Chapter Text
Pity makes a bad master.
Utahime doesn’t hear the doorbell at first over the sound of running water. And when she does, her face is still wet, her skin red from the astringent cleanser, and there is still curse ectoplasm beneath her fingernails; she doesn’t want to get it.
It rings a third time and she frowns. She tries not to do that – fast-track to wrinkles, she always tells herself – but she’s annoyed. Everything aches after the night she’s had, and on nights like this, skincare is sacred. Wet skin and the same-as-ever rotation of products in frosted-glass bottles drown out the heartbeat that still pounds in her ears hours later.
She had only been on standby – a snub – but even that had been enough to shake her. So she wills the person at her door to go away.
On the fourth ring, she stands before she even dries her face. Pity makes a bad master.
“Senpai.”
She grips the doorknob like a weapon. Gojo is not supposed to be in Kyoto right now, is never supposed to be here at this hour. Isn’t supposed to know where she lives. Shouldn’t look so defeated when he’s won. Shouldn’t address her properly and not by her name or some teasing diminutive she doesn’t like. She should close the door.
She doesn’t. Pity is a bad master.
“Why are you here, Gojo?”
He pulls down his blindfold. His smile and his eyes and the droop of his whole face are rueful. It looks as if he’s lost all his elasticity, like he can’t snap back anymore.
“I killed him,” he says, a little wild-eyed, almost swaying on his feet. “I killed him, Senpai.”
Somewhere in that dangerous half-feral look she sees a fragility that makes her ache. She’s always warned herself against that kind of tenderness – it is dangerous, she cannot afford to be the kind of woman who wants to hold wounded men in her arms until they knit themselves back together and she does not want to be – but it is not an obedient subordinate. It unfurls. Pity is the worst of masters.
She opens the door wider and warns him, flat-toned, to duck so he won’t hit his head on the low doorframe when he follows her through.
“I’m sorry,” she says once he enters, flat and businesslike. “You can sit if you want.”
A part of her that may be rational or may just be heartless wants to leave him here and finish with her face, but it wouldn’t feel right. She only excuses herself long enough to duck into the kitchen and dry her face with a clean hand towel.
She sits across from him at the kotatsu. A silence that feels like a bed of needles separates them.
“Why me, Gojo?”
He doesn’t look like he knows, but he won’t say that. She can read him, though. She’s always been better than most at knowing how much of Gojo is what it seems and which parts are a little boy who never got the answers he needed to grow up.
She wishes she didn’t see it – really, she does – but he looks at her like he’s desperate for an answer that for some reason he thinks she has. And she knows she doesn’t. There’s nothing at all in her life to make him think that she does. But the last person he loved with any semblance of certainty is dead by his own hand, and a traitorous part of her is glad he came to her if only because she knows he has no one else.
It should be him who makes the wrong decisions tonight, but she is the one who crosses over to the kotatsu and hesitantly puts her arms around his shoulders.
Probably, no one does these things for him. Utahime shouldn’t, either. It’s not proper, and she doesn’t really want to. She doesn’t even like Gojo. Certainly not in any kind of way that would inspire a display like this. He isn’t her job. He’s a grown man and he can fend for himself. She is tired of being told that men like him with nowhere else to go are her job. But this sadness is such a foreign thing to a man as untouchable as Gojo Satoru that she can’t stop herself.
Pity is a bad master. It overtakes her, makes her want to do things that she will realize hours later she never wanted to do at all.
“Gojo,” she murmurs, “I’m sorry.”
“You weren’t there.”
“No,” she says. Her nose finds the crook of his neck and she wants to recoil at the smell of unwashed sweat from a hard day’s work, but she doesn’t. “They didn’t want me to be.”
She had been angry earlier – that they’d sent her students into battle and kept her on standby – and she will be again later. But Utahime doesn’t really want to be angry now. She is snubbed so often that she’ll never run out of chances to stew in it. She will never get another chance to speak to Gojo on a night where she might get through to him.
His stiff arm comes up to circle her waist. It awes her a little how broad it feels.
“I’m sorry,” she says again. “I’m sorry.”
A sad, ironic chuckle ripples through her chest by way of his. “For what?”
She says nothing, feels very stupid for having thought this was a good idea. As if it is the natural order of the world for it to fall to her to comfort Gojo Satoru for doing his damned job. As if she even wants to.
(A lie: something deeper than reason says she wants to hold him until something in him snaps loose and he cries in her arms like he needs to.
Pity is a cruel master that way.)
Briefly, she thinks he must be using her, and she must be a glutton for punishment or else the feeling of being useful if she’s letting him, but she could have left the door locked. She chose this. She tells herself that, and that she is not a traitor to the strength she has to insist she possesses just because, when Gojo takes her slight body in his arms and clings to her, she allows him.
She doesn’t know what he must want to hear, so she says, again, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t say that.”
“What should I say, then? That it’s okay? That you didn’t do anything wrong?”
