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It’s Gojo who mentions it first.
Later, Maki will spend more time than she needs to dwelling on that fact—that she heard it from Gojo first. It should have been him. She was supposed to hear it from him.
But she doesn’t, and the call that summons her to the hospital is Gojo’s, and there’s something so wrong about that. He could have waited, let her hear it from Yuuta when he woke up and no one else. Because she should’ve. And because she shouldn’t have had to pretend for Gojo, of all people, that this was random, and unpreventable, and not her own fault.
She had told him to stay home. Taken his temperature, even, rolled her eyes when he had winced at the force with which she jabbed the thermometer under his tongue. She’d told him he had no business going into the field in a state like this, and he hadn’t listened, and if she could’ve made him…
“He’s fine,” Gojo says. His voice is thin, as if his throat’s shot – like he’s been shouting. Maki’s red face stings at the thought. “I mean. Will be.”
Gojo’s blindfold, she notes, is pulled lower over his eyes than usual.
“Sure,” Maki says gruffly. “He always is.”
“I don’t know what happened.”
Maki does, but she swallows hard and pretends that she has nothing to say to that. “Sure.”
“I just don’t get it,” he mutters. Maki’s lack of an answer, as usual, doesn’t interrupt the flow of his monologue much – because, really, that’s all Gojo ever does when he talks. At least, to Maki. “He should’ve been fine.”
“Well, obviously, he wasn’t.”
Gojo turns his head, but she can’t really tell from his blindfold if he’s looking at her or not. “Maki-“
“Why are you here?” she asks, desperate to stop him before he says something she can’t control her reaction to.
“I got his distress call.”
Oh.
Maki wants to lash out at him, but she can’t really say anything to that. He probably brought Yuuta here. Might’ve been the only reason he didn’t bleed out on the jetway back at the airport. She thinks about that and wants to put her hand to her mouth.
She doesn’t, though – she can’t afford to show how her stomach is turning on her face.
“Thanks,” she says, small and frail and prickly. “I guess.”
“I just don’t get it.”
Maki does.
Yuuta always gets sick in springtime. Then he always pretends that he isn’t, brushes her off when she tells him he has no business dragging himself off on missions like this, and he tells her that too many people are counting on him for him to think about his allergies, and she tells him that allergies are a sorry explanation for a fever this high, and every single springtime, it’s the same.
Every single springtime since their second year of high school. Seven, now. Back then she had been able to brush it off as teenage stupidity. Now, she has to think about waking up with his feverish skin pressed to hers every time she remembers how he hadn’t listened.
Yuuta can barely even get out of bed when he’s this sick. It’s almost amazing he even managed a distress call this time.
“He’s an idiot,” she says under her breath.
Gojo looks at her and he has to know that she knows more than she’s telling him, but he doesn’t ask. For once in her life, Maki is grateful to him.
“They said he’ll be fine,” he says. “Once the drugs and stuff wear off.”
Maki wants to go somewhere with nobody and scream. Instead, she nods, silent.
He was supposed to call in sick.
**
“Okkotsu-san told us that he doesn’t want visitors.”
Maki stands in front of the cracked-open door in shock for a moment. The nurse, whose round face does not look nearly sorry enough for the words that are coming out of her mouth, gives Maki a smile that makes her stomach turn.
“That’s ridiculous,” she snaps. “He’s my husband.”
“Well, I’m sure-“
The nurse trails off, turning her head when somebody addresses her from back inside the room, and she turns back with a conciliatory smile. “Maybe he’ll be feeling up to visitors later,” she says.
Maki wants to rip the door off its hinges, and she almost does. It’s ridiculous, denying her entrance to his room when she’s seen him in every sorry state imaginable. This nurse who has never had to nurse him through a stomach crisis because he ate dairy and who has never had to chase him down with a surgical mask because otherwise the pollen will render him useless by ten in the morning can’t possibly have the right to tell her that she can’t.
“Hey,” Gojo says behind her, setting his hand on her shoulder. He doesn’t flinch when she turns like she’s waiting to strike. “He just woke up.”
