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i. silverware
This is the thing no one tells you about building a life together - the endless moving boxes that neither bothered to unpack in the chaos of wedding planning, the things one doesn’t even realize one will need until they can’t be found. And Gojo, proud half of a two-hour-old marriage, spends the afternoon of his wedding ceremony digging through Utahime’s unpacked boxes for a fork.
There are cake leftovers. He only owns two forks and they’re both in the dishwasher. Something obviously has to be done.
“The boxes are marked, you know.”
“Hm?” he turns at a tap on his shoulder. “They are?”
Utahime laughs softly and, just because she can, she takes his hand and guides it to the box which - upon further inspection - is marked “kitchen.” “Did you not bother to read the labels?”
“I didn’t know there were labels,” he protests.
“They’re really not that hard to find.” She laughs, pressing her cheek to his back, wrapping her arms around his waist to distract him from the fact that there’s dessert to be eaten. “Can’t you find whatever you’re looking for later?”
“No,” he says, very gravely. “The cake, Utahime.”
“ Gojo,” she says, her fingers marching up and down his arm in an attempt to get him to focus on her, not the cake or the quest for a clean fork. “The cake can wait.”
“For what?”
She squeezes his arm as if he’s supposed to divine her meaning from that vague gesture alone and lets out a muffled giggle against his shoulder.
(He does. Of course he does.)
“The cake can wait,” he decides.
ii. glasses
He’s sprawled out longways on the couch when she gets home, still in uniform. One of his legs is falling off the cushions and the other dangles over the armrest, too long to fit; he’s still in slippers, and his glasses slip dangerously down his nose.
Well. They can’t have that.
She slips off her shoes and tries to stay quiet as she approaches the sofa, though a bomb could detonate in their kitchen and Gojo would probably sleep through it. It’s force of habit, she supposes, so she gets only close enough to pluck his glasses from his nose. His nose scrunches and, though it might wake him, she brushes his hair out of his eyes and bends to kiss his forehead.
They’re expensive glasses, as expected. And he really shouldn’t make such a habit of napping in them on the days when he’s too tired to take them off - he might break them. But he won’t, so she cleans them with the fabric of her hakama as if in apology for their owner’s carelessness. She’ll keep them in her pocket until he wakes up again, then unfold them and push them back into place on his nose before she kisses its tip and tells him that money doesn’t grow on trees and he needs to stop being so careless with his things.
Later, he’ll probably take them off like he always does just to look at her, and she’ll ask why he couldn’t have done that before his nap earlier. He’ll say something saucy, she’ll roll her eyes as if she isn’t certain that a house wouldn’t be a home without Satoru and his inappropriate asides, and she’ll cover her mouth with her hand when she finally breaks down and laughs.
It always goes a little bit like that. And she can’t wait.
iii. cat tree
“I don’t recall you ever asking me if we could get a cat.”
“No, ‘cause I don’t want one.”
Utahime crosses her arms. “Then please explain the cat tree.”
It sits in the middle of the living room, guilty as charged, and impossible to miss. She suspects she won’t like the answer, but she would quite like to know why.
“Oh. It was free.” He grins as if he’s accomplished something. “Someone at the school was getting rid of it.”
“So you took it.” Utahime should be more disappointed than she is that this doesn’t surprise her in the slightest. “Even though we don’t have or want a cat.”
“Yeah, why not?” he asks.
She can think of a thousand reasons why not and a thousand more when she flicks on the living room light on the way to the kitchen and sees him sitting in it, unbothered, one leg tucked onto the top perch while the other dangles almost to the floor.
Great. She’s gone and married a gremlin.
“Please tell me you’re not using that as a chair,” she sighs, even though it’s evident that he is.
He just smiles. “It’s comfortable.”
“ How?”
“You should try it.” He pats his thigh. “Come sit.”
“ Gojo.”
“What? I said it was comfortable!”
“Yeah, and we’d break it. It’s made for
cats.”
She slows down to emphasize her words. “
Cats. Not humans.”
