it may as well be you

I'm carrying your baby. I'm going to get rid of it.

Tsujimura would never admit it, but a part of her had wanted to tell him. Since the moment she found out in that cramped bathroom stall at the Division's main headquarters.

She wanted him to know so he could tell her what she should do. Not what to do. It was a no-brainer to get an abortion: It didn't take being a genius to figure out Tsujimura abandoning everything with the Division (which she would have to do, given the extreme secrecy of her profession) to become a mother would be one of the worst ideas to even conceptualize, let alone actually make happen.

No. She'd wanted him to tell her she was making the right choice, even though just about anybody would have said it was.

But he'd asked her. Quietly. And she'd told him and he fully accepted it. He didn't get mad or start an argument. Didn't get upset or raise his voice. Didn't lay any claim to the clump of cells currently metastasizing within her body like an unwanted virus. He didn't even say the word 'abortion.' He'd let her say it, like it was her right to call it what it was.

And now he wanted to be there for it. For her.

As if this thing they'd accidentally made together was theirs. Something that connected them together, like a memory or wedding vows.

A voice in her head told her he was acting like her boyfriend, as if just being the father of this accident entitled him to act this way. And, sure, maybe before she might have considered seeing him as that to her. They had been having sex regularly and she'd slept over in his bed more than once. She cooked him meals and drove him around everywhere. He'd gotten to know her — her goals, how she liked her coffee, the spy movies she loved, and she'd even told him about her mother. They'd gotten used to one another, as was always intended when he'd been assigned to her almost a year ago (with some unexpected complications, of course. This being the biggest one).

But, despite all that, Tsujimura never really thought of them as a couple. She never thought too long about it to give what they had an actual name.

He wasn't her boyfriend. And she wasn't anything but his overseer.

Yet here he was — here they were — in this situation.

"I'll tell Sakaguchi-san I changed my mind and that I'll come in for work like normal," Tsujimura said, unsure, her voice sounding like it was miles away. Then, like a reflex, she added, "You don't have to come with me, Sensei."

"Yes I do,"

So that was that.

They never spoke of it for the rest of the day. No one would even think something had happened — something big, something unbearably intimate — between the two of them.

They weren't scheduled to investigate a site nor pursue any high-priority leads that day, and Ayatsuji wasn't supposed to be anywhere else other than his Manor, so that was where they stayed. He spent the day looking over documents and case files at his desk, languidly smoking his pipe, only ever acknowledging Tsujimura's presence to say a curt "Thank you" when she placed his coffee or food on his side table. She didn't say anything back. The purring of his two cats and his ash-filled exhales were the only noises that filled the room for hours.

It was a perfectly unextraordinary day.

Only, after Tsujimura was getting ready to leave in the evening, he was standing at his office doors, blocking the exit. She didn't get to ask him if he needed something else from her before she left, because that was when he handed her a full written report of the work he'd done today, neatly organized and as pristine as a document for the Division archives should be. Sakaguchi-san might've even cried.