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It starts with a seemingly innocuous piece of gossip from Shoko.
They’re in the morgue, because of course they are. Shoko’s got corpses up to her eyeballs and is crazy enough to take on more work even then, and when she’s not working she’s with Utahime , so if Suguru ever wants to hang out with her best friend she has to make the trek down to the morgue and kind of just sit there while Shoko does whatever it is she needs to do.
It’s not bad, she thinks. It’s just cold and sterile and she never wants to touch anything, afraid of where it's been, what vital organs it may have prodded. Is prodding, because most of the time Shoko’s deep in a cavity of some sort and using anything within her reach to shift and poke and prod. It makes Suguru squirm, and her own discomfort makes her even more uncomfortable. She fights curses for a living, she should be used to this by now.
Suguru wraps her coat tightly around herself to ward off the chill. It’s the kind of coat she’d ogled in magazines as a teenager but never worked up the courage to buy, even now she has her cushy sorcerer's salary. It’d be a waste of money, bought purely for vanity, but all Satoru ever did was waste money and indulge in vanity, so buying Suguru the coat was no skin off her back, no, really, just take it . Suguru’s thankful for it, even if she’d huffed and puffed as she took it out of the box (because it was expensive enough to come in a box). It does successfully ward off the chill and it makes her look put together, like she has her shit in order and doesn’t spend her free time hanging out in a morgue, gossiping with a mad scientist.
And it is gossiping, because Shoko’s conspiratorial “Satoru’s cousin is having a baby,” can’t be construed as anything but that. She says it as flippantly as she says anything, but Suguru knows her well enough to hear the amused tilt in her voice. This is as interesting to Shoko as which student is dating who, what new arguments Suguru and her girlfriend are having, what they’re all giving Yaga grief over this week.
“What?”
Shoko repeats herself, slower this time, Satoru’s cousin is having a baby . Suguru still doesn’t get why she’s telling her this. She doesn’t even care enough about Satoru’s extended family to guess at which cousin is having a baby. Hell, she doesn’t think she could name her cousins even if she tried. “There hasn’t been an official announcement but you know how Gojo Suzume and my mother speak, well, she’s so mad about it.” She makes an amused scoffing noise, flicking some hair out of her face before it can drape into the abdomen she’s inspecting. “Her second-rate niece is having kids while her daughter is, y’know, Satoru .”
She doesn’t press Shoko for what she means by that. Suguru is intimately familiar with what she means by that.
“Satoru has other cousins who have kids, though,” Suguru points out, because she doesn’t know much but she remembers how creepy that experience had been. They’d stared up at Satoru with wide, unblinking eyes, none of the bold enough to touch or approach her, just staring until their maids ferried them off elsewhere.
“They’re extended cousins though,” Shoko says. She forgets, sometimes, that there are layers to this clan stuff. She always tunes out Satoru when she starts rambling about her family tree, who birthed who, who has a viable chance at becoming clan head if anyone actually managed to kill her. There’s just too many of them to keep track of. Suguru’s family tree is remarkably simple in comparison. “This is her brother’s kid. She’s so fucking mad.”
The streets of Tokyo are as cold as the morgue, if not colder, and Suguru finds herself wishing she’d remembered to take a scarf with her when she left the apartment that morning. She wouldn’t have chosen to walk home if she hadn’t promised Satoru a meal they didn’t have the ingredients for. She was fucking herself over by being such a nice, devoted girlfriend.
The grocery store she ducks into is marginally warmer, just enough that when she takes her hands out of her pockets it doesn’t feel like her fingers are going to fall off. Even then, she moves with purpose, tipping item after item into her basket. She picks up some things she remembers they’re running low on, gets some pads too, just to be safe, and swings by the sweets aisle at the last moment to get something for Satoru.
There's a woman and her child there, mother and child she realises, because the kid is basically the spitting image of her, all woman’s features softer on her daughters face. They’re arguing over the packet of sweets she’s gripping, the mother very clearly trying to get her to trade it in for something healthier.
It’s funny. They’re both so passionate, and she can’t help but watch until the mother just gives up and puts the sweets in her cart with the other vegetables and essentials she’s gotten. She’s tall, willowy even , with dark hair and bright eyes that are so full of love that it finally forces Suguru’s eyes away. There’s nothing wrong with looking, she knows that, but she feels wrong anyway.
Her child clings to her jeans, little hands in tiny gloves gripping with all their might as they leave the aisle. The woman moves so easily despite it, as if there isn't a world in which this position isn’t ever uncomfortable. As if there isn’t a world in which she wouldn’t be able to carry that weight. Suguru doubts she’d be able to carry it so easily.