Maki hates that he probably sees how frightened her eyes are when he says those words.
“I can see him,” she says. “I need to see him.”
“Later, Maki.”
She lowers her eyes before they can fill with tears and storms off down the hall. Gets four steps deep, pulls out her phone, stops – tell them to let me in, she texts Yuuta, even though, who knows, maybe his hands are hurt, maybe he can’t text, maybe he’s got a concussion and they won’t let him have his phone. On any other day, the curse he’d been sent to exorcise would have been nothing to him, but today, she has no idea what it did to him, and maybe…
He's fine, she tells herself, furiously typing, and pretends that after all of this she still thinks he’s invincible.
**
Maki was supposed to be out in the sticks today. People have been disappearing around an abandoned amusement park up in the mountains, or something like that. But it’s been hours now, and she’s still here.
She doesn’t like waiting rooms very much.
The round-faced nurse had said she’d come and get Maki when Yuuta was ready for visitors, but she doesn’t really believe that. Somewhere between flipping mindlessly through old Jump issues and wanting to rip all of her hair out, she’s lost what little faith she had in that promise.
It makes her steam, because there’s no reason she couldn’t just barge in and insist, but the order had come from Yuuta. Normally, she’d ignore that, because when it comes to her husband, the only thing she is certain of is that he has no idea what’s good for him. But this…
She can’t think of a single reason he be in a civilian hospital when Gojo could have as easily taken him to Shoko, or that would turn her away from his room. And even though she thinks she’s going to go crazy trying to figure out why, she can’t leave until she does.
Maybe Gojo had wanted them to run tests. (No, that’s stupid. What tests?)
You’re such an idiot, she types. Send.
Maybe it’s because he’s sick. Shoko’s useless against allergies. (But that’s not why he was in danger, so…)
Next time you better listen, she types. Send.
Maybe Shoko is out today. Finally took a day off. (No, Shoko is never out.)
And what’s with this ‘no visitors’ stuff? She huffs as if he’ll hear it on the other end. Send.
Maybe she should be nicer. This is an idea that she quickly discards – she’ll be nice when he learns not to risk his life so uselessly now that he has people who need him.
Idiot, she types again. Do you even think?
That’s the thing about Yuuta – that he doesn’t. That no amount of love ever makes him hesitate before he puts himself in danger. That he’s gotten used to the way everyone thinks that nothing can touch him, and that sometimes he goes one step too far and tests that theory and it fails.
Maki’s eyes sting, but she won’t let herself cry. It isn’t worth it. They’re saying he’s fine.
(But why, if he is, won’t he let her in?)
**
She’s tired of being angry with her husband and she turns her anger to the rest of the world.
He had woken up crabby this morning, like he didn’t want to get up. He’d been feverish and pale and looked wobbly when he stood to go brush his teeth, then came back to bed and curled up around her – she hates when he does that, usually, except that today she’d welcomed it, because she had thought it meant he was going to stay. He had wanted to; she knows that. He’s not good at hiding those kinds of things.
But he is too used to the weight of the world to set it down at the door when he knows that he needs to stay home, and she hates it for that.
There are a dozen sorcerers who could’ve taken that mission in Yuuta’s place and come out unscathed. There had been no danger there that only he could face, but he’s used to ultimatums – if not him, then no one. He’s used to being the only one. Even when he’s sick, apparently. Even when he shouldn’t even be out of bed.
Maybe it’s not Yuuta’s fault. Maybe it’s not that he’s an idiot. Maybe it is, but even so, it’s someone else’s fault, too.
Maki wraps her hand around her phone and squeezes it until she thinks it’ll shatter, and when it hasn’t, she opens it again.
Let me in, she types.
This time, his read receipt appears beneath the message.
**
“What? Is there something wrong with him?”
“Ma’am,” the doctor sighs, “he wouldn’t be here if there weren’t.”
“But-“
“He’s been insistent about no visitors.”
“But why?”
“Not our place to ask.”
“Are you kidding me?”
The doctor’s expression is so blank that she almost wants to see if a fist to the face would rearrange it into something more interesting. Instead, she shoves him aside and forces a crack open in the door.
