths to protect her from what she already knows.
He goes on about the little girl on the train, and she pretends, for his benefit, to believe him. He isn’t saying any of the things that would bring him relief and it’s easiest to make him think she doesn’t know that, but a nagging sense of guilt won’t leave her when he finishes a flimsy explanation that only puts a bandage over his odd behavior.
She should tell him, she knows. She should say she knows he wants children of his own and let him admit it and take the weight off his chest. They are supposed to be the first to have each other’s backs, and this is how she needs to have his. But if she did that, she would need a ready answer – anything else would merely add to the pile. And she can’t do that.
For most of her life, Maki could not have thought of a husband and children without wanting to be sick. To give in would have been to accept defeat and she had thought things were supposed to stay that way. Yuuta had begun to chip away at her in her later teens, but she had stayed firmly resolved – no marriage, no children, no white picket fence. No more Zenins, no domestic subjugation or ties to hold her down. It had been that way for years and it had not been an easy adjustment when, at twenty-one, she had looked at Yuuta and realized with a pang that she didn’t know what she was going to do if she ever had to be without him.
Marriage had started to look like a home and not a cage not long after that, but family had never followed.
There is a part of her that still stubbornly insists that to entertain the thought of a family with Yuuta would be treason – against Mai, against her younger self. But another notices things, knows that she has a husband who longs for a baby, starts to wonder.
There is no scenario in which she can confidently say she wants what he does, but she can no longer truthfully say that she’s completely set against the thought of it, either. She doesn’t want to think about it, process it, make progress in making her final decision – if she’s asked and has to answer, she will have to. It is selfish and perhaps cowardly to force him to keep his secret so she can keep hers, but she can’t bring herself to admit what she knows.
“Yuuta-kun,” she murmurs, wrapping herself around him and caressing the ridges of his spine until his muscles go slack beneath her fingers, “it’s okay.”
It really isn’t, but neither of them has any intention of showing their hand.
**
It’s sort of become a tradition, New Year’s together.
The Okkotsus have no one to go back to, and those of their old classmates who do usually don’t want to. Gojo, who would do anything to avoid having to host his clan for the holiday, knows and takes advantage of this. They have a good thing going.
At least, Yuuta thinks they do.
He thinks they do until he kneels down to greet the youngest of the Gojo children, and his face pales.
“You okay, buddy?” Yuuta asks, trying to keep his tone genial because he knows Kazuhiro well enough to know that this reaction is unusual. Sometimes he’s shy, and others it seems like he’d just rather not engage, but that has always seemed more like annoyance than fear.
Whatever the reason, Kazuhiro doesn’t answer.
“Hiro-kun,” he tries again, softly, “do you remember me?”
He’s silent and still for another moment, wide-eyed, until finally he meets Yuuta’s eyes and bolts.
Yuuta knows better than to go after him.
**
Yuuta seems anxious when Maki finds him again. She nudges his arm with her elbow to see if it’ll help him loosen up, but that gesture is fifty-fifty – sometimes it’ll help and other’s it’ll wind him up even more tightly. She takes the gamble this time.
“I’m okay,” he says, interrupting a tense exchange with Megumi to smile weakly at her.
No, he’s not. “Did something happen?”
“He tried to talk to Kazuhiro and apparently he freaked out,” Megumi tells her. “We don’t know why.”
Oh. So that’s all, then.
“Isn’t he kinda shy?” Maki asks. “I’d think that was pretty typical.”
“He is, but I’ve never seen him just...run off,” Yuuta frets. “He looked so scared.”
Fear is an odd reaction to someone he knows as well as all of the Gojo children know Yuuta, but Maki can’t say she has any clue what might’ve prompted it. Unsure what else to do, she pats Yuuta’s back. “You probably didn’t really do anything wrong,” she says.
“Probably not,” Megumi agrees. “He’s...sensitive.”
“Sensitive to what, though?”
Megumi sighs, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Pretty much everything.”