Suguru doesn’t understand why Shoko even bothered to mention Satoru’s cousin and her baby until she comes home and sees Satoru engaging in a very heated call on the balcony. Her jaw is clenched, her free hand flying and, okay . It makes sense now.
Satoru’s problems are Suguru’s problems and vice versa. They always have been, even when Suguru didn’t believe that they had knotted their lives together so tightly that there was no coming back from it. She’d gotten herself into a mess that she’d never get herself out of (wouldn’t, even if she could, because a complicated life with Satoru was better than a simple life without her), so when Gojo Suzume brings her problems to her daughter’s doorstep, she chooses to take those issues on too. Even if she doesn’t quite know what to do with them.
Sometimes it’s clear what she needs to do. Suguru puts the groceries away first, slotting each item into the space it belongs. She moves slower on purpose, listening for the sounds of Satoru’s irritation rising. She can’t quite hear the conversation she’s having but she catches snatches of it, the distressed Mother s and Oh, fuck you s. Satoru speaks to her mother so plainly, so coarsely, that it always takes Suguru a second to remember it’s her mother she’s speaking to. She treats her father with even less respect. “He’s spineless,” Satoru had scoffed once, staring at her father from across the room while he stood next to his wife and said nothing. “There’s nothing I have to say to him.”
She moves on from the groceries once Satoru stops talking, watching her back for a second before she crosses from the kitchen to the living room. She slips through the gap in the sliding doors that lead off onto the balcony, the one request Suguru had made when they were picking this place. It’s much too cold for this but Satoru doesn’t seem to care. Satoru leans against the railings, silent for a long moment, staring into the distance. Suguru slides a cigarette out of the pack she’d brought with her, lighting it and tucking her zippo back into her pocket afterwards. Satoru’s nose wrinkles at the smell like it always does, but she neglects to say anything, so used to it now after so many years.
She’s halfway through her cig when Satoru cuts the call, immediately silencing her phone and pushing it into her pocket. “Who was it?” Suguru asks, even though she already knows. She would have known even without Shoko’s earlier comments. It made her angry sometimes, that Gojo Suzume could inspire emotions in Suguru that she never could. It was selfish of her, but she wanted to own everything about Satoru, even the particular tilt of her brows and lips when she was talking to her mother.
“Just my mother whining at me,” Satoru grumbles. “Stupid Kanae and her stupid fertility.”
“What does she want you to do this time?” Suguru asks. Sometimes it's remarkably simple: come home more; talk to your father; talk to your grandmother. Satoru always insists that it’s an emotional trap and Suguru knows that they are, that nothing is ever simple, but the beaten down teenager inside her, the one that wants her mother, that wants to please her father, always rears her ugly head before Suguru can lock her away again. Is that it? she demands, grimy and tired but still trying to do her makeup as best she can, is that all it takes to make things easier? Such a stupid little girl.
Satoru’s mother has clear and undeviating expectations for her only child. Suguru has known this for as long as she’s known Satoru. It’s a blessing and a curse, she thinks. A blessing because she never has to guess as to what her mother wants, a curse because she’s intimately aware of the fact that she is constantly disappointing her. But Suguru also knows that Satoru doesn’t register disappointment the same way she does. Maybe she’s never felt the inadequacy of knowing you don’t live up to your parents expectations of you.
“She wants me to marry some ultra-extended Gojo cousin then pop out a ton of his babies blah blah blah, boring ,” Satoru says, her voice taking on the haughty pitch of Gojo Suzume. “As if I’d ever do that.”
Suguru tries to imagine it. Satoru sitting pretty and demure next to some marginally powerful man who’s probably cheating on her behind her back, in a way that he thinks is discreet, even though Satoru’s six eyes see all. They’re surrounded by little white haired, blue eyed children that she’d birthed, with another on the way, probably. Hair long, lips painted, back straight. She wants to throw up. The Satoru she knows and loves is foul mouthed, slouches, and only knows what to do with a tube of lipstick because she gets off on putting some on Suguru.
But it’s not the whole image that’s disgusting. It transforms in her head as she turns it over, as Satoru bitches about her cousin and her husband and how everyone in the clan fucks like rabbits, it’s bad for population growth, she’s doing her civil service by not contributing and–
Satoru’s long hair becomes inky and black, her features sharper, darker, as she becomes Suguru instead. The faceless man melts into Satoru, the grim slash of his lips becomes her vicious grin, blue eyes hidden behind a blindfold. There’s no longer an inordinate amount of children, just two, and their black hair is all Suguru’s. Not the perfect Gojo scions but they, like Satoru, will be loved unconditionally anyway. She turns the image over in her head. Finds she no longer hates it. Banishes it from her mind in an instant.