“I can bend the laws of physics with my mind,” he points out. “Why should I care if a cat tree wasn’t made for people?”
What stellar logic. She snorts. “You’re so stupid.”
He looks up at her, tilting his head. “But you love it.”
She turns away, biting her lip to quiet her laughter, because she’d rather not have to affirm that.
iv. guitar
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you play.”
Utahime’s fingers hover an inch above the strings, and her cheeks redden when she looks up to see Gojo standing in the doorframe. She’d been too absorbed to hear him come in. “Oh, I, uh...sorry,” she mutters, setting her instrument aside.
She’s not embarrassed - not really. At least, not by her playing. It’s really the fact that there’s no real reason that she’s never brought it up in all the years they’ve known each other, and she’s not sure how to explain now that her guitar’s not just for decoration.
“Um,” she says, looking down. “Probably not.”
He tilts his head, neither approaching nor asking her anything, but his question is obvious - why?
“Never seemed relevant,” she explains. “And I, um...don’t really like playing in front of people.”
He crosses the room to the window seat and sits down behind her, resting his head on her shoulder. “I’m not ‘people,’ though.”
“Technically-”
“Technically nothing.” His arms are long enough to reach in front of her for the guitar and set it back in her lap - that shouldn’t annoy her as much as it does. “I’m not people. I’m your husband. Your partner. Your beloved. Your soulmate. Your homeslice-”
“Please quit while you’re ahead.”
He pokes her stomach and smiles, satisfied, when she has to try not to laugh. “Made ya laugh.”
“And?”
“Play me something?”
There’s no real reason this should be embarrassing, but it kind of still is, and a stiff blush rises in her cheeks. “Are you sure?”
“Uh...yes?”
“I’m kinda rusty. Don’t practice much anymore.”
“Smells like excuses.”
“Well, obviously. Why else would I say that?”
He lets go of a fistful of her shirt to reach out and pluck a string. “Bet you’re still pretty good.”
She winces at the twangy sound of the string he’d plucked too hard and from the wrong angle and presses her fingers to the strings to quiet them. “Okay, okay, fine.”
v. clipboard
“Do you want all of your students to fail, Gojo?”
It’s not an empty threat. Each teacher has to evaluate the performance of the other school’s students in the Goodwill Event this year - something about ‘impartiality,’ or whatever that’s supposed to mean. As if that’s going to help matters when two of said rival teachers are married.
Or when one of said rival teachers is determined to distract his wife from the task at hand as long as his bosses are out of the room.
He blinks down at her, bewildered or faking it well, then shrugs. “Can’t you just give ‘em all default 100%?”
She looks from the monitor to the wall where half of her students’ banners are already up in smoke to Gojo’s hand resting on her shoulder and sets her evaluation clipboard down to cross her arms. “What an absolutely hilarious suggestion, Gojo, given that your students have an overwhelming lead after fifteen minutes.”
“Oh, yeah, they do,” he agrees, kicking his feet up onto the table in front of them without moving the arm around her shoulders. “ I love Okkotsu.”
Utahime’s nose scrunches. He laughs.
“Also, can I just say that this is way more entertaining than it was last year?” he goes on. “I mean. A house divided... ah, classic. Gotta love marryin’ your rival-”
“You do know that I can unmarry you, right?”
“Nah, you wouldn’t.”
She catches a snatch of a fight between - it’s hard to see with all that dust - Momo and a dark-haired boy who could be either Fushiguro or Okkotsu, and marks something down on her clipboard. “Oh, I wouldn’t? Keep trying to distract me and we’ll see about that.”
“Aw, but you gotta,” he whines. “You know how many ‘sleeping with the enemy’ jokes I’ve made this week?”
She takes his hand off of her arm and sets it back on the armrest of his chair. “So unprofessional.”
“Nah. I’m demonstrating a balanced relationship to my impressionable young pedagogues.”
“What you’re demonstrating is a flagrant disregard for the standards of polite society, Gojo.”
“But you didn’t say you didn’t like it.” She would’ve if she’d really minded - she always does when he goes too far.
