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Scar is blissfully asleep when he suddenly hears a noise.
The sound repeats itself again, and again, and again, getting louder and clearer every time. It’s high-pitched, and familiar, but his brain can’t figure out what it is yet.
“...-ake up! Wake up, come on!”
Finally, Scar opens a bleary eye to see a blurry round face towering over him. He blinks a few times, and the blurry face becomes Mei, who’s staring down at him with intensity. She’s pouting, her little arms crossed, and her long hair is so tangled it looks like a bird nest. Scar finds it absolutely adorable, but his frown doesn’t go away: he just glanced at the alarm clock next to his bed, and it says it’s 7:45 am. On a Saturday.
“Why are you waking me up this early?” he grumbles. “There’s no school today.”
“Except that there is!” she shoots back, bouncing up and down on his bed in frustration. “Did you forget about the parent-teacher conference? We have to be at school in forty-five minutes!”
“…Shit,” is all he can say as he remembers with horror that yes, the parent-teacher conference is today. And they’re already late. As if the other parents needed another reason to dislike him.
He groans, already feeling grumpy, and gets out of bed. Mei seems to think he’s too slow, because she grabs his arm and forcefully tugs him toward the bathroom.
“Come on daddy, hurry up!”
Scar can’t help but smile through his annoyance. It’s been more than two years since he took Mei in, and a year since he legally adopted her, but she’s only started to call him “Dad” instead of “Mr Scar” a few months ago – and it’s making his heart melt every time. Even as he is dragged out of bed at an ungodly hour, he can’t help but feel happy at how excited Mei is.
Happiness. Something he thought he would never experience again. And yet, here he is. Here they are.
“Can you please do my hair?” Mei asks even though she’s already putting the comb in his hand.
He starts detangling the long strands as gently as possible. Mei can do her hair by herself, she’s done so for years. But she prefers when he’s the one doing it: it has become one of their rituals, one of those moments when she feels safe and taken care of. A reminder that she’s not on her own anymore, that she now has someone who looks after her.
Scar braids her hair, then rolls the braids into two buns. The buns are somewhat uneven, but the braids are perfect, a far cry from his very first attempt at styling her hair. He looks at his work with pride, and can’t help but preen when Mei inspects it in the bathroom’s mirror then says “Great job daddy!” with a beaming smile.
However, her smile vanishes when she realizes it’s already past 8 am, and she starts hounding him about being late. He takes a quick shower while Mei, who is already dressed, eats breakfast, and then they’re ready to go. Scar takes a look at Mei, with her fluffy scarf, her bright pink backpack almost as big as her, and her even bigger smile, and can’t help but pull out his phone to take pictures of his adorable daughter, as well as poorly taken selfies of them both.
He never thought he would be the kind of father who constantly takes pictures of his kids – he never even thought he would be a father to begin with. But time flies so fast, and Mei grows even faster, and he wants to commit everything to memory. His family were among the countless victims of the Ishvalan genocide, and he doesn't have anything to remember them by - not a single picture or book, nothing. As the years go by, he finds it more and more difficult to remember their faces, their voices. He doesn’t want the same thing to happen with Mei, he doesn’t want to forget a single thing about her.
By the time the impromptu photoshoot is done, it’s half past 8 and they’re officially late. They quickly say goodbye to their cat Xiao Mei and get into the car (he traded his motorcycle for a more child-friendly vehicle a few weeks after Mei moved in with him).
They arrive 15 minutes late at Mei’s middle school, and hurry into the building as Scar silently curses the person who thought that organizing a parent-teacher conference on a Saturday morning was a good idea. When he realizes it’s not their turn to talk with the teacher yet, he sighs in relief before sitting on a chair in the hallway, next to the other waiting parents and students. Mei plops down next to him.
A few parents glance at him with disapproving stares, and he scowls back. They look away, intimidated. Scar knows he doesn’t look like the typical dad, with his imposing frame and leather jacket and the big scar in the middle of his face. The fact that he has a “resting bitch face” (according to Mei) doesn’t help either. Still, despite not being very talkative, he’s been nothing but polite to them, so the fact that they still judge him based on his appearance is starting to get on his nerves. He kind of wants to be as rude to them as they’re being to him, but doesn’t want his daughter to stop being invited to birthday parties and sleepovers. She’s made plenty of friends since starting 6th grade, and he really doesn’t want her to be excluded because of him.
Scar is eventually distracted from his sour thoughts when he notices that Mei is being unusually quiet. Instead of chatting with the other kids, she’s twisting her small hands, features scrunched up in a worried expression.
“What’s wrong?” he asks. Up until now she was brimming with excitation about the parent-teacher conference.
“It’s just… I just realized… What if I didn’t do good enough?”
“What do you mean?”
She doesn’t answer and keeps staring at her lap dejectedly, her usual confidence gone. He gently nudges her to encourage her, and she eventually answers in a small voice.
“What if the teachers tell you I’m not a good enough student? I don’t want you to be disappointed. I... I can be better.”
Scar’s heart breaks at these words. Mei’s biological father never cared for her, and she had to compete with her numerous half-siblings for a shred of his attention - that she never managed to get despite her best efforts. And when her father died, her siblings old enough to take her in refused to do so, and she ended up in foster care until she met Scar. To this day, and despite Scar's reassurances, she still thinks that her family neglecting and abandoning her is her fault. That if she was a better child, they would have cared about her. And now she’s scared of letting him down.
Scar scoots his chair closer to Mei, puts an arm around her small shoulders – she’s so tiny, even for her age – and squeezes her against him in a side hug.
“Mei, look at me.”
She complies, looking up at him with sad eyes.
“No matter your grades, your behavior, or what your teachers say, no matter what happens, you will always, always be good enough.” She doesn’t seem convinced, so he insists. “You’re amazing, and I’m incredibly lucky to have you. It’s important that you know that.”
He got a little better at expressing his emotions over the years, but he still has a long way to go, and he doesn’t know if she knows how much he loves her.
“I could never be disappointed in you, Mei,” he says earnestly. “The best day of my life was when you agreed to let me be your father.”
He means it so much he gets choked up. His words seem to touch Mei as well, and she smiles, eyes watery. She snuggles against him, pressing her face into his jacket.
“I love you, Dad.”
The words are muffled by the fabric, but they shoot through Scar’s heart all the same.
“Love you too, kid,” he says gruffly. He squeezes her a little tighter against his side.
“Leather is not comfy,” she says after a moment, her speech still stifled by the fabric. “You should wear a cardigan.”
Scar lets out a snort, surprised and amused at the bold comment. And the worst is, he’s now actually considering buying cardigans.