“It just sucks, and I know the next time I go to the estate my mother will be waiting with, like, ten different men from me to pick from.” She huffs. “And they’ll all be ugly!”
“Hah, poor Satoru, forced to endure the company of ugly men–”
“Of men ,” she corrects, shuddering. She smiles up at Suguru, stretching to her full height so she can press her cheek to the crown of her head. She smells like sweat and rain, of Suguru’s perfume underneath it all. “I told her if I can’t do it with Suguru I won’t do it at all. So romantic, right?”
“Very romantic,” Suguru agrees, and Satoru breaks into a raucous laugh. She presses a kiss to Suguru’s temple, so gentle she doesn’t even really feel it. She leans further into Satoru’s body, into the arms that wind around her tightly. “Sure, we can dig up some ancient tomes to stick it to your mother.”
“There’s literally no better reason to do that.” Satoru goes silent, swaying slightly as they stand. When she speaks again her voice is so heartbreakingly soft, catching on itself as she speaks. “I think she’s just mad I’ve given myself a choice. She never had a choice.”
“Are you still with that girl?” Her mother asks, which is always the first thing she asks after Are you well? and Are you eating enough? Each time she wants to laugh because it seems laughable to think of Satoru as a girl. Even when she had long hair and wore the school skirts shorter than they should have ever been worn, Suguru didn’t think of her as a girl. She didn’t think of her as a God either. To Suguru, Satoru was always just someone doing a very shitty impression of both God and Girl.
But she can’t blame her mother for not understanding the nuances. To her parents, Satoru is girl enough for them to be discomfitted by Suguru’s relationship with her. And that’s funny too, in its own way: Satoru is girl enough for Suguru’s mother, but not girl enough for her own.
Suguru doesn’t know why she still calls her mother. Duty, she thinks. Guilt, definitely. Once upon a time she thought she’d have to kill her parents in the name of ideology. She’d have been a hypocrite not to. She wouldn’t have started with her mother, which is probably why it’s easier to talk to her but. Still. She thinks about it, sometimes, how she would have done it. The method doesn’t really matter in hindsight. She’d have felt guilty no matter how’d she done it.
She tries to remember that guilt when she responds, trying to keep the sigh out of her voice. “Yes, I’m still with her.”
Her mother – predictably – makes a noise that’s almost disapproving but not quite, just enough to make Suguru’s hackles rise. “You should come and visit soon,” she continues, changing the subject. Suguru shouldn’t be thankful for it but she is. This is easier than fighting over her life choices again. “You know, Mayumi from the grocery store has been asking about you.”
“Ah, that’s nice,” Suguru says, even though it’s really not.
“Yes, she’s been asking if you have a husband yet, if you’re thinking about kids.” Her mother sighs and Suguru closes her eyes, a headache already pounding behind her eyes. “What do I even tell her, Suguru? You know, her daughter got married last spring, and she’s already had a child!”
“I can still have children if I want to.”
It’s like her mother doesn’t hear her. Doesn’t want to hear her, lest Suguru shatter her worldview even more. “And she visits all the time. I tell Mayumi that you’re busy with work in the city, that you have a good salary, but children should make time for their parents.”
She knows that her mother loves her. She knows that her father loves her too. It’s not that she’s unbelieving of that fact, but she doesn’t want to believe it sometimes. It would be easier if she didn’t know that her parents loved her, that they only want the best for her. She doesn’t know how they can look at her and think that a life in the countryside – keeping a home and tending to children while her middling husband works – is the best life for her. Maybe it’s the best like for Tsumugi’s daughter but it’d drive Suguru to an early grave. She wouldn’t be able to live with herself.
“Can Satoru come too?” she asks, because it wouldn’t be right not to. And besides, she wants to hear the answer. To remind herself why she doesn’t come home.
Her mother is silent for a long while, long enough that Suguru thinks that she’s lost connection, or that she’s forgotten who exactly Satoru is. Who she is to Suguru. Her sigh crackles over the line eventually, small and defeated. Suguru doesn’t know if she’s disappointed in her or disappointed in herself. Both, most likely. “Maybe not this time, Suguru. Next time, hm?”
“Next time,” she agrees. She said that the last time, and the time before that. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go, okay? Tell Dad I said hi.”
“Suguru–“
She’s in an irritable mood the rest of the day. It simmers just under her skin, pricking at her senses. She doesn’t even really notice it until she’s tearing into a stack of essays that Satoru should be marking, essays that are more red than black at this point. She’s not a teacher, she doesn’t know how they’re being taught, but Suguru’s learned enough to know that all their essays are wrong, and she’s angry enough to actually say something about it.
