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6 Months
“You know, I’m really starting to think he doesn’t like me.”
“What are you talking about? Of course he likes you.” Utahime taps the baby’s nose with her pointer finger and he doesn’t react – a little strange, because all of his sisters had scrunched up their faces at that, but nothing particularly troubling. She knows by now that all babies are different. “Right, Hiro-kun?”
“He doesn’t,” Gojo insists. “He gets stiff when I hold him.”
“He’s like that for everyone,” Utahime replies. Kazuhiro begins to fidget; she knows to calm him with a shushing sound and a brush of her thumb back and forth along his hairline.
“Except you.”
“I’m his food source. I don’t think that I count.”
“I’m his dad,” Gojo says despondently. “I don’t get it. None of the girls reacted to me like that.”
“I think he’ll grow out of it.” Utahime looks back over her shoulder with a reassuring smile. “It might just be a biological thing. He doesn’t like to be held unless he knows he might get a meal out of it. Something like that.”
“Or he just likes you better.”
“Maybe.” Utahime knows she shouldn’t tease, but it’s sometimes irresistible. “Payback. All of the girls like you better than they like me.”
They do, sort of. Reika isn’t an affectionate child, but she’s equally willing to hide behind either parent’s legs when she’s too shy to come out and say hello; Kimie, for all that she throws herself at her father when he returns from work, lights up just the same when she sees her mother waiting to pick her up from kindergarten; Kazuki lavishes affection on both of her parents. But they’re just a little bit happier around Gojo – Utahime doesn’t mention it, but it’s obvious. She knows she’s doing well with them – reasonably, at least – but she’s not the fun parent, and for girls aged eight, five, and four, that’s a serious offense.
Perhaps it’s greedy, but she sort of hopes her only boy will cling to her instead.
“But it’s probably temporary,” she says, trying not to let that show. “He’ll warm up to the rest of the world later, I think.”
Gojo says nothing. Maybe he knows, years before he has any proof, that Kazuhiro will always be his mother’s son before he is anything else.
**
2
Kazuhiro stares at the pole in front of him, too short to see that it holds up a sign listing the playground’s rules and too dazed to look up and find it. To an onlooker, it doesn’t seem like he’s quite sure how or when it got there, or how he came to be standing in front of it. And he certainly doesn’t seem hurt, even though he’d been running full-speed when he’d bumped into it. He just stares, so bewildered that he can’t remember where he was supposed to be going when he ran afoul of the signpost in the first place. Only at a hand on his shoulder does Kazuhiro finally turn away from the signpost.
“Careful,” Utahime says gently, trying not to laugh. “We want to stay on the sidewalk.”
Kazuhiro blinks up at her like she’s speaking a foreign language. She knows he knows what a sidewalk is, but he doesn’t seem to remember right now.
“We want to keep going straight ahead,” she tells him, pointing her arm straight ahead down the concrete path bordering the playground. “Do you think you could try that?”
Kazuhiro is too little for the play structure and he probably wouldn’t enjoy it too much if he weren’t, so they keep their outings to the park confined to the grass and the sidewalks. Utahime had hoped that a little practice and lots of space to run without the risk of bumping into sharp corners or knocking things over would do his motor skills some good, but they really haven’t. Still, unerringly, Kazuhiro manages to veer off-course the moment he takes off running, and he never seems to know when that will take him straight towards an obstacle in his path. He never seems to get hurt, and those collisions obviously don’t upset him when all he does is stare at whatever he’d run into until someone gently snaps him out of it, but it seems like it might be a problem. Best to get out ahead of it.
“Okay,” Kazuhiro replies, clearly not understanding a single word.
“I know you can do it,” Utahime coaxes, kneeling in front of Kazuhiro with a hand on either of his arms to steady him. “Okay, Duckling?”
He nods, and as soon as Utahime releases his arms, he takes off again. It looks promising for the four seconds that he manages to run in a straight line before he veers to the left, off towards the grass; Utahime catches him by the back of his shirt so he won’t trip over tree roots or the inch-tall difference in height between the sidewalk and the grass.
