i know we all love toji being nasty, but i'd love to see a (slightly) sweeter side of him and the reader as mamaguro, if possible?? maybe featuring the reader in his lap, the first time toji's ever really wanted to really do right by his partner... the ability of a man like him to have a softer side has plagued me ever since akutami said he mellowed out with his wife 😭
toji’s not the kind of man who wears his heart on his sleeve. but he’ll try, for you.
warnings: none! reader is mamaguro and uses fem pronouns, pregnancy is briefly talked about. this is just soft honestly
[reblogs/comments appreciated! // my jjk masterlist]
Megumi is sleeping.
He lays in his crib, his chubby cheeks squished against the soft mattress, his hair dark and messy. At times like this, you can see so much of Toji in him, and it makes your heart ache. You can’t believe that you helped create something so perfect – from his tiny face, the tilt of his nose, the perfectly formed fingers and toes . . . You find it hard to believe that Megumi could really be yours.
“You’re starin’ at the kid again.”
Toji’s voice comes from behind you and startles you – you jump, guiltily turning to see your husband. His voice is dark and rough, but as you see him you realise that his face is anything but. Oh, sure – he has a scar bisecting the corner of his lip, muscles rippling out of a tight black shirt. But the look on his face is peaceful, and as he meets your eyes it just seems to fade into something even more so.
“You come stare at him,” you say, “you’ll understand why.”
He makes a little huff of amusement – but Toji Fushiguro is under your thumb, so he humours you by moving forward. Big arms wrap around your waist, making you feel safe and held in his embrace. His chin rests on your shoulder, sharp green eyes on the messy-haired bundle of wonder sleeping in the crib that you’d watched Toji build with a screwdriver clenched between his teeth.
(“How hard can it be?” He’d asked you. “S’flat pack, right? Guys who aren’t half as smart as me do it--”. In the end, it had taken six and a half hours and Toji had had to physically pick you up and sit you down on a chair because you couldn’t stop bending down to help. He’d placed his hands on his hips and pointed an accusing finger at you. “You’re gonna get yourself stressed, sweetheart, and it isn’t gonna do any good for the kid.” You hadn’t expected Toji Fushiguro to be the over-protective kind . . . but you’d be lying if you said that his pout and furrowed eyebrows weren’t adorable).
Megumi’s eyes had turned the same shade of green as Toji’s around the five month mark, for the record.
“We did a good job, huh?” There’s a hint of pride in Toji’s voice that he does his best to dampen down – he’s trying to be cool, even now. Your hands come to rest over his own, where they’re clasped onto your hips.
“I think we did a great job,” you tell him, and snorts out a little laugh against your neck that tickles, making you bend back into sub-consciously. “No, really. I think he’ll fetch a high price on the black market. Look at all of that hair.”
“Takes after me,” Toji tells you. “I think I’d fetch a high price too.”
“You know you’d fetch a high price,” you say, turning around to wrap your arms around his neck. You find yourself on your tip-toes just so you can feel a little closer to equal to him. “You’re a wanted man, Mr Fushiguro--”
“You’re a wanted woman, Mrs Fushiguro,” He says, bending his head – and his lips brush across yours, and you feel your entire body fill with the heady knowledge that he wants you. You know it – he makes it clear in the gentler way he holds you against him, his attempts to do chores around the house, the way his fingers entangle with yours when you’re out doing grocery shopping as a little family. But there’s something that you can’t quite express that feels all the more special about the embrace and the words when you two are on your own.
It hadn’t always been like this.
When you’d first met Toji, he’d been all dark flashing eyes and dangerous smile and tugging hands, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth as he flirted and charmed his way into your life. His voice had been dark and deep, he’d winked at you and made insinuations and insisted, occasionally, that this wasn’t a relationship so much as a mutually beneficial arrangement--
Until someone else had flirted with you in a club and Toji had grabbed your hand and pulled you into him, arm wrapping around your waist. Perhaps you’d been trying to make him jealous – you’d long ago accepted that your crush on Toji and desire to make him yours officially were going to come to a sticky end, seeing as he seemed to value his freedom so highly – but you hadn’t expected it to work.
He’d murmured into your neck that night that you were his, forever, and he never wanted to see someone else’s hands on you again--
“Does this mean I can call you my boyfriend, finally, then?” You’d asked, a hand cupping his cheek, thumb brushing the scar on his lip. Toji had grinned at you, dark and deep and dangerous but warmer than you’d ever seen it. He’d held you that night like he’d just realised how precious you were.
“Sweetheart,” he’d said to you in response. “Hell. Y’can call me your husband if you want.”
You had laughed and thought he was joking.
“Maybe I’ll try that after a proper proposal,” you’d said, tapping his nose. You’d expected him to grab your hand before you could make contact and pin you underneath him, tell you off for being so cheeky – but instead, the pad of your finger had made contact with it and you swore you’d seen a dark flush dust his high cheekbones.
You’d figured that was the end of it, until two weeks later he’d pulled out an expensive-looking ring whilst the two of you watched a movie.
“Well?” He’d asked you, looking almost uncomfortable – almost afraid that you might say ‘no’. “Whaddya say, angel? Gonna try callin’ me husband now?”
And you had.
He’d confessed everything to you before he’d asked about taking your name. His exact line of work, why he wanted to leave his old surname behind – and though you know you shouldn’t have, you’d simply taken it in stride. If this was what it took to have him, you would accept it; it had been too long, and you loved him too much, to simply walk away. You’d found out you were expecting Megumi six weeks before the small wedding and had told Toji immediately.