“Ah,” Satoru says, peering over her shoulder. “I think you can give Kirara that.”
“It’s a bad essay,” she grumbles, a flurry of red question marks adorning yet another sentence. “What the fuck are you teaching your students, Satoru?”
“Suguru,” she says, each syllable of Suguru’s name clipped and staccato. She hooks her chin over Suguru’s shoulder. Satoru smells like deodorant, like the body wash she steals from Suguru. “What’s crawled up your ass and died?”
“ Nothing ,” she grits out. “What are you teaching your students? This is blatantly false, anyone with half a mind–“
“Suguru,” Satoru says again, cutting her rant off at the knees. “Who cares if they’re a little dumb? Who really needs to know this anyway?”
“They’re students, not just good little soldiers! They should know more than how to fight.”
Satoru hums placatingly. “Sure, but that’s not why you’re mad.”
Why is Suguru mad? Because her mother refuses to take her relationship seriously. Because her last mission sucked and reminded her why she doesn’t take missions. Because Mimiko and Nanako are at the age where they can take missions and every mission that Suguru takes is one they don’t have to. Because she just is. Because she hasn’t had sex in a week and doesn’t want to, anyway, but wants to want to. Because Satoru’s mother is somewhere out there handpicking the man she wants to marry her daughter. Because–
“Would you love me if I was a man?” Suguru asks. She didn’t mean to ask that. She wants to know the answer desperately.
Satoru blinks, then hauls herself over the couch so she’s sitting in the free spot next to Suguru. For a second, she doesn’t say anything, running a hand through her white hair distractedly. It’s getting longer, the mullet growing out so it sits ragged against her shoulders. It’s the longest Satoru’s hair has been in years, long enough that she has to remember to carry hair ties around with her so she can pull it back into the shittiest little ponytail ever. Suguru wants to tug on it to see if she yelps.
She remembers the first time she’d been enlisted to shave it all off. They were barely friends, but Satoru had knocked on her door until she couldn’t ignore the insistent sound of it anymore, then begged for her to cut it all off because Shoko said no, I’m not wasting any time on that .
She would find out later that it was because Satoru’s mother could just grow it back. Shoddily, yes, that was what hairdressers were for. Reversed curse technique, even in unskilled hands, could do that. Then Satoru left home, learnt infinity and, well, no one could touch her hair without her permission again.
Suguru had cut off the bulk of it first with kitchen scissors, until Satoru’s long hair that Suguru had been so jealous of wouldn’t even fit into a ponytail, no matter how hard Satoru tried. It lay all around their feet on the newspaper they’d laid out so it would be easier to collect it all up, little strands and all, and burn it. Then she’d touched the clippers to the back of her neck, shaving it down until she had a shoddy, spiky fade.
The fact that Satoru trusted her to do that was baffling. She’d trusted her to put a blade to the nape of her neck over and over and give her an admittedly shitty haircut. She’d never seen the back of Satoru’s neck before that, and the sight of the soft, sensitive skin had driven her crazy in a way that had been unexplainable then and was only slightly less unexplainable now.
“I mean, man Suguru wouldn’t be like woman Suguru, right,” she starts, almost unsure, like she knows what she’s saying is right but it’s still unbelievable to say it aloud. “It’d be you but not you . Like, he would have been raised differently, even if the foundations of your character are there. I don’t know–maybe? Hopefully? A life without Suguru would suck.”
“What if you were a man?”
Satoru blinks again, but she answers quicker this time. “Of course I would! Would you love me?”
“I don’t know, am I still a girl?”
“You can be a man, for this.”
“Then yeah. I would.”
But it’d be hard, if they were both men. Easier in some ways, unless Satoru was a man in the same way that she was a woman, which was barely. They’d be men and in love so they’d be having the same issues they have right now, but it’d be different. It’d be so different.
“It’d be easier if you were a man,” Suguru says suddenly. If Satoru was a man, they’d get married and no one would bat an eye. Then, as an explanation: “I called my mother today.”
“Oh,” Satoru breathes. “Yeah, it would be easier, wouldn’t it? But I’d have terrible pull out game, don’t you think, so it’s a good thing I don’t have the right equipment.”
It’s stupid and crass and it would make Suguru grin viciously on a regular day, but today it only makes her stomach turn. Satoru notices, the smile on her face slipping slightly. “Oh come on, it’d be true. We’d be, like, overrun with kids, you’d hate that. You’d hate that, right?”
