Work Text:
The first scare frightens her enough to be the last. It only takes Rin one missed period, one trip to the drugstore where she makes Nezha go to the checkout while she hangs back, one stretch of the two longest minutes of her life while she waits for the test to be done, one single line on a plastic stick, for her to decide that’s enough anxiety for one lifetime.
Rin isn’t going to go through that again.
She sits Nezha down to tell him, sitting on opposite sides of their kitchen table, her hands folded in front of her like she’s preparing for some debate in one of their classes.
“I’m not pregnant,” she opens with, and the happiness on Nezha’s face is immediate. The concern melts away into relief, a sudden relaxation of all his features.
“Oh, thank the gods,” he sighs, but she’s still perfectly poised, waiting until he’s ready to hear the next piece of the speech she has prepared.
“But I’m going to get a hysterectomy."
Nezha doesn’t look surprised at that, which wasn’t the reaction Rin was expecting. Then again, she isn’t sure what reaction she had anticipated from him. “Okay. Yeah, yeah, of course.”
She stares blankly, her head cocked to the side as she takes in what he just said. “That’s… it?”
“What, are you waiting for my permission?"
No, she’s not, of course she isn’t. But Rin had expeected a little more push back, a little more concern from Nezha. “I don’t want kids,” she says in response. It’s just that simple.
“I don’t either,” Nezha responds, so that week she calls her gynecologist and makes an appointment.
The pushback doesn’t come from Nezha, but from her doctor of all people.
“Are you sure? You’re so young. What if you want to have kids down the road?” She asks, looking over Rin’s chart. Rin doesn’t understand how a woman could be the one to say such things to her, but it doesn’t make her blood boil any less to hear it come from her. It’s still just as condescending, still just as frustrating. “Have you asked your husband what he thinks?”
Rin is so startled by the question that she makes a noise of surprise, something of a gasp. What the fuck, she wants to ask. The only thing that stops her is wanting this woman on her side. “I’m not married,” she says incredulously.
“Oh, well, I don’t see why you’d get a hysterectomy now. What if your future husband wants children someday?” The thought of Nezha asking to have a child with her is so painfully laughable that Rin smiles despite herself.
“I don’t think that’ll be the case,” she responds, her patience for this woman wearing thin.
She looks at Rin’s chart over her glasses, and Rin just knows by the blank expression on her face that she’s not considering a word she’s said. “Well, you don’t have any ongoing conditions that would be treated with a hysterectomy… We could probably get you on birth control, maybe an IUD if you really want, but why not wait a few years before getting your tubes tied?”
When she comes back in a month later, this time with Nezha sitting in the uncomfortable chair next to the exam table, his eyes averted from Rin’s body hidden by a papery gown, everyone is much more agreeable to the idea. With Nezha’s approval on the idea, they schedule the surgery for her that day, sending her home with a folder of information and a date set for six weeks out.
Those six weeks are the longest of Rin’s life. And in the meantime, she’s terrified to have Nezha touch her.
“Rin, you’re on birth control. I’ll wear a condom. It’s going to be okay,” he tells her.
He’s always had a penchant for being more rational than her, and while she usually appreciates the fact that he’s there to keep her more hot-headed tendencies in check, rationality isn’t exactly what she needs right now. “If there’s even a chance of pregnancy, they won’t do the surgery. I already had to go through enough to just get it scheduled.”
“Rin, there’s not going to be a chance of pregnancy,” he reminds her.
“There wasn’t supposed to be a chance last time, either!” She shouts back, suddenly angry.
Nezha’s lips purse together, that face he always makes when she knows he’s thinking. That face has always been so attractive to Rin, but right now it causes nothing but frustration. “This really scares you, doesn’t it?”
“Of course it does,” she answers. “Of fucking course it does.”
His head tilts in the way that it does when he’s curious, when he’s trying to read her. “Rin…” She expects a fight, expects him to push back on her, but he just smiles sadly. “I’m sorry it has to be that way for you.”
Rin has to walk away so that Nezha doesn’t see her cry.
“Do you think you’ll ever regret this?” Nezha asks her, lying awake and staring at the ceiling, just a week before the surgery.
Rin responds almost before he’s done talking. “No,” she says, easily.
When little girls had played mommy to their baby dolls, Rin had never taken interest, never so much as thought about the idea of having a little life growing inside of her without feelings of panic and fear settling in her stomach at the same time. She could never regret ridding herself of the nightmare that’s followed her around since she was old enough for it to become a reality.
And then, she turns to Nezha, watching his beautiful face in the moonlight, the way his chest rises and falls. “Are you going to regret it someday?”
