Work Text:
She’s wearing yellow today.
Utahime doesn’t much like bright colors, rarely wears anything but neutrals unless it’s red, so the shirt is a surprise. The tiny floral pattern is faded wherever the fabric stretches to fit her, and he observes it with fascination that a new shirt definitely doesn’t warrant. She is eating her breakfast standing up at the counter but that isn’t nearly as interesting as the fact of her wearing yellow.
“What are you looking at?”
“Nothin’.”
She has an uncanny way of feeling his eyes on the back of her head and he knew she would probably notice. It’s still amusing that it took so little time for her to catch on.
“Mmhm,” she says, stabbing her fork a little too vengefully into her omelette. “Quit staring, it’s creepy.”
His cheeks heat. “I’m not staring.”
“Ogling,” she offers.
“That’s mean, Utahime, I was just looking at your shirt.”
“Ogling.”
“Why’d you get a yellow shirt?”
She raises her eyebrows. “Why does it matter?”
“You don’t wear yellow.”
She pouts out her lower lip. “I love yellow.”
“Seriously? That’s news to me.”
“You should know that,” she says crabbily.
“The only real color you ever wear is red!”
Well. She does have one particularly beloved set of lavender lingerie that haunts him in his dreams, but if he brings that up right now, she’s probably going to throw her fork at him. He’d rather not wind up with three tine-shaped puncture holes in his cheek. He’ll take this instead, Utahime stabbing at her food moodily instead of trying to kill him with a utensil.
“I bought it because your giant kid outgrew all of my old ones.”
“She’s a perfectly normal size, Hime, stop being mean.”
“You try lugging her around everywhere and come back and tell me that.”
She always does this, picking fights she doesn’t have the will or the energy to finish. It’s almost a display of affection by now, one he would miss sorely if she stopped, and it makes it easier for her to talk about things that stick in her throat. He knows it has not been easy for her to express what she’s been feeling lately, knowing that he will never truly understand, not wanting to make herself more vulnerable than she already is. He knows, too, that he’s supposed to read the unspoken into her barbs.
That outgrowing her clothing makes things more real than she has had to believe. That being looked at right now makes her shy. That the vastness of what she feels for this baby is so frightening that she wishes the whole world would pretend it hadn’t noticed she was having one until she figures out how to put it into safe, easy words. He knows those things. She’s never had to say them. But he’s not going to look away.
She wants that more than anything, but he won’t. He could give her anything but that. He can keep himself quiet, but he can’t pretend that nothing has changed when everything has, and even a new shirt looks stretched-out already, and a glimpse of her silhouette in profile makes his chest feel tight. It’s a shame, really, that she’s become so shy, because he would like very much to be obnoxious, and make a ruckus about her carrying his child, but the only thing she’s asked of him in all this time is that he let her have her privacy.
It should be simple to grant that wish, but it is so difficult.
“Satoru.”
She looks not at him but at her abdomen, watching her open palm smooth down her shirt even though it already fits her like a second skin. Her cheeks are red, maybe or maybe not because she’s embarrassed; there is so much affection built up in him, anywhere inside him where there is room, that it feels like something will rupture.
“Hime?”
“What is it about the shirt?”
The same thing that it is about anything. The same reason it pleases him to see a ring on her finger or hear him call him by his first name when she talks to her friends on the phone, even if she spits it in annoyance. Nothing more or less than the very same reason she does anything to him at all.
“You just never wear yellow,” he says dumbly, because Gojo Satoru is a great many things, but eloquent under pressure has never been one of them.
So many things, he could say, the way you walk and how you talk to her when you think I can’t hear you and cry when you watch movies that you wouldn’t have cried over six months ago, but those things feel too big to release into the world carelessly. Maybe Utahime isn’t the only one whom her pregnancy has made shy.
“Oh, I…I see.”
“It looks good on you.”
She smiles at him, bare of any pretense, and replies, “it really doesn’t.”
“What do you mean? Of course it does.”
“I’m a Winter,” she says. “Yellow doesn’t go with my skin tone.”
“So what?” Utahime’s color theory lectures have stuck only so far as making him remember what the theory is; belief that it means anything, that there are colors she cannot wear, is further off. “It looks nice.”
“I bought it because I thought I might’ve been wrong, but I wasn’t.” She frowns, poking her belly with her pointer finger. “Not my color.”
“You’re having my baby and you think I notice if the color goes with your skin tone?”
Then, of course, even the tips of his ears begin to feel flushed, because those are the kinds of things that Utahime has been too shy to hear lately, and even though it makes him half-crazy that he has to hold his tongue so often around a woman who used to be so brazen, he does his best anyway.
“I guess you’re right,” she says, laughing shakily. “It’s not exactly the most…noticeable part of me right now.”
“Are you embarrassed?”
“What? Of course not.”
“I just…never mind.” It itches at his brain, he has to ask: “are you, I don’t know…ashamed?”
Her eyes flash. “Why would I be?”
Satoru raises his hands in surrender. “Just a question. I just…wondered.”
“But why?”
“I mean, you’re not usually…I dunno…shy.”
“I’m not shy, I just…don’t know how to talk about it.”
You don’t have to, he could tell her, I know you better than that, but what he says instead is “oh.”
“I just don’t love all the staring and lurking and-“
“I don’t lurk!”
“Lurking and ogling.”
“And I also don’t ogle!”
“You do and it makes me want to hibernate.”
“…hibernate?”
“Like a bear or something.” Her cheeks puff out in indignation and he could eat them, he really could. “Go find a nice little cave and hide out until I have this baby and no one wants to look at me anymore.”
“Mm, that would never work,” he says gravely. “I’m too tall to spend a month and a half scrunched up in a cave.”
“You wouldn’t be invited anyway.”
“You’re a cruel woman, you know that? First I can’t even look at you, and now I’m uninvited from hibernation?”
“Yes,” she says sweetly. “The baby said you talk too much.”
“Right. The baby did.”
“Mmhm.”
You should be so proud, he could tell her, you should be as proud of yourself as I am, you don’t know how much I love you like this, you don’t know how much everyone should love you like this, and you don’t realize how lucky your baby is, and you think you’re doing everything wrong but I can’t stop looking at you, but that, too, is too much to let out into the world. Once more, he doesn’t do his talking in words.
She’s done with her omelette now, and when she finishes setting her plate down in the sink, he steps forward to block her path away from the counter. Both hands settle on either side of a ninety-degree corner where one panel meets another, and she fits comfortably in the space he leaves.
“Kabedon?” she asks, unimpressed. “Really?”
“It has to be a wall for it to be kabedon.” With one hand he lifts her chin, and he relishes the way her nose scrunches and her lips purse with displeasure that can’t possibly be sincere. “Not kabedon.”
“The principle is the same.” She gives him a very weary look after he squeezes her cheeks between his fingers. “Kabedon.”
“Utahime.”
Again, that long-suffering look. She loves to act as if she can barely stand to be in the same room as him, squash down the frightening scope of her feelings beneath annoyance, and he loves that look all the more for knowing that it actually means I love you, and that scares me.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry.” He cradles her chin in his fingers, leans forward to press his lips to the tip of her nose. “But I’m never going to stop looking.”