“Whether or not I liked it is entirely irrelevant!”
“Is it, though?”
“We’re working-”
“And you’ve been writing stuff down this whole time, so you’re obviously working just fine.” He lifts his blindfold over one eye to look at her. “And no one’s around to tell me to stop unless you do, which you could, but you didn’t.”
“I have no issue with what you were doing.” She clicks her pen open and turns her eyes back down to the evaluation paper on her clipboard, feigning disinterest. “I have many issues with Gakuganji calling me in for a meeting because my husband has no sense of decorum.”
He opens his mouth, probably to say that he can’t understand why something so innocuous could possibly offend anyone, then closes it.
“At home, Satoru.” She reaches over to pat his hand. It’d be no use pretending she doesn’t like his idle touches even when she knows she shouldn’t. “Or dinner. If you can be subtle about it.”
She knows and doesn’t really care that he can’t.
vi. coffee mug
Caffeine makes Gojo feel like his Six Eyes are glitching; too many all-nighters in high school had taught him that. He’s avoided it since and his body is so unused to coffee now that even the smell makes him feel a little bit dizzy. But Utahime lives off of the stuff.
He’s known that forever, of course. The number of years he’s given her travel mugs for her birthday speaks to either a dire lack of creativity on his part or a flagrant overreliance on coffee to hers. But things are different now - they’re married, and he’s always a little worried she’ll wake up one day to his bare-minumum effort and start to wonder why. He can’t allow that.
So, dizzy or not, he runs the coffee machine every morning, and by the time she drags herself out of bed for school and stumbles to the kitchen with a blanket around her shoulders, he’s waiting for her, a mug in hand.
“Morning, gorgeous,” he says, even though she always looks just about as bad as Gojo Utahime is capable of looking. (Which is still, naturally, beautiful - never mind that.) It’s a routine: she chugs her coffee in about three sips, then dashes it down with water so she can kiss him because she knows the taste of coffee makes him gag.
“Look at you,” she’ll tease, “taking the initiative.”
Sometimes the words change, but the sentiment is always the same. He smiles, gives her a brief peck, then asks, “am I not taking enough?”
“Mmm...” She cranes her neck to return his last kiss. “I never said that. But it’s very, hm...chivalrous of you.”
Gojo Satoru is anything but chivalrous, but he likes to fancy that he is sometimes, so it’s nice to hear. He takes the empty mug from her hands and sets it on the counter so she can do whatever she likes with her hands. “I’m just,” he says, and he pauses to bump his forehead against hers when she wraps her arms around his neck, “making sure you get a good return on your investments.”
“A good return on my investments. Right.” She shakes her head. “Smells like bribery.”
Now it’s Gojo’s turn to shake his head. “And you smell like coffee. Not sure how that’s any better.”
She breathes on him. By now she knows he won’t pass out or feel ill, just make a face like he’s sucking on a lemon, and she’s got no qualms about using her ammunition. “Sorry,” she teases. “Thought it might get rid of the morning breath.”
Utahime’s morning breath, truthfully, is just coffee smell, but he’s starting to get used to that. He’ll never love the stuff, no, but it smells like
her
now, and he can deal with it.
“I should start making you tea,” he replies, just so he can kiss the pout off her face.
She’d never thought that she would like mornings, and he’d never thought that he would find joy in routines. But she is warm and a little sleepy in his embrace and he kisses her despite the coffee in her breath and it’s like this almost every morning now.
It’s nice, being a pair.
vii . photo album
Gojo can’t stop fidgeting with his (fussy, ceremonial, and thoroughly loathed) clothes on the ride back, and Utahime is still, clutching a satin album almost as wide as she is to her middle. She’s been so quiet since they left, and he doesn’t know why, and he swears he’s going to kill whoever said something untoward if any of the nagging aunts or nosy elders at the clan meeting were the reason for her uncharacteristic silence.
Outside of the family, only spouses can attend clan gatherings, and this is Utahime’s first; neither had known what to expect. But he doesn’t have to wonder for very long.