He rolls over, an arm slung easily around her waist. “No,” he tells her, just as easily as she told him. “Not if it’s what will make you happy.”
It’s hard not to believe Nezha when he speaks so freely, so Rin just settles in his arms and goes to bed.
The day finally comes, and Rin could not be more relieved. In pre-op, her mind is delightfully fuzzy between how early she had to get up to be at the surgery center and the sedative she’s been given before the anesthetic. Still, it’s easy to picture Nezha pacing the waiting room, wearing a hole in the floor with his anxiety despite the fact that this surgery will take a few hours at most.
When she wakes up, the first face she sees is Nezha’s, fuzzy and out of focus but there nonetheless. Rin gives him a lazy, slightly delirious smile, and starts laughing. Apparently relieved by her alertness, Nezha smiles too.
Maybe it’s just because she’s so out of it on painkillers, but she thinks Nezha might be the most beautiful sight she’s ever seen.
“Hey handsome,” she drawls, slurring her speech just slightly. Her head lolls to the side on the pillow, getting a better angle to look at Nezha. “You come here often?”
The absurdity of it makes Nezha laugh. It makes her laugh, too, delighted by the sound of Nezha’s laughter filling the room. He brushes a hair away from her face, tucking it behind her ear. “How would you even know I’m handsome? You don’t have your glasses on.”
Rin tries to reach for them, but she’s all tangled up in wires, connecting her to different monitors and the IV bag hanging next to her. “Well then give them to me,” she says, resting back against her pillows.
When Nezha delicately puts her glasses on her face, resting them on the bridge of her nose and making sure she can see him clearly, Rin’s smile grows even wider.
“I was right,” she said, sounding a little clearer than before. “You really are the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.”
Once she’s able to keep an entire bag of animal crackers down (though Rin takes special delight in feeding some to Nezha, too), she’s released from the surgery center and to Nezha’s car, where she reclines the seat back all the way.
“Rin, don’t do that,” he tells her.
“Okay,” she answers, making no move to unrecline the car seat.
Nezha helps her sit upright anyway, or at least closer to upright, and she closes her eyes almost immediately. But then, Nezha starts to pull out of the spot by the discharge door, and her eyes fly open, the world suddenly spinning around her.
“Hey, hey, you’re okay,” he says, putting a hand on her shoulder. He grabs a bag from the backseat, opening it in front of her in case she vomits. She doesn’t, but the plastic bag stays spread open in her lap. “Do you want to go back inside?”
Too nauseous to respond, Rin only shakes her head and lunges for the water bottle in the center console. While she chugs it, Nezha’s hand finds hers, his thumb rubbing in soothing circles over the back of her hand.
She clenches his hand like her life depends on it, and eventually the smoothness of the road lulls her to sleep. When she and Nezha pull into the driveway, he’s still holding her hand.
“Rin, please go take a nap, you need to rest,” Nezha pleads with her, coming up to their room to take away her garbage, the empty cup next to her, and the bowl that had contained her lunch.
She’s been relegated to their bed on strict orders for bedrest, but no one had ever told her that she needed to be sleeping. Just resting.
“I am resting,” she insists, staring at her laptop screen with bleary eyes. “I’m just writing a paper at the same time.”
Nezha looks at her laptop skeptically, where she has a paper on the rates and causes of female poverty in Nikan for her sociology class pulled up. It’s heady stuff that involves her sifting through pages upon pages of government data and reports from various researchers to synthesize together into something coherent in her own words.
She proudly shows her laptop screen to Nezha, showing off the paragraph she’s just finished.
“Rin,” he says, poking a finger at her screen. “You’ve used the word ‘clearly’ five times in this paragraph alone, and two of them were in the same sentence.”
Her head lolls back onto the pillow behind her and she groans aloud. “My brain feels so fuzzy. I’ll go back and edit later.”
“You had surgery yesterday,” Nezha points out. “No wonder you’re too tired to work.” He takes her laptop from her, closing it and sticking it on the bedside table, just out of her reach.
When Rin tries to protest, he only gently pushes her hand away. Nezha’s hand moves to cup her cheek. His thumb strokes her cheekbone, and Rin nuzzles into his touch easily. “You need to rest, my beloved.”
She groans in protest. “No, I need to finish my paper.”
“Whatever you write today you’ll just have to delete and start over, anyway,” he counters. That’s hard to protest against, and so Rin doesn’t. She merely closes her eyes and leans into Nezha’s hand. “That’s my good girl,” he coos. If it weren’t impossible to hide with his hand against her face, she’d feel almost ashamed by how hot her face gets.
“You dick,” she mumbles, snuggling further into bed, Nezha’s thumb still stroking her cheek.