“Careful, Duckling,” she says again.
He really does remind her of a duckling sometimes, running too fast on clumsy little legs, forever trailing after his mother. It’s an image she can’t deny she finds endearing – she, the mother duck, and four ducklings trailing after her in a height-ordered line with her clumsy, precious youngest bringing up the rear. But that hasn’t really been true in a while.
The girls are growing up now – too quickly – but Kazuhiro is still hers, confused and clumsy and too young to turn to anyone but his mother when he doesn’t know what to make of the world. He’ll be the last chance she gets to carry a sleepy toddler in from the car after a long drive, to sing a child to sleep, to witness the clumsy sweetness of the earliest growing-up stages. And, for better or for worse, he needs help in ways that his sisters never did. They walked without issue and he still stumbles even after a year and a half; they took to preschool like fish to water, and he doesn’t seem to understand what to do with a class full of people. It had almost felt like they hadn’t needed her help to grow, which she supposes with resigned disappointment is inevitable when one is dealing with Gojo Satoru’s children. Of course they’d been preternaturally gifted at just about everything. But there’s something just a little bit different about her Kazuhiro.
If it means that she’ll get to care for him and comfort him and remain his favorite and most trusted person for just a little longer, she’ll gladly take the complications.
**
4
“It might help him develop his fine motor skills,” the doctor had said. After two years of bumping into everything in his path and endless struggles at holding chopsticks or doing up buttons or tying shoes, it had been time for a professional opinion; Utahime thinks it’s a little bit fitting that, given her own predilections, music lessons had been the doctor’s order.
It’s a relief that nothing more drastic is required, but it’s heartening, too – she was trained as a musician, after all, when she was learning to use her technique, and though she never played an instrument, she knows the territory. But he doesn’t seem as eager as she is to to choose an instrument – none of the videos she’s chosen to demonstrate each instrument’s potential seem to strike his fancy.
“No,” he says, flatly rejecting the flute even though, personally, she thought he’d love the Intermezzo from Carmen. He’s sensitive to noise and he likes soft voices so she’d figured that he would like its gentle sound –apparently not.
“You sure?” she asks, shifting so she can balance him more comfortably on her knee at her desk chair. “Doesn’t it sound nice?”
“No,” he says again, and she doesn’t bother to press him.
“All right,” she says, closing out of the tab. He hadn’t been fond of the French horn or the oboe, either, so maybe he wants a change of pace. She clicks out of the video tab and tries a piano concerto, but he shakes his head fervently within a single chord.
“No piano,” he insists.
“No piano?” There goes her easiest option by far. “Don’t you want to listen a little more?”
“No. No piano.” He shakes his head again. “That’s for Kazukin.”
Ah, of course. She hadn’t considered that he might be opposed to playing the same instrument as his sister, who’d requested lessons rather than being ordered to take them, but perhaps he wants to stand out. “Okay, then how about this?”
Kazuhiro takes a few more seconds than he previously had to rule out the clarinet.
“Squeaky,” he tells her. She can’t really understand where he’s coming from, but she certainly isn’t going to insist. “Next one?”
“So picky,” she teases, opening a clip of a cello piece she’d read was supposed to be nice – her experience with classical instruments is admittedly limited. “How’s this one?”
This time, Kazuhiro listens for a minute or so – Utahime begins to feel hopeful again – before he shakes his head. “Too big.”
“They make smaller ones,” she tells him, gesturing to the cello in the recording. “This one is for an adult. You’d have one that fit you.”
“But it’s too big,” he insists.
“But you like how it sounds?”
Kazuhiro doesn’t say anything; she makes a gamble.
“Then maybe you’ll like this one,” she says. “It’s a lot like a cello, but it’s small.”
Not exactly, and she can tell by his rapt attention to the first ten seconds of a Bach violin partita that he doesn’t think so, either. But he doesn’t request that she turn it off, either, which she holds out hope will mean something.