That tells them nothing, and none of them has anything to say to it, so they stand in stiff silence for the approximately twenty seconds it takes Maki to mutter, “wait.”
“Hm?” Yuuta asks.
“I wanna test something,” she says. “Where’d he go?”
“Who, Hiro?” Megumi asks.
“Yeah.”
“Back guest room. Why?”
“I think I might know what happened.”
**
There is an outdated western-style guest room in the back corner of the Gojos’ house. No one ever goes back there; Maki would probably never have seen it if she and Yuuta weren’t always sent there on the rare occasions they had to stay over. As a hiding place, it makes sense.
It doesn’t look like he’s hiding, though.
She had expected to find him hiding in a corner by himself, but she supposes when she opens the door that she should’ve known parents even a fraction more decent than her own wouldn’t have let their frightened son run off alone. He’s curled up in his mother’s lap beneath a blanket and he doesn’t even react when she enters.
Oh.
“Yuuta told me what happened,” she says, nudging the door open an inch further to step through. “I, uh. Wanted to check on something.”
Utahime looks suspicious. “Check on something.”
“I, uh. Yeah.”
She eyes her warily, waiting for an explanation. Probably, Maki thinks, anticipating that her son will react the same way to Maki that he did to Yuuta. Probably trying to protect him from another shock. She doesn’t know why that sort of stings.
“Megumi said he’s sensitive,” she says. “I thought...I don’t know. Maybe that had something to do with cursed energy.”
And you don’t have any. Utahime doesn’t voice the obvious.
“I mean, I...I’ve heard that a lot of people don’t like how Yuuta’s cursed energy feels, so...I...”
“Wanted to see if he’d react to you.” Utahime almost smiles. “That was smart.”
Utahime would know. She probably does, actually, that the only reason Maki is here is so she can give Yuuta an answer and put his mind at ease. If the only problem was his cursed energy, she doubts he’ll feel so guilty. And Utahime, who is the kind of woman who had never needed time to adjust to the idea of being a wife, would know why she wanted to be able to do that for him.
Tentatively, with that invitation, Maki sits at the edge of the bed, a foot or so away, and when Kazuhiro notices the mattress moving and turns to see why, he looks at her so blankly that it is hard to imagine him being frightened enough to bolt from the room.
“Hi,” she says, unsure how else to start.
He doesn’t answer, but his blank expression doesn’t change, either.
“Say hi back, Hiro-kun,” Utahime says gently, and he raises his hand in a clumsy approximation of a wave.
“Are you, uh. Are you okay?”
He nods.
“Oh, uh. Good.” She clears her throat. “I, uh...my...Yuuta-san is worried about you.”
Kazuhiro blinks at her as if she is speaking a language he’s never even heard of, then says, “why?”
It is more of a relief than Maki wants to admit to be answered at all. “He scared you.”
“Oh.”
If only soft and gentle things came more easily to Maki. She worries her efforts, however well-meaning, are probably not putting Kazuhiro at ease.
“I, um.” She swallows hard. “Do you not like Yuuta-san?”
He shakes his head.
“Is that a yes or a no?”
He blinks at her again. He’s got the Gojo eyes – big and deerlike, with long white lashes – but in Utahime’s brown, and there’s something a little unsettling about the way they’re scared and probing all at once.
Kazuhiro is sort of a strange little boy, but that’s not news to anybody.
“Do you like Yuuta-san?”
He nods. Finally.
“Did he do something that scared you?”
Kazuhiro doesn’t answer, which Maki takes to mean he doesn’t know how to say what he wants to. She had thought that might be the case, so she tries another question: “do I scare you?”
Blink, blink. That seems to be this child’s default response to almost everything.
“No,” he finally says.
“Why not?”
He shrugs. Great.
**
Maki’s picked up a shadow by the next time Yuuta sees her. He’s small and pale and a little skittish, but he sticks close to Maki, and sometimes when he’s frightened he wraps his arms around her leg and she doesn’t so much as acknowledge him, which – paradoxically – is exactly what he probably wants. He’d ordinarily be surprised that it wasn’t bothering her to have him tagging along, but she looks up at him and smiles, and he knows exactly why it isn’t.