“Yeah,” he says, hoarse. “That.”
“Idiot,” she says, for the sake of her conscious mind. “You shouldn’t need me to tell you that.”
He shouldn’t. A heartless part of her says he should be better than this – asking for reassurance because he did the job assigned to him. Wanting to believe that saving thousands was the right choice. But she gets it, because she knows, too, what it is like to be rejected over and over, and what it must be to have been like to have been forced to be the rejector.
She holds his face and watches it fall apart in her hands.
“Gojo,” she says, softly like a lover, “it was time.”
Maybe he is here because he had wanted a lover. She doesn’t think so little of him as to believe that, but the thought crosses her mind.
It crosses her mind again, and with strength this time, when she tells him she needs to sleep, and when he calls through the seam of her bedroom door to ask if he can bring in a chair and rest there with her.
She does not ask him to bring one. It is three hours before she looks across at the gentle rise and fall of his bare chest and drifts off with no peace in her mind at all.
She knows this is a mistake. Knows somehow that it won’t end with a single lapse in judgement. But she feels morbidly compelled to try.
She is not really surprised, then, two weeks later – she’s businesslike, tactful. Takes the first train to Tokyo and hands Gojo a doctor’s report.
“Yours,” she says roughly.
He looks dumbfounded. Somehow it surprises her that he hadn’t felt the same foreboding dread that she had – that something much more than a lingering regret had begun that night.
But then, she has always known these things better than he has.
**
Gojo still has the test. Every so often, he stares at it as if the lines on the screen are going to disappear if he looks hard enough. Sometimes he lets his eyes lose focus on the test as if that’ll quicken the process of erasing what it says. Others he simply studies it.
It had been a moment of weakness, but he thought he had deserved one of those.
He knows what Utahime is probably thinking. She hasn’t called, and he takes that to mean she doesn’t think he’ll call, either. He bets that she thinks he’s thrown the test away, forgotten it already. Utahime is like that, a pragmatist to the bitter end. She has no reason to think that he would do right by her, and she doesn’t. Simple. Natural consequences – for every action, an equal or an opposite reaction, or whatever. She couldn’t know that he hasn’t called because he thinks he’d choke on the words if he tried.
Like that he’s always liked her, if he’s being honest, but never said so, because life has never made it convenient to acknowledge that he does. Or that he’s sorry and he knows better than she thinks he does what people are going to say when they learn that a woman who has always toed the line and stayed out of sight is expecting his child, and that he wants to silence them, for his own sake as much as for hers. Or that he misses her a little. Or something even worse, like the fact that it’s been driving him half-crazy not knowing why a woman who apparently can’t stand him would react to his grief the way she did.
She probably thinks he’s the scum of the earth. In a lot of ways, he feels like she might be right.
It takes four nights for things to boil over, and when Utahime answers her door, she’s wearing pajama pants and a blanket around her shoulders and an expression that can’t seem to figure out what it wants to express.
“Oh,” she says. “You.”
“I-“
“I’m not letting you in this time,” she says coldly. “Make it quick.”
He would be incensed at the sudden hostility if he didn’t feel so thoroughly that it was deserved. He had, after all, backed her into an awful corner.
“I want it,” he blurts out, before he can think that perhaps he shouldn’t.
“You want what?”
“The…the kid. Baby.” He thrusts the pregnancy test into her hands like a peace offering, still warm from the heat of his hand in his pocket. “I, it’s…I want it.”
He hadn’t been planning to say it like that. Oh well, he supposes. He’s done worse lately.
“You want the baby,” she repeats. “For what?”
Her voice is so toneless that Gojo can’t glean even a hint at her opinion from it. He stares at her for a while after that, but finds nothing in her face or her posture to help him reason out the meaning of that question.
“I mean, it’s mine, isn’t it?”
“It’s yours,” she says coolly, leaning her hip against the doorway, arms crossed. “Right. Legacy, and all that. You want an heir, then?”
That thought has barely crossed his mind until now, though he should’ve known someone as pragmatic as Utahime would’ve thought of it first-thing. It makes his face feel hot – one-upped, maybe. That’s what he feels.
“When have I ever cared about clan stuff?”
“More than you want anyone to think you do,” she says drily. “And why the hell else would you ever want a kid?”
His glasses are slipping down his nose. He doesn’t bother to push them back up.
“Don’t give me that look,” she says. “When would you even see it? You’re always gone.”
“It’s…it’s my kid, Hime,” he says. He cannot remember the last time his voice sounded so weak. “Isn’t that enough?”
She swallows hard, and it occurs to him for the first time that what had seemed like hostility might only be a cover for nervousness. Both, maybe.
“You know,” she says, “this whole kid thing gets a lot harder with you involved.”
He’d thought she might say that. The higher-ups won’t have anything kind to say about a pregnancy out of wedlock no matter whose child it is, but if they know that it’s his, they’ll probably be merciless. See an opportunity, or something like that. It’s not often that anyone has a pawn as easy as a baby to move against Gojo Satoru.