“I like that one,” Kazuhiro tells her.
“The violin? Is that what you want to play?”
He nods. “Mmhm.”
**
“He wants violin lessons.” Utahime remembers an anecdote her husband likes to tell at parties or whenever he feels the need to embarrass Megumi in public and rolls her eyes. “Who’d have guessed?”
“Dunno, but that’ll be good for him, right?” Gojo glances over at his wife. “It’s gotta take coordination to play a violin.”
“That’s what we’re hoping. I doubt he’ll take to it, but if the doctor recommended music lessons…”
She doesn’t have to add how worried she is that it won’t work. She’s been silently fretting over Kazuhiro’s less-than-rapid development in the motor skills department since he learned to walk, and though she rarely wants to talk about it, Gojo knows that it weighs on her.
Kazuhiro has always been a little different – never so much so that he can’t seem ‘normal’ in front of those who don’t know him, but enough to worry his parents. It’s useless to compare children, but both experience and research have told them that Kazuhiro isn’t growing up the way the girls had, nor like the ‘typical child’ most parenting sites dispense advice on. And it’s no burden or bother when so much of Kazuhiro’s unassuming sweetness comes from the ways that he’s still a little bit slow, but the nagging thought that something about him is abnormal has a tendency to prod at them both.
Gojo knows exactly how badly Utahime wants this to work, because he knows her, and because – though Kazuhiro has never clung to him the way he clings to his mother – he wants it to work just as badly.
**
6
Kazuhiro doesn’t run into poles at the park anymore. It’s a relief, but a bittersweet one; he’s tall enough that the top of his head reaches a ways above Utahime’s waist now, and though she has to shorten her stride to keep him from falling behind, he can keep up. She only has to veer off-course to avoid a collision every ten minutes or so. And she finds herself wondering when her little boy went and got so grown-up.
Then he tugs on her sleeve like he always has, and she stops wondering.
“I don’t like school,” he tells her, certain that he has her attention.
“Why not?” she asks. He doesn’t usually need to hold her hand anymore – he isn’t an affectionate child – but she offers it anyway.
“It’s scary,” he tells her, and takes her offered hand. “Everyone’s loud there.”
“Oh.” There’s nothing she can do about it, but Utahime’s stomach drops guiltily – of course he’d be bothered by that. He’s never liked loud noises or people who raise their voices, and a kindergarten classroom is full of both. She can’t imagine what it has to be like, knowing how distressed he is when his sensitive ears are flooded with too much noise; she wishes she’d thought to talk to the teacher, but she hadn’t. “I’m sorry, Duckling.”
Another of her failings, she’s sure – she never remembers to tell her son’s teachers that, for all that he ‘seems normal,’ he struggles with things that come naturally to his peers.
“I don’t like it,” he repeats.
And what is she supposed to say to that?
**
10
Kazuhiro is like clockwork. It’s almost funny how aggressively he regulates his schedule at the tender age of ten, but the family is used to it by now. He’ll be home from school by two-thirty, then wait until two forty-five to take two trips down the hall from the room he shares with Reika to the guest room. On the first, he takes his violin case and sheet music; the second is to fetch his music stand.
Two forty-five is unquestionably Utahime’s favorite time of day. Because – no, he’s not perfect, though he’s certainly talented, and hearing eighty-seven renditions of the same tricky passage of the same Mozart concerto can be a little grating. But that repetitive practice, that drive to refine a passage until it’s drilled into his muscle memory in microscopic detail is proof that something worked. There’s no question about it – Kazuhiro took to music like a duckling to water, and the doctor’s order was unquestionably the right one.
Utahime works her schedule around his: at two forty-five, she moves into the office next to the guest room to grade papers or file mission reports, and through the paper-thin walls, she hears the proof that she’s found a way to help her son thrive.
**
11
“Talk to me, Duckling.” Utahime sits at the edge of Kazuhiro’s bed and tries, to no avail, to get him to look up at her. “Something on your mind?”