“I refreshed my supply of your baby pictures,” she tries to joke, her smile halfhearted. “Your aunts made sure of that.”
“Oh.” He raises his eyebrows. “Did they say something?”
“No, nothing bad.” She lets the album fall flat in her lap. “Mostly just a lot of winking and nudging.”
“About?”
“It’s an album of baby pictures, Gojo. You tell me.”
“Oh.” Of course they had. “I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t be. We both knew this was coming.” She exhales. “And...it wasn’t anything awful. Just a lot of ‘wasn’t our Satoru the sweetest baby?’ and all of that.”
“I was not sweet.” That gets him to crack a smile. “Those liars. I was an absolute menace and I’m positive they didn’t forget that.”
“But you were cute.” Utahime takes a photo from its plastic slot and holds it up. “See? You probably were a terror, but you were adorable.”
“Aww, you think I’m adorable?”
She swats his arm with the photo. “I said were.”
He clears his throat, eager to change the subject. “Well, um. I’m glad they were okay? I mean...they were, right?”
Utahime nods. “They were actually really nice, just a little pushy with the ‘your-babies-would-be-so-beautiful’ stuff. Which...wasn’t that bad.” It goes without saying that the clan expects heirs. “I mean, we’ve...talked about it before.”
They have, at length. Utahime had made sure of that - she’s wanted children since she got her first batch of students. And Gojo had agreed, though it’s not really clear to Utahime whether it’s because he likes the idea of a noisy, chaotic house full of children or it has more to do with the dazed expression he always wears when he sees Utahime with kids. That still makes it no less awkward to be prodded about it.
“We have,” Gojo agrees.
“I haven’t changed my mind.”
“Neither have I.” He figures he should try to be a little more convincing, so he adds, “I want daughters.”
He’d never mentioned that before. “Really?” she asks, and her lip quirks into a smile. “Why?”
“I dunno. I’d just rather have girls.” He shrugs. “And the clan elders would be pissed if I only had daughters and a girl had to inherit.”
“...
really,
Gojo?”
He raises his hands in self-defense. “But I also want mini-Utahimes,” he adds, as if that’s supposed to help.
“And you’re sure this has nothing to do with the fact that Megumi grew up so bitter?” She lifts an eyebrow. “Because it kind of seems like it.”
“It’s not! Do I need a reason?”
“Well, you just gave me two.” She smiles. “But have you considered” - she pulls out another photo, this one of a chubby-cheeked two-year-old Satoru clutching a sock to his chest and staring suspiciously up at the camera - “that if we had a boy, he might turn out like this?”
Satoru chuckles. “Give me a few of your baby pictures and I’ll be able to rebut that.”
“Mine aren’t nearly this cute.” She frowns. “I wasn’t the nicest-looking baby.”
“Eh, you’re just saying that because all you’ve got to compare them to is mine,” he says. “And, I mean, that’s not even a fair fight. I was damn cute.”
Utahime smiles sweetly. “Too bad you’re not cute anymore.”
viii. slippers
Sometimes, when Gojo is gone for too long or working late or sent on missions somewhere further than Utahime would like, she wears his slippers.
It’s really just about the most ridiculous thing she could do to console herself when he has - as she likes to call them, only somewhat affectionately - ‘clown feet.’ Absolutely nothing about her husband is small and his slippers reflect that, so her foot barely covers half the sole when she wears them, but it’s amusing, at least. She sometimes gets a smile out of clomping around the house in slippers that feel seven sizes too big. But mostly, it’s the permanent imprint of his step that she likes.
It swallows hers, just like his embrace does. So, though a collection of shirts and sweaters that used to be his live in her drawer now, it’s the slippers she goes to when she really wishes he were home.
Miss you, she texts him, one night while he’s staying overnight in Nagoya for a two-day investigation. He’s gotten in enough trouble for trying to teleport home when he’s needed on call at a mission site that she’s made him swear not to do it again, so this is the best she can do - texts he can smile at in an empty hotel bed, pictures of her little feet drowning in his slippers.