“I don’t…mind children…” Suguru grits. She doesn’t. She loves Mimiko and Nanako. She endures Megumi and Tsumiki. She understands that Satoru has a capacity for forgiveness that she doesn’t, even though it took a lot of hemming and hawing and accepting things she didn’t want to accept. Still hasn’t really accepted, if she’s being honest. “I think they’re nice. Innocent. Totally innocent.”
And that’s it, really. That's what she wants. The chance to hold something, really hold it, and know that it is innocent.
The look on Satoru’s face tells her that she knows exactly what she’s thinking, or has a pretty good gist of it anyway. There’s no pity though. It’s been a long time since Satoru pitied her. “I suppose that makes sense, since you would be a good mother,” Satoru says, and it carves right through her. “You’d be really good.”
Here’s the thing: she wouldn’t be a very good mother. She’s mean and obnoxious and easily irritated. Bigoted, at worst, ignorant at best. She’s selfish. She likes living in the city too much, so they’ll never have a yard. A bad student, a worse daughter. She’d probably be overbearing. Her children will probably hate her. And she wouldn’t quit smoking or drinking, either, so she’d be a terrible mother who smelled like cigarettes. They’d probably end up just as fucked up as she is.
But she’d love them, she knows that. Suguru isn’t her mother, she isn’t Gojo Suzume. She’ll love them so much they’ll be sick of it. She’ll never let them doubt it, even if she does a terrible job in every other faculty. Even if they grow up to be just like her, she’ll love them anyway.
Suguru carries what Satoru said about her mother in her mind for months. She doesn’t know why it sticks so hard this time. It’s not the first time Satoru has made mention of the fact that her mother didn’t really have a choice when it came to getting married and having children. It was the way of all powerful clans – have child after child and amass more power with each one. A child is an investment, a woman equally so.
People have proposed to her in the past. Kamos, Zenins, the stray sorcerer from a lesser clan occasionally working up the courage. She knows what they see when they see her: a powerful, beautiful woman who came from non-shamans, who can be led astray with some nice words and promise of protection. At least, that's what they saw , before Suguru became too powerful to control. Before Satoru made her mark on her so public.
They still think it now. It’s in every leer, every condescending word, every comment on her looks, or technique. They look at her and imagine a straight back, a serene look, someone who will smile placidly when she sits by their side. It’ll never happen, but knowing that they think it could still disgusts her. It disgusts her more when she knows that women are thinking it. It disgusts her the most when she knows it’s Satoru’s mother thinking it.
Kanae had apparently given birth sometime after New Years, more information that Suguru learnt from Shoko. When Satoru received an invitation in the mail to officially meet the baby, she’d asked if Suguru would come with her. She’d said I’ll think about it , already blocking off the date in her mental calendar.
Kanae and her husband live closer to the city than the rest of the main clan do, though their estate is no less ornate and complicated than where Satoru grew up. Suguru tries to dress appropriately, even though Satoru can’t even be bothered to change out of her sparring uniform, and feels horrible even as she applies her red lipstick with a shaky hand.
It’s unsettling to finally meet the mother and baby that had inadvertently shifted her worldview so suddenly, she’d almost made them a sort of boogeyman figure in her head, but Kanae and her daughter are startlingly normal. As normal as sorcerers are, at least. She looks nothing like Satoru with her brown eyes and hair that is more an ashy blond than stark white, and she’s just as deferential as all the cousins that Suguru has met previously. Maybe a little more outspoken, considering she’s close in age to Satoru and had grown up with her. She still tries to bow low even though she’s in no condition to and the sight makes Suguru so uncomfortable that she elbows Satoru in the stomach until she gets her to stop.
“What’s her name?” Suguru asks, half polite and half genuinely curious. The baby is still in that wrinkly stage but it’s her first time ever seeing a baby this young so close. It’s not a very cute baby but there’s still something wonderful about her. Something so pure.
“Aiko,” she coos, tapping her Aiko’s nose. She directs Suguru’s attention to the edge of the blanket where her name is stitched so she can see the characters for it. “So cute, isn’t she?”
(“Ironic,” Satoru will tell her later. “Considering Kanae doesn’t really like her husband.”)
Gojo Suzume and Satoru give twin grunts. They sit a little further from Kanae than Suguru does, more content to sip their tea than try and interact with the baby. It’s almost like they’re getting along. Sitting side by side like this, Suguru’s reminded of their similarities and how different they are. Satoru looks nothing like her mother, Suguru doubts she would even if she grew her hair out and wore makeup and the right clothes and everything. They have the same white hair but Suzume is so – and Suguru feels mean even thinking it – drab . She’s beautiful, don’t get her wrong, achingly so, but she’s so used to Satoru’s brightness that Suzume’s austerity has her paling in comparison.