He looks up, then down again. “Don’t call me that.”
“Sorry, Hiro-kun,” she says, reaching out and squeezing his knee. “But you’re always gonna be my duckling.”
“Ew.”
That response is expected, at this point, but still stings more than it should. “Anyways. You seem a little bit off.”
“Oh,” he says.
At least he, unlike his sisters, never has the guile to pretend that he’s fine. If he doesn’t want to admit that he isn’t, a simple non-answer will do.
“Do you miss Rei-chan?” she guesses, glancing over at the empty bed on the other side of the room. “Is that what’s up?”
Kazuhiro looks over at Reika’s side of the room they used to share, then slowly nods. He knows he can’t hide from his mother, and he doesn’t want to – she’s always treasured that, the knowledge that he won’t retreat when he’s asked questions like his sisters do.
“She’ll forget about me,” he says, too matter-of-fact to sound sad. Kazuhiro has never expressed much emotion when he tells people how he feels, which he rarely does, and it’s easy to assume from his flat inflection that nothing bothers him. Utahime knows that’s not the case.
“No, she won’t,” she tells him, puzzled as to why he’d think that when she comes home to visit so frequently. “She comes home all the time.”
Kazuhiro shakes his head. “It’s a pattern. Kazuki forgot about Kimie, so Kimie forgot about Rei-chan, and Rei-chan is going to forget about me.” Of all his sisters, only his favorite gets a nickname – Kazuki and Kimie might as well be distant cousins for all the affection he feels for them, but never Reika. She’s the sister he loves more than anyone besides Utahime. “I’m not relevant. She doesn’t need to think about me. She won’t.”
Utahime doesn’t know a single other eleven-year-old who talks that way. But by now she’s learned not to get distracted by his stilted phrasing when it’s the emotion hiding behind his deadpan inflection that matter.
“Of course she’s not going to forget about you. She’s your sister,” Utahime replies. “And Kazuki and Kimie didn’t, either.”
He silences her with a really? look that she can’t do much to counter. Kazuhiro might live in his own little bubble half the time, insulated from his oldest sisters by age and the wiring of his brain and their differing interests, but even he hasn’t been unaffected by the rift between Kimie and Kazuki now that they’re old enough to resent each other. Even if the only way he shows it is by projecting that pattern onto the one sister he can’t bear to lose.
Utahime had thought the guilt she feels whenever she’s reminded that her daughters are estranged would dissipate now that Kazuki is graduated and Kimie is in Tokyo, but it can’t when not even her last-and-only youngest feels the strain.
“I’m irrelevant,” he tells her. “She’ll forget me.”
She doesn’t think comforting him would do any good when that would require her to explain how little of Kazuki and Kimie’s schism had to do with either one’s irrelevance.
**
14
Kazuhiro has an unfortunate habit of dropping his most relevant and important news at family dinners. It’s smart, certainly – he’s never the focus of anyone’s ire when an entire family of siblings who largely don’t get along are there to distract his parents. But it’s sort of irritating, too, because it rarely seems as if he cares about the fights he causes when he unthinkingly announces a decision or decides to psychoanalyze the family in the middle of one of their increasingly-rare meals together.
Reika, recently-graduated, prompts one such reveal on Kimie’s nineteenth birthday.
“Your class must be prepping for high school entrance exams, right?” she asks her brother, reaching to the center of the table for a croquette. (Reika’s love of appetizers is unrelenting.) When he nods, she follows up. “Must be annoying to have to do all of that when you don’t even have to take them.”
Kazuhiro tilts his head. “What do you mean by that?”
“Jujutsu Tech doesn’t require them. Did you not realize that?” Reika’s narrows her eyes. “Have you been studying this whole time, thinking you had to take a test to get in?”
“Oh.” That makes sense. “No, I know that. I’m just not going to Jujutsu Tech.”
Even Kazuki has the decency to look surprised.