Or its expectant mother, for that matter.
“Would you rather I just abandoned you both?”
“There would be no abandoning if you were never anything to me to begin with.”
That stings more than he would’ve expected it to, but the last thing he wants is to let that show. “Really? That’s the argument you’re gonna make?”
She ignores him. “And what’s with you never even bothering to ask what I want?”
“I…”
Admittedly, a shortcoming of his strategy. He trails off.
“Because if you had asked me,” she says frostily, “I’d have told you that the last thing I want is to make an even bigger mess.”
She could mean anything by that. He waits for an explanation.
“This wasn’t how it was supposed to go,” she says, her face flushing in splotchy, uneven patches.
“Are you explaining what you want or just yelling at me?”
“I think I have every right to yell at you right now.”
“You’re the one who started takin’ off clothes!”
“And you’re the one who-“
“Okay, okay, fine.” He rubs at his temples, exhausted already. “What was it you were saying?”
“I was supposed to be ready for this,” she says, looking down at her slippers. “Y’know. Stable. Married.”
He looks at her pointedly.
“To someone I liked.”
“And I ruined it,” he guesses.
Interesting, he thinks. The idea of the child barely seems to faze her at all – just the consequences. He hadn’t known she had such firm plans of being pregnant someday.
“I don’t think it’s too much for me to ask that you stay out of this,” she says.
“It’s my baby, too, you know.”
“Yeah, but you’re not the one who’s gonna take the heat for it.”
It’s not as if he didn’t know that. He gives her a look.
“You’re not the one with things to lose here,” she says, her voice beginning to shake. “What’s Gakuganji going to say when he finds out about this? Probably ‘you’re fired,’ to start.” She looks at him with colder fury than he’s ever seen on her face. “Something about how there’s no place on his staff for Gojo’s whore.”
Gojo’s fists clench. “If he does-“
“That’s the thing,” she says. Her jaw is trembling now and he’s seen her cry just enough times to know what that means. “Maybe you can scare people, but they’re still gonna think it.”
“But-“
“And they’re still gonna make sure I never get anywhere.”
Looking back on it, he doesn’t know what makes him say it. It isn’t even something he’s thought about, and it’s far too life-altering to blurt out thoughtlessly, but he feels suddenly that he has to.
“I’ll marry you,” he blurts out.
“Sorry, what?”
“I’ll marry you. I mean it.” It’s desperate and maybe stupid, but he goes on anyway. “And then who’s gonna say anything? We’ll make it look like it’s been going on for a while-“
“You’re joking, right?”
“Why would I joke about that?”
“Marriage is permanent, Satoru!” she snaps. “And I don’t even like you!”
“Then why is all of this even happening?”
Well, probably not because she liked him, if he’s being entirely honest. But in the moment, he can’t think of anything else to say.
“We both had just about the worst day of our lives,” she says, all coldness now. “I’m sure it’s not hard for you to get your head around why we might’ve done something stupid.”
She looks at him for barely a few seconds before her face falls.
“I mean the sex,” she says hastily. “Not the baby.”
“You want it, then.”
She bristles. “Of course I want it.”
“Why?”
“I’ve always wanted one.”
“Mm.”
“Not with you.”
“Yeah, I gathered.”
“I don’t wanna marry you.”
“Honestly, I don’t wanna marry you, either.”
Well, it’s not as if he’s opposed, really. He does like her, after all. But he’s never really thought of himself as the kind of person who had options like that. Marriage is for the indistinct masses, of which he has never been one. He doubts his own would be much more than a legal agreement.
But it would keep Utahime safe, still wagging tongues, and allow him to raise this child he wants for reasons he can neither grasp nor articulate, and that is not nothing.
“Great. Glad we’ve got that sorted.”
She goes to close the door. He reaches for her arm before she can.
“Hime,” he says, “I’m serious.”
“Yeah, and so am I.”
“You wouldn’t have to worry about what people would say.”
“And I’d be stuck with you,” she hisses. “And then someday, I’d meet a guy I actually wanted to be with, and I’d still be stuck with you.”
He wants to argue that that doesn’t work, because she can’t have all the things she wants at once – the baby, her reputation, the freedom to go out and find someone who she didn’t make a baby with in a moment of grief-induced stupidity. There’s nothing Gojo can do to spare her from the higher-ups and their inevitably negative reaction to her pregnancy except this. But then, she’s the one carrying the baby. Part of him thinks maybe he should let go and accept that she will never allow it to be his.
But that only flips the switch that reminds him that this is his child, and that it is not a bad thing that he wants to be its father. That is, after all, what he thinks fathers are supposed to do, want to raise their children.
“I just don’t want to abandon my kid,” he says, defeated.
Utahime opens the door another inch. He knows that for the invitation that it is.