He’d seemed scared, but he’d seemed excited to – whirling you around like you weighed nothing before he anxiously put you back down and stepped back.
“That’s fine, right?” He’d asked. “I dunno much about kids. I haven’t hurt ‘em or anything, have I?”
He’d made a real effort around the house whilst you were incapacitated by your pregnancy, too – sometimes too much of one, as he batted away your attempts at cooking or cleaning with an insistent ‘I can do it, sweetheart!”. You’d let him make mistakes – honestly, a couple of disasters notwithstanding he’d made a decent effort.
You’re not afraid to leave Megumi alone with him, though Toji still hasn’t quite mastered the life skill of ‘talking to my baby as if he is my child and not simply a friend who I want to slightly intimidate’.
Sometimes you see Toji sat in an armchair with Megumi in his arms, a tiny hand wrapped around Toji’s massive thumb, and you think you could die from how much you love them both.
“C’mon,” Toji murmurs, breaking the kiss. “He’s fast asleep.”
You let yourself be dragged over to said armchair in the corner of the room, next to the little case of children’s books you and Toji had chosen for him
Megumi likes dogs; he claps his pudgy little hands together whenever one is introduced in the bright colours and flat pages. At nine and a half months, he had furrowed his little face and pronounced; “Gog. Goggy.”. Toji had grabbed the cheap camcorder that he’d been recording as many milestones as possible on and tried to bully Megumi into saying it again, but all of the footage he’d actually gotten was you laughing in the background as Megumi attempted to cross his chubby little arms and look at his father in disapproval. He had not said ‘goggy’ again until you had thoughtlessly picked up a little pair of black and white stuffed dogs whilst in a toy-shop with him to show him. Toji had had to go back to the shop ten minutes before closing to purchase them, and even now Megumi tucks them under his arms when you take him out in his pushchair.
You let yourself, too, be pulled into Toji’s lap as your husband gets comfortable, readjusting your body so he can wrap his arms around you and you can bury your face into his neck.
He smells like cigarettes and your laundry powder, familiar and comforting.
He takes a deep, pleased breath that makes the muscles in his throat ripple – you bring up a hand and trace them, fingertip lodging in the hollow of his throat for a moment before your hand moves down to rest over his clavicle, and then where his heart is beating steadily under his clothes and skin.
“You feelin’ me up, baby?” He asks with a smirk. “Y’can just ask, you know--”
“I’m feeling your heartbeat,” you say to him, listening to his pulse in his neck. “I think it might have stopped. We should look into it.” “Is this because I made that joke about the black market? Babe, you’d never let me fuckin’ sell our kid--” “Don’t swear around Megumi,” you say, automatically, your eyes swivelling to Megumi’s crib without moving your head from its comfortable position. “You’ll give him a dirty mouth.”
“You love my dirty mouth,” Toji purrs, the arm around your waist pulling you in tighter and closer. Heat rushes to your face and you give him a headbutt in the neck that’s half affectionate and half warning.
“Not now,” you say, sighing comfortably. Toji is warm and solid and always there for you. “I’m too comfy.”
“Ah, far be it for me to interrupt your nap-time,” he teases, but he pushes a kiss onto your forehead anyway. “Hell, I could go to sleep here myself. Nobody said havin’ a kid would be this much effort.”
“Everyone said it,” you say, stifling a yawn. “You just didn’t believe them.”
He snorts again.
“Y’got me there,” he says. “Wouldn’t change him for the world, though.”
“You’re just saying that because he takes after you,” you smile against his skin. “If he looked like me and acted like me, if he was sweet and demure--”
This gets another laugh from Toji, who knows exactly just how not sweet and not demure you can be.
“I’d love him even more, probably,” he says. “We’re gonna have some fuckin’ blow-ups in the future, sweetheart. Good job you’ll be around to sort out your men, right?”
The arm not about your waist moves so he can cup your face now, tip your chin up towards him. His eyes are still very sharp, but they’re softened with love as he looks down at you. Toji gives you these moments in the quiet of night – when he’s not formerly-of-the-Zenin-family, when he’s not the ‘Sorcerer Killer’, when he’s not an assassin-for-hire – when he’s just Toji Fushiguro, your husband and father of your child. You treasure every single one of them and hold them close to you like a precious pearl, stringing them onto a necklace of memories you’ll cling to forever.
“I’ll be around forever,” you tell him. “If I die, I’ll come back to haunt you and tell you what a shitty job you’re doing on the PTA.”
He snorts.
“Don’t even joke,” he tells you with a flickering smirk – but that smirk quickly drops away to be replaced with a look of intense solemnity. “You know I love you, don’t you?”
“Are you getting soft on me?” You ask, but the hand tipping your chin up does a little jerk.
“Please,” Toji says, a little softer now. “Let me tell you I love you and mean it.”
Sparks fly all through your stomach, your heart twisting in your ribcage. You rarely see this kind of gravitas on his face – he rarely takes this tone, almost needy as he implores you to listen.
“I love you too,” you breathe. “You know that.”
He pulls you into a kiss that knocks the breath out of you, that makes you feel like you and Toji and Megumi are the only real people on Earth and everyone else is an imitation.
“Yeah,” he says, gruff. “Doesn’t mean I don’t like hearin’ you say it, though.”