“I don’t want to be a sorcerer,” he says, not quite sure why everyone seems so shocked. “Did you think that I did?”
“Um,” Kimie says, looking down into her bowl, “are you sure about that?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” Kazuhiro’s eyes narrow. “I don’t want to be a sorcerer and I never have.”
“But…”
You have to, Kazuki doesn’t finish.
“No, I don’t,” he says mildly. “Why would I? I wouldn’t be any good at it.” He, too, reaches for a croquette. “I’m going to conservatory.”
“You mean for violin?” Reika asks, raising her eyebrows. “Huh.”
“This is the first I’ve heard of that plan,” Gojo cuts in, neither upset nor entirely surprised. Really, he seems more amused than anything, which irritates Kazuhiro but isn’t worth commenting on. He’s had to get good at that, knowing when not to raise a fuss in a family of fuss-raisers. “Since when?”
“Since always,” he replies. “Did I ever indicate that I wanted to study anything else?”
“Sick,” Kimie says, dipping a croquette in a tiny bowl of sauce. “Do violinists get groupies?”
Utahime elbows her daughter under the table for that. “That’s not the kind of decision you can make without telling anyone, Hiro-kun,” she chides.
“Oh.” Probably not. Kazuhiro has never been good at knowing when something is expected of him. “Sorry.”
“I thought we all had to go to Tech,” Kazuki cuts in, looking down at her empty appetizer plate. “We don’t?”
“Not as far as I know,” Kazuhiro replies. He isn’t sure why she asked, and she looks sort of sad. He’s not close enough to Kazuki to be worried, but he can’t help but notice. “Did you think we were?”
**
“Kazukin has a stick up her butt about duty,” Reika explains with all the worldly wisdom of eighteen. “She went to Tech because that’s what she thought she was supposed to do. Never considered that she had other options. That’s why she got so weird about you saying you wanted to go to conservatory instead.”
“Oh.” Kazukiro picks at a loose thread on his quilt, frowning. “Why? Was she told that she had to?”
“No, she just decided.” Reika knows her brother well enough not to act surprised when he doesn’t understand things that seem second-nature to her. “Probably thought she didn’t have any other choice. But, I mean…she did. So do you.”
“Yeah.” Kazuhiro hugs his knees to his chest. “I…I know it probably sounds dumb, but all I really want to do is keep playing music, y’know? I’m not gonna go to school to be a sorcerer if I know I’d hate it.”
“You do you,” Reika says aimlessly.
“But…I feel like I did something wrong.”
“Nah. You just probably shoulda run it by Okaasan and Otosan before you went and announced it.” She sighs. “If it makes you happy, they’re not going to be mad.”
Kazuhiro looks up at his sister, notes her dull eyes and stringy hair, tries to bury his concern. She sounds fine, because Reika is an expert at pretending not to be bothered, but something about the way she’d said ‘if it makes you happy’ gives him pause.
“Rei-chan,” he asks, “did you like going to Jujutsu Tech?”
“Nah, but the job’s nice.” Reika hugs her own knees to her chest in imitation of her brother. “I like sorcery. It’s never boring and I’m good at it.”
“But you didn’t like going to school for it.”
“No, but where else was I going to go? Woulda looked weird if Gojo Satoru’s kid didn’t go to Tech.” Reika realizes what she’s said and winces. “Sorry. No offense.”
“None taken. I know I’m different.” Kazuhiro isn’t sure what compels him to get up and cross the room to sit beside Reika, tucking his legs back to his chest when he has, but he doesn’t see the need to fight the urge. “I’m a little weird. And slow. And I didn’t get Otosan’s technique. No one is gonna be disappointed if the runt of the litter goes to music school.”
“Hey,” Reika murmurs. She sounds hurt and Kazuhiro can’t figure out why. “Don’t say that stuff about yourself.”
“It’s objectively true.” He shrugs. “If I’d been the only possible heir, they’d have put some cousin in my place ‘cause I wasn’t good enough.”