Hot, he replies, because Gojo Satoru is nothing if not exceedingly low-brow.
My feet? Lol gross, she writes back. Weirdo.
Your feet in my slippers 🤤, he replies.
She rolls her eyes, but she’s still smiling when a video call prompt pops up on her screen. She kicks off his slippers, tucks her knees up to her chest, pulls a blanket up over them, and clicks accept.
“Hey,” she says, soft even though there’s no one around to disturb.
It’s moments like this, when he can’t be here with her, that his answering smile warms her the most.
**
ix. game controller
“This is such a waste of time!”
“And yet you’re mad that you lost.” Gojo nudges Utahime’s arm with his controller. “Or was losing the waste of time?”
“We are adults,” Utahime sputters, red-faced. “We should not be wasting our time on...on video games-”
“What would you say to a rematch?”
Utahime perks up, retrieving the controller she’d chucked at their kotatsu and composing herself.
“That’s what I thought.” Gojo pats his thigh; she returns to his lap, where she’d been sitting before she’d lost an intense round and stormed off in a huff. “You always have been a sore loser.”
She grips the controller so tightly that her knuckles go white. “You know I’m going to have to make you eat your words now, right?”
“Hm. We’ll see about that.” He rests his chin on top of her head. “Ready for round two?”
She sets down her controller just to crack her knuckles for effect. “Born ready,” she tells him.
She was definitely not. For all her hand-eye coordination, she can’t help but be hopelessly outgunned by a man with inhumanly acute body awareness and decades of experience wasting his time playing video games. Still, it’s adorable how competitive she gets.
Even if all that’s at stake is “going to bed when I do tonight” on his end and “staying in bed until I get up tomorrow” on hers.
“Right. We’ll see about that.”
x. lightbulb
Gojo hadn’t wanted to replace the dying lightbulb in their kitchen’s overhead light. “Something I want to do first,” he’d said, refusing to elaborate when Utahime had asked why.
Now she gets it.
“You know,” he remarks, adjusting his hand so it sits at the small of her back, “I’m beginning to see why I’ve been called ‘hopelessly corny.’”
Utahime would usually say something snarky to that, but she doesn’t want to think that hard right now. “Oh,” she says faintly, faraway, more focused on feeling her husband’s warmth beneath her cheek through his thin t-shirt than his words. Her feet seem to move of their own accord, even though she doesn’t know how to dance; she doesn’t know the song playing, either - something in an unfamiliar language, maybe French - but her body seems to know what to do. Or maybe she just knows how it’s supposed to move with his.
Being married is sort of like a partnered dance, after all. This is just...more literal.
“Yeah, I guess I am kinda cheesy,” Gojo admits, realizing she won’t react and he’s free to say whatever he pleases now. “Guilty as charged, whatever. But, I mean…the lightbulb, right? It gave me an opening.”
His hand is so warm against her back, big enough to span most of its width alone - she loves that feeling. Makes her feel like she’s his the way nothing else does. “What opening?”
“It’s all dim,” he explains. “Like...candles or something. Dunno. I just saw that it was kinda dark in here and was, like...I need to dance with her before we fix this.”
That isn’t like the Gojo anyone else would know, but she’s seen enough of the side he’s probably only shown to two people his entire life to know that it’s really all she could’ve expected. “You softie,” she teases. “You just wanted to put your hand on my back.”
He likes that - likes the way it covers so much of her, how small she seems beside him. He laughs softly. “Nah, I’m just cliché like that.”
“Are you absolutely positive it has nothing to do with the other thing?”
“Maybe,” he admits.
“You don’t need an excuse to do that,” she replies, then adds, “I love you.”
They don’t really say those words often when they linger so plainly in the unspoken; they’re better saved for moments that deserve them. But this one does, because the lightbulb above them is still dim and its flickering casts eerie shadows across the kitchen floor and Utahime has never felt more privileged to be the one who holds her husband’s heart.
“So much,” she says, again, after a few seconds of silence save for the singer’s voice beginning to fade out.
His lips press the top of her hair, messy from a day in the field. “I love you more.”