“I know,” he says fondly. “Go to sleep, Rin. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
True to form, Nezha is still sitting on the edge of the bed when Rin wakes up, his hand still pressed against her face.
To not even be able to bathe on her own is demoralizing, and more than that, embarrassing.
Rin had almost thought the doctor was joking when she had said that Rin might need some help for the first few days, but when standing for long periods of time was discouraged, so with it went any hope of showering unsupervised.
She tried to put it off as long as possible, hoping that by the time she got tired of scrubbing herself down with a washcloth and desperately needed her hair rinsed, she might be able to get in the shower on her own, without incident.
Rin has no such luck.
Only three days after her surgery, she feels positively disgusting, and Nezha immediately asks where she’s going when she delicately climbs out of bed and starts hobbling towards their bathroom.
“Taking a shower, fucking duh,” she says, holding back a roll of her eyes. Nezha doesn’t deserve her sass right now, now matter how badly she wants to give it to him.
He gives her a knowing look, the kind that lets her know she’s not getting away with anything. “Rin,” he says. She hates that that’s all he needs to say, that all it takes to get her to cave is a stern look at her name.
“Nezha, I feel gross,” she complains. “I just want to wash my hair. Five minutes, in and out.”
That look he gives her makes her want to combust, whether from being angry and frustrated or because he’s so damn attractive when he looks at her with concern in his eyes. “Okay, let me run you a bath.”
Despite her opening her mouth to protest, Nezha doesn’t give her room to argue with him as he moves past her and into their shared bathroom. Wordlessly, he draws a bath for her. Rin watches steam fog up the mirror over their sink, and then the room fills with a light lavender scent as Nezha lights a candle and sets it on the windowsill.
When the bath is full, he takes her hand to help her into the tub, though Rin can’t help but shy away from his gaze. “I’ve seen you undressed before, you know,” he says with a teasing laugh, one that can’t help but make Rin smile.
“I know. This isn’t like having sex, though, it’s different,” she replies.
“Why? I’m completely focused on you either way.”
That makes Rin flush, so she doesn’t say anything else.
She’s prepared to just stick her head under the water to wash her hair, but Nezha leaves long enough to grab a cup, and when he returns, he fills it to pour over her hair. With gentle fingers he brushes through the tangles of her hair, combing it after days of being pressed up against her pillow. When that task is done, he lathers her hair with shampoo, his finger massaging into her scalp in such a way that she wants to never let the moment end. He rinses her hair and does the same thing with her condition, until Rin feels a bit like a putty in his hands thanks to all his ministrations. He even convinces her to let him pamper her, applying all sorts of skin care products and even a mask, cool and silky to the touch, to her face.
Later that evening, wrapped up in a fluffy robe fresh from the dryer and watching her favorite movie with Nezha, she begins to think having Nezha look after her isn't so bad.
It’s another six weeks before Rin is cleared for sex. She finds it almost funny that Nezha, in solidarity with her, abstains as well.
No matter how many times Rin reminds him that she simply doesn’t care (and that, in fact, he’s less stress out and diva-like when he’s had some release once in a while), he insists that it’s not fair to her. When he tells her every debauched detail of what he wants to do when she’s fully healed up, Rin finds it hard to complain, likely because of how flustered she is.
Which means that, six weeks later, after her doctor’s appointment where she learns that her stitches have dissolved nicely and there’s very little scar tissue left behind, Nezha is all but ready to pounce on her. And Rin is plenty glad for his touch again, something she’s ached for this entire recovery period, so she’s hard pressed to tell anything but the fact that she wants more, more, more.
And somehow, the afterglow is the best part.
Rin shouldn’t be surprised, really. That’s always how it goes. But there’s no interruption where Nezha gets up to toss the condom, no checking her bedside drawer to make sure she’d taken her pill according to schedule that morning, just Nezha pulling her into his arms and holding her close.
“Rin?” He says, face pressed into her hair. He can’t stop touching her, he never can, his hands skating over her body in the most intimate of places and ways without any expectation of anything further.
Rin turns herself over so that she can nuzzle into his chest, feeling so secure and safe in his arms. “Yes, Nezha?” She says, voice muffled by his skin.
“Are you happy?” He asks, seemingly a preposterous question given how contented she seemed to scream his name just a few minutes earlier. But after all it took to get here, Rin supposes it’s a fair question.
It seemed a distant memory that she had been so panicked about the possibility that she was pregnant, but it wasn’t truly all that long ago. Rin thinks of lying in the dark with Nezha and promising that this would make her happy, would put her mind at ease. He had let her choose, then, without a single word of complaint.
“Yeah,” she whispers back. “I am happy.”