“The Clan is stupid,” Reika says, resting her head on Kazuhiro’s shoulder. He’s four years younger but already taller than his sister at her adult height, and she feels small next to him. “Remember how you always told me I shouldn’t let people call me Six Eyes?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, don’t call yourself a runt.” She wraps an arm around his shoulders. “You’re not.”
“Rei-chan, it’s fine,” he tries to reassure her. “I have shortcomings. It’s okay to acknowledge that.”
“Who says?” she challenges. “The Clan? ‘Cause I thought we both decided that we were gonna petition Kimie to get rid of the Clan once she became the head.”
“No, we are,” Kazuhiro agreed. “It’s a horribly inefficient political system.”
“Weirdo.” She pokes his arm and he smiles, because at least Reika remembers that she’s allowed to call him that. She’s the only one allowed to call him that. “You’re too young to talk that fancy.”
“You’re too young to have a bottle of vodka under your bed,” he fires back.
“How’d you find out about that?”
“I smelled it,” he says, even though he’d actually gone looking after Kimie had made an offhanded comment about Reika’s newly-acquired drinking habit. “Don’t drink vodka. It kills your braincells.”
“Does it?”
“Probably.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I’m pretty sure.”
“The Clans are stupid,” Reika says again, evidently trying to dodge the rest of her brother’s warnings. “You’re not a runt.”
“Otosan’s aunt Narumi says I’m stupid,” he tells her. “And other things I don’t want to repeat.”
“Aunt Narumi is a bitch,” Reika says without an ounce of remorse. “And you can tell her I said that. In fact, I encourage you to. And you can tell Kaachan that I did.”
“Don’t curse,” Kazuhiro tells her. It’s a reflex now. “It demonstrates poor character.”
“Sometimes people are just bitches,” Reika replies. “Gotta call it like it is.”
“No.”
“Yeah.” Reika ruffles his hair. “You do.”
“Kaachan would be mad.”
“I’m eighteen. Kaachan can be mad if she wants.”
“Do you think Kaachan is mad at me?”
“Nah, you’re her favorite. Probably just wishes you’d talk to her.”
**
“You’re…not mad?”
“Why would I be mad, Duckling?” Utahime bites her lip so she won’t laugh at the unfounded anxiety in her son’s eyes – as if she would ever be upset about something like this. “You picked a career path that won’t put you in mortal danger and you think I’m going to be mad?”
“I failed to properly consult you before I picked a high school-“
“Well, yes, but to be fair, we didn’t really ask you.” She pats his hand across the table. “I guess we all assumed you’d go to the College-“
“Are you upset that I didn’t?”
“No, not even a little.”
“Really?”
“Music is safer,” she says. “And it’s the only thing you’ve ever really been interested in. Of course I’m not upset that you’re not going to be a sorcerer.”
“Is Otosan?”
“I know you think he doesn’t get it,” Utahime says softly. “But he wants you to go wherever you’ll be happiest. Really.”
“I…guess.”
“But,” she goes on, “I’m disappointed that you’re going to be all the way in Osaka.” She pouts jokingly, a habit she picked up from Gojo years ago. “It’s bad enough having Kimi-chan and Rei-chan in Tokyo-“
“The school with the best strings program is actually in Yokohama, but this one is closer to Kyoto.” He looks up at his mother to see if she’s getting the hint. “I’m not completely without regard for my filial duty or whatever.”
Utahime has never met another fourteen-year-old who uses phrases like ‘filial duty’ in everyday speech. She hopes she never will – that those quirky turns of phrase will always be her son’s trademark and no one else’s.
“Well,” she says, squeezing his hand, “that was sweet of you.”
“Not really.”
He’ll never admit to that, but he knows that it is, too.
**
16
Chamber music has to be the worst thing ever invented.
Orchestra is one thing. There are so many people in an orchestra that Kazuhiro never needs to talk to anyone but his stand partner, a mousy girl named Motomi, and he likes that just fine. People skills aren’t his forte, but he never wakes up in a cold sweat because he has an orchestra rehearsal in the morning.