She's much sharper than Satoru is, even though Suguru can see her girlfriend growing into her mother’s jaw, nose, mouth. She looks like she’s been cut from marble. Satoru’s just as untouchable but there’s nothing inviting about Suzume, nothing that makes you want to try. Her lips and kimono are the same shade of red, like blood in the snow. Her eyelashes are stark black with mascara. They’ve been carefully ignoring each other since Suguru stepped out onto the drive and found Satoru’s mother there.
Suguru tears her eyes away from their twin gazes. “She’s very cute,” Suguru agrees. “I hope it isn’t too hard.”
Kanae blinks. “Why would it be hard?” she asks, and it suddenly occurs to Suguru that if this baby is being raised like how Satoru was raised, holding Aiko for guests to see her is probably the most interaction Kanae has with her each day. “Here, would you like to hold her?”
Before Suguru can even say anything, Aiko is being thrust into her hands. She fumbles with the bundle slightly, getting her situation in her arms after a bit of unsure coaching from Kanae. She flashes Satoru a weak smile, then the baby a larger one, as if to say hello, I’m not going to hurt you.
She could, though. Babies are so fragile. She could hurt her and just never know. She seems to be doing alright, though, if the way Aiko settles in her arms is any indication. Everything about her is so tiny, so soft. In the windows that Kanae does hold her, how does she reckon with it? How does she look at this thing that came out of her and be okay with it?
“Suguru knows what she’s doing,” Satoru says, and she was so engrossed in studying the baby that she didn’t realise Satoru was slowly coming towards her. She peers at Aiko from her side, bending so close to the baby that her breathing makes her squirm in Suguru’s arms. Kanae stills opposite them, unused to Satoru taking any real interest in anything related to her, apparently. She drags a finger down Aiko’s plump cheek. “She's not horrible." Kanae beams. It's high praise apparently.
They sit and talk about nothing for the amount of time it takes for Gojo Suzume to finish her cup of tea. “I’ve got business to attend to,” Satoru says, just as her mother sets down the cup for the final time, effectively cutting the visit short. She doesn’t, but Suguru does. Satoru stands, extending a hand to Suguru to hold as she stands too, dusting off her skirt. “Cute baby, though.”
Kanae glances at Gojo Suzume before looking back at Satoru, one of the attendants rushing to take the baby from her, and another rushing in to help her stand. “Is it fine if we have a word outside? It won’t take too long, but Tsuyoshi was hoping–”
“As long as it doesn’t take too long.”
It’s a lot shorter walk from the room where Kanae received them back to the cars. Suguru knows a silent request for privacy when she sees one, so she makes her way down to the cars instead of waiting under the awning with Satoru. To her surprise, Gojo Suzume follows her, followed by her tall, dour guard. The woman barely looks at her but when she does Suguru can see the barely concealed derision. Personal grudge, then.
“You must think I’m a horrible person,” Gojo Suzume says. Satoru talks to Kanae with very little enthusiasm, casting sideways glances at her husband the whole while. “And an even worse mother. But I think I’ve done a good job, don’t you think? Insolent but–” she waves a hand “--that’s to be expected.”
“I don’t think you had much of a hand in that.”
“Would you want a hand in something you didn’t quite want?” Suzume smiles at her, a cutting grin that again, reminds her so vividly of Satoru. “I love my daughter, even if you don’t believe that. I even like Satoru, which is a lot more than some of my siblings can say about their children.”
Satoru’s voice rings in her ears: nothing is ever simple with my mother. Suguru swallows the lump in her throat. “What is it that you want, exactly?”
“My daughter has gotten it into her head that she’ll only have a child if you want one too.” She says it with no small amount of derision. “She won’t budge, despite what I’ve offered her–”
“And I won’t budge, despite what you offer me.”
“Reslient.”
“Very.”
For a moment it looks like neither of them will concede to the other, but Suzume sighs, breaking the terse silence. “Thousands of years of Gojos, Getou Suguru.”
“That doesn’t really matter to me. I think Satoru’s made enough sacrifices.”
“And I haven’t?” It’s so sweet and simpering that Suguru can’t help but recoil. She casts a heavy look at her body guard, one that is only barely returned, but it’s enough. Enough for Suguru to know what she’s getting at, for her to know what she has suggested to Satoru previously. A public husband and a private wife. She’d never . “Ah, more prideful than my Miyako then. A shame. It’s a good deal.”
“I’m not you,” she says, brazen and offensive. She knows what Gojo Suzume thinks she is. Powerful but still sweet, not headstrong enough to be so openly rude to her girlfriend’s mother. “I don’t have to take shitty deals .”