“Hey, idiot,” she says, cold enough that she’ll regret it later, “when were you planning on letting me in?”
**
“I’m sorry, Maki-chan.”
She stops.
Maki hadn’t been thinking when she forced her way in about how he would look or sound, but his voice is thin, and there are wires in his arms, and when she really looks, he looks more bandage than skin. She shuts the door behind her and makes sure it latches so she can press her back against it for support.
He doesn’t look like her Yuuta is supposed to look.
I’m so sorry, he texts her, and she knows, and it makes her stomach knot.
Her fingers are shaking a little when she pulls up her list of frequently-called contacts. He picks up on the second ring.
“You have some nerve,” she says shakily, “making them do that.”
“Sorry.”
He says nothing but that. Probably, she thinks, he knew his voice would wrap around her ribcage like a choking vine if he kept talking.
“You’re sick,” she says, choked. “Why would you even go?”
“I already said I’m sorry.”
“And did you really think saying I couldn’t come in was gonna keep me out?”
“Well, it did, didn’t it?”
She looks down at her phone and wants to smash it.
“You shoulda gone to Shoko,” she mutters.
“Gojo said she was busy.”
“You let him in, but not me?”
“He’s not my girl,” he says. “Don’t care if he sees me all banged-up.”
“That was your reasoning?”
“Maki…”
She wants to throw her phone again, and not least because he’s sort of right. He knows how few things in this world could ever really get to Maki, knows that seeing him at death’s door would be one of him – in his foolish way, he thinks he’s protecting her. Thinks he has some kind of duty to shield her from the consequences of the stupid things he does.
She wants to throw her phone at him, she decides. Maybe it would break something in her to have seen him how he was before Gojo brought him in, but that’s her duty – one she signed up for. In all of the other ways she can be, she is no stranger to his worst.
“I’m coming in.”
“Don’t.”
“I don’t care what you want, or what you think is good for me.” She clenches her fist by her side. “You don’t get to do these things and then tell me I can’t see you.”
“I just don’t want-“
“Do you think I give a damn what you want right now? You could’ve died!”
**
“You’re so stupid.”
Maki thinks this must be the fourth time today that she’s said those words verbatim, but she doesn’t care anymore.
“Maybe a little.”
Yuuta smiles, barely, then winces – she notices his jaw is bruised. He lifts his right arm, the one without an IV drip, and she knows that the round-faced nurse is watching, but she ducks under it. She lays her head on his chest not knowing if she even can.
“A lot,” she says crossly, pressing her ear to the spot where his heartbeat is easiest to feel.
“I’m okay,” he says quietly. “It looks worse than it is.”
“You’re still sick.”
“Yeah, but-“
“And you look like death warmed up,” she mumbles. “Don’t even start with me.”
“I told you that you wouldn’t want to see.”
“Yuuta…”
He sighs. She doesn’t really need to finish that sentence.
“It was my stomach,” he says weakly. “Mostly.”
No wonder he couldn’t heal himself. Maki’s chest feels like it’s been stuffed too full with something cold.
“This probably hurts, doesn’t it.”
“Nah.”
He’s lying and she knows it. “Are you gonna listen the next time I tell you to stay home?”
He doesn’t say anything, which is probably a ‘no.’
“You better.”
“Okay.”
She still doesn’t even know what happened to him, at least not in any detail, and she doesn’t think she wants to ask. Not now, at least. Not when she can barely look at him without wanting to cry, because whatever it was, it’s not the kind of thing that’s supposed to happen to Okkotsu Yuuta.
But she will, she knows. She’ll be the one who helps him bandage himself, and insists he has to use alcohol even when it stings because you’re already sick enough without getting infected. She’s always the one, in the end, who does those things, and he for her. They’ve chosen each other – they don’t have the privilege of looking away when it hurts to look.
She wishes he would learn that it’s much more stupid than noble to try to relieve her of that duty when he’s at his worst.
“You can’t do this stuff to me,” she says.
She knows that he hears the unspoken I love you in those words.
She can only hope he’ll heed it.