Maki is an island of dead-silence in a sea of people whose cursed energy rings loud and overwhelming in his little ears, and he stays close by her.
She has no particular fondness for children, or skill in dealing with them, but she had tried to piece together what it was about Yuuta that bothered Kazuhiro for no other reason than knowing it hurt Yuuta to think he’d scared a toddler without knowing why. She probably doesn’t like the way he’s following her around, but she’s taking it as gracefully as she ever takes anything.
And here’s no two ways about the fact that she makes a three-year-old feel safer than anybody else in this room.
He tries to look like nothing has happened, but he can’t get the smile off his face. He can’t stop thinking about, if a distant nephew they rarely visit already trusts Maki so much, how much more she would be loved by a child of her own, and-
It’s like a sunburst behind Yuuta’s ribcage, the warmth that wraps itself around him, because finally it seems possible and acceptable and even reasonable to admit it to himself – that he wants to be a father. That he wants to have a baby if only because he loves the idea of creating a person who loves his Maki as much as he does.
It is with Maki’s help, later in the night, that Kazuhiro bids good-night to Yuuta before his parents take him back to the bedroom he shares with his sister for sleep, and with Maki’s hand securely on his shoulder he barely looks like he wants to bolt.
He does not know if he has ever loved her more.
(Maki likes to tell them that he is far too polite in bed but this time, when they are home and alone again, he kisses her with an insistence that makes her eyes widen before they close and he leaves no room for those complaints.
He wonders if she would be angry with him if she knew that he kissed her the way he did because he was thinking of making a baby with her.)
**
It is another year and a half before Yuuta admits it.
It’s a practical necessity by then. It is growing harder to pretend, and even though there’s little to do most of the time, they’re working; these kinds of barriers can’t stay up. And besides, there is nothing to do in midwinter in Hokkaido except think and talk and find it impossible to ignore things.
She knows now, and she is not angry.
She might decide anything – she’s given him neither a firm ‘yes’ nor an absolute ‘no.’ It is so much more than the outrage he’d been expecting that it is nothing but a relief, but still, he finds himself watching her and wondering.
He’s felt more guilt than he has known what to do with these past two years, wondering it if is right to feel this way without Maki’s permission about something that involves her so directly. He’s felt, constantly, that he’s hurting her somehow by wanting a child, as if the desire to add to their little family means he thinks she’s not enough. He’s spent dozens of sleepless nights awake wondering if he’s no better than the family she exterminated for wanting this with her when he had been so sure that she would loathe the idea.
But she listens.
She’s reluctant and he’s sure she’s scared, but she listens to him. She doesn’t seem outraged, doesn’t accuse him of anything, doesn’t shut him down. The next few days she looks deep in thought. And even if she never wants a child, Yuuta thinks he could satisfy himself with the simple knowledge that Maki had known what he wanted and hadn’t run from him.
It tells him, if nothing else, that the issue is not and has never been that Maki is not enough.
If Maki weren’t enough, there would have been no reason to hide for so long or pretend it was nothing when she asked what was bothering him. He would not have loved the thought of a little person who loved Maki as much as he did if he had wanted more than what she could offer him. No – it isn’t that he is greedy or twisted or that the wife he loves so dearly is not enough for him.
He simply loves the thought of giving the fact of their love feet to roam the earth.
He has a feeling that he will have his answer soon, but the frantic, nervous thud of his heart slows, and he doesn’t feel anxious when he thinks about receiving it. Her answer can be what it wants. He would mourn a ‘no,’ maybe, but mourning is not permanent. He thinks it’s enough for her to know.
Admitting how badly he wishes for a baby is, in the end, a way of professing his love that Yuuta has never had the courage to attempt, and so long as it is out in the world and she knows and she still loves him in return, he can take her answer in whatever form it comes.
Maki has always been enough. And so long as she knows just how overwhelmingly enough she is, he can rest.