Gojo Suzume’s expression shutters, pure rage flashing in her eyes.
In the distance, Satoru’s conversation with Kanae comes to an end and she tries to bow again. Satoru doesn’t stop her this time, turning mid sentence. Suzume takes one look at her and decides to slide into the backseat of the car idling, Miyako closing the door after her. She hesitates, then says, “it’s not a bad life. It’s better than what I would have had.” Her voice is smooth, higher than Suguru expected it to be. Gentler, too. Suguru wonders how she lives like this, wonders how strong she must be to accept this as her reality. Miyako clears her throat, moving around the car to occupy the vacant seat next to Suzume. Suguru watches her up until Satoru takes her hand, prying her eyes away finally.
“What was she talking to you about? Not threatening your life, right?”
Not obviously, at least. “Nothing, really.” She smiles at Satoru for good measure, pushing her face away when she leans in for a kiss but allowing her to smack one on her cheek anyway, even if it is embarrassing. Two grown adults acting like fools. She wonders if Gojo Suzume envies them. Knows, suddenly, that she does. “Let's go home, okay?”
Mimiko and Nanako are the last uncomplicated thing in her life, surprisingly. They have simple, uncomplicated, teenage wants, and simple teenage problems. It’s easy to lose herself in their simple bickering, just as easy to pick out the threads of real worry underneath it all. She wishes, sometimes, that it’d be this easy with Megumi and Tsumiki, that she wouldn’t have to pretend so hard. They seem to like her anyway, which just makes her feel worse.
They’re at some trendy crepe place that the girls have been wanting to go to, shopping bags around their feet. Even Suguru’s got something new, a maxi skirt that she feels too old for but the twins had insisted she’d get. “Getou-sama, should I dye my hair?” Nanako says, touching her blond strands. “I don’t know how well it would work but I think I should go darker.”
“But it’s so nice right now–”
“But it’s been like this for so long, it’s a bit boring, don’t you think? And Momoe-chan had these brown highlights that were so nice–”
“What do you think, Getou-Sama,” Mimiko says, tapping her shin with the tip of her shoe lightly. “Should she dye it?”
She stares at the two of them, two pairs of eyes turned towards her expectantly. She’s struck by the image of how they looked when she first met them, two small bodies covered in injuries, hair matted so much that they’d had to cut it all off. She’d cried herself sick over it. Over them. “Getou-sama?” Nanako waves a hand in front of her face, frowning deeply. “What’s up? You haven’t been paying attention today.”
“Girls,” she says tentatively. “Have I been–have I been good to you? A good–” she waves a hand, unsure of how to define herself “--a good mother-figure to you?”
Mimiko and Nanako stare at her, shocked by her blatant display of insecurity. She’s always tried to be confident and self-assured around them. A good role model. She never really had one of those growing up and then she has Satoru. “Of course you were good to us,” Mimiko says. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. I don’t always model the best behaviour at times.” At their confused looks she continues, ticking things off on her fingers. “I smoke, I’m selfish, I can be mean sometimes. And I’m overbearing. And a little bigoted.” That’s all that comes to mind, she finds. “That sounds pitiful out loud.”
“You are all of those things,” Mimiko says, blunt as ever. “But your good qualities far outweigh all the other ones. You’re the best person ever, so you shouldn’t worry about things like that.”
“Yes, never worry about things like that!” Nanako agrees, pointing her fork directly at Suguru. “But why do you ask?”
“Ah,” Suguru waves them off. “I’m thinking about personal things.”
“Oh, like having kids?” Mimiko says off handedly. Suguru freezes for a moment, then plasters a smile on her face. “They’d be lucky to have you, just like we’re lucky to have you. If you want them, that is. That’s all that matters.”
She says it so easily, like it’d never once crossed her mind that Suguru would be bad at it. All that matters is if Suguru really wants them.
She reaches out to pat their heads gently, just like she used to do when they were kids, running down the driveway to greet her whenever she visited the house that Gojo had set them up in, with two Gojo relatives to raise them into upright individuals. They’re so much older now, with their own sense of style and their own bad habits and tastes and she still loves them so much. Loves them more actually.
“My girls,” she repeats, so full of emotion her heart threatens to burst out of her chest and run bloody rings around her. “I love you two so, so much.”
She decides to call her mother the next day.
“Do you think you and dad were good parents?” Suguru asks, getting it all out before her mother can get a word in edgewise. She breathes heavily down the line. This was her last resort. She’d been running laps around the school grounds for hours, thumbing through books before that, scrolling through blog posts before that. Nothing could settle the disquiet in her.
“Suguru, why are you–”
“Please,” she begs, in a way she never wants to again. She grips her phone so hard she’s worried it’ll shatter. “Just answer me.”
She used to hold her so gently, through all the doctor’s offices and screaming nightmares and drowsy mornings. She used to hold her so gently. She could be that gentle.
“We love you,” she says finally. She sounds just like Suguru, looks just like her too. As a teenager, she’d thought her mother had broken her. She understands now that she’d broken her mother too. Two shattered mirrors reflecting onto the other’s surface. “And we tried. I hope that’s enough.” It’s not. But somehow it is. Suguru cuts the call.
“What are you looking at?” Suguru asks, casting a glance at the paperwork Satoru is flipping through very casually. She’s not even really looking at it, scratching her stomach idly, head lolling to the side so she can watch TV.
“Oh, just new students for next year,” she says, then snorts. “Damn. This kid was a baby the last time I saw them.”
It’s like a siren goes off in Suguru’s head, drowning out the rest of her senses. The muscle by her eye twitches. It’s the only explanation for what she says next. “I want a baby,” she blurts out. She slaps a hand over her mouth when Satoru’s jaw drops almost comically. This is not how she planned to do this. She never planned to do this. But if she did, she wouldn’t be wearing a sauce stained shirt and watching bad reality TV. “Forget I said that.”
“Absolutely not ,” Satoru shoots back immediately, incensed. “You want a baby? Like, a real human baby? What Kanae has?”
“Yes, but,” Suguru sighs, drawing her knees up to chin. She wraps her arms around herself, tries not to feel like a butterfly under a microscope. It’s hard, especially when Satoru is watching her so intently and not doing a thing. “Not a baby. A child. And adult, eventually. I think I want to be a mother , Satoru.”
“I–” her jaw clicks with effort as she shuts her mouth, her eyes growing impossibly wider at the bite in Suguru’s words. She thinks of that woman in the store, of Kanae, of her own mother. Of the fantasy she hadn’t been able to fully banish from her head: her and Satoru, beaming with pride as two kids ran around them. It’d be good, it’d be normal, even. They’d be an even happier family.
“If you don’t want it, I don’t want it. But I think I want it.”
Satoru shoves her paperwork off to the side, dragging Suguru by the shoulders until she’s facing her. Her eyes blaze, wide and blue, her mouth set in a tight grimace. Suguru avoids her eyes until Satoru grabs her by the chin, forcing her to look at her. She doesn’t look mad and some of the shock has melted off her face, replaced with determination. “Suguru. Since when?”
She shrugs, but doesn’t try to look away this time. “Since forever, I guess? I don’t know. It’s hitting me now that I want it. Desperately. I want to be a parent desperately.” Suguru takes a deep breath, shouldering past the rock sitting in her chest. She’s gotten this far, she can go further. “I want to hold something and love it and raise it to be as good or bad as–as they want to be. And I want to be better than my mother, and your mother and–”
Suguru’s hand slides from her jaw to the nape of her neck, pulling Suguru in until her forehead rests on her chest. She didn’t know she was crying until she felt the material of Satoru’s shirt grow wet beneath her cheeks. Satoru’s seen her starved, grimy, covered in blood and guts, half dead. She can see her like this, too. “I want it so bad,” she mutters, her voice hitching as she speaks. “I didn’t know I’d want it so bad.”
“I’m not going to pretend to understand,” Satoru says. “I don’t think I want it this bad. All I’ve ever wanted was you. But it’d be nice, I think…to know what it’s like. And we’d do a good job, as long as we’re together.”
Suguru nods desperately. “It’d be nice.”
Satoru is silent for a long while, the way she always is when she’s turning something over in her head. Suguru loves her so much. Even if she didn’t want this, even if she says no, she won’t mind. Suguru loves her beyond belief, to the point of ridiculousness. She’d be happy to live like this forever, as long as Satoru is by her side.
“Well, if you want it so bad, then who am I to deny it to you?” Satoru strokes a hand through her hair, down her back and back up. All Suguru can do is grip at her t-shirt and cry harder, so hard she chokes on it. She hadn't know she wanted it so bad. She doesn't even feel guilty about it anymore. “We’d have to get married first, otherwise it wouldn't be proper.”
Satoru sounds so much like her mother that Satoru can’t help but laugh. She pulls away, wiping tears from her cheeks and Satoru smiles, eyes so full of love it makes Suguru feel sick. She’d gladly feel this nauseous forever. “No,” she agrees, the corners of her lips turning up into a smile. All for Satoru. “It wouldn’t be proper.”