But no – he needs to diversify his experiences. Never mind that he’s probably going to be a faceless violinist in a sea of orchestra musicians for the rest of his life (he has no illusions about making it as a soloist). Osaka Academy of the Performing Arts decrees it, so Gojo Kazuhiro, third-year, feared by all – at least, he thinks they must – is shoved, round in a square hole, into a string quartet.
He actually has to talk to people. It’s terrible. He’s the first violinist, of course; the second violinist is insufferable. The violist seems to want to be his friend, which is terrifying. The cellist is so pretty he doesn’t really know what to do with himself. It’s all so terribly unideal-
“Gojo-kun?”
He looks up from his sheet music, which he’d only been pretending to study. That voice – soft, lilting, gratingly pleasant – belongs to Eunha, the cellist. He knows nothing about her except that she is beautiful and half-Korean and has a voice that makes him feel like he’s sinking into warm honey, but that is more than troubling enough. And she’s the only person who’s ever called him that, Gojo-kun. That’s worse.
“Yeah,” he says, not really asking.
“The pickup to eighty-nine,” she says, tapping her stand with a pencil. “We’re restarting from the pickup to eighty-nine.”
**
17
“Yesterday was your birthday, wasn’t it?”
Kazuhiro wants to close his door – probably would, it if were anyone but Eunha on the other side. But it is Eunha, so he opens it just a crack.
“Tsubaki told me you were gone all afternoon.” Eunha gives him a little wave through the crack in the door that makes him want to combust and he doesn’t stop her from letting herself in. “Why didn’t you tell me it was your birthday?”
“My mom was visiting,” he explains. “That’s why I was out.”
“And?” Eunha sets her hands on her hips. “Why didn’t you tell us? Tsubaki and I had to find out in the student directory.”
He doesn’t even want to ask why the two members of his string quartet he can stand were stalking him in the student directory. “It didn’t seem relevant.”
That answer does not please Song Eunha at all.
**
“You’re really close to your mom, aren’t you.”
“I guess.” Kazuhiro brushes his hair out of his eyes, leaning against the railing with one arm as he looks aimlessly out over the canal. He doesn’t know what he’s looking at, but it’s better than looking at Eunha, whose loveliness is admittedly somewhat blinding, so he keeps looking. “I mean. Yeah. I do, um…we’re close.”
“That’s sweet,” Eunha comments. “I have a different ringtone for my mom than anyone else and I still break into a sweat when I hear it.”
“Why?” Kazuhiro turns to her, wondering why he’d never bothered to ask about any of this before.
“She’s nuts,” Eunha tells him. “So’s my dad. And since I’m an only child, I kinda take all the heat. Not like you.”
“Well, I’m the youngest,” he counters. “And the dumbest. They worry about it a lot.”
“I’ve met your sister. You’re definitely not,” Eunha says charitably.
She has, actually, met Reika. Sometimes she drops by his high school dormitory when she’s not drunk or on a mission; Kazuhiro does the same for her, restocking her supply of Bufferin, running a few loads of laundry, cleaning up her squalid Tokyo apartment. She’s a mess and he worries for her, but neither ever leaves the other hanging. “Rei-chan’s not dumb,” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets.
“No, but she’s a little bit of a mess. Not like you.” Eunha smiles. “I like her, though.”
“I like her, too.”
“But not your other two sisters,” Eunha guesses.
“It’s not that I don’t like them. They’re just…irrelevant.” Kazuhiro shrugs. “And I’m irrelevant to them.”
“Is that how siblings work?” Eunha’s nose scrunches. “That’s kinda messed-up.”
“No, it’s just how Jujutsu clans work.”
“Ew.”
“Ew,” Kazuhiro agrees.
“I’m surprised Reika didn’t come by for your birthday,” Eunha comments.
“She wanted to. Work.” Kazuhiro shrugs. “’s okay. She’s coming by this weekend.”
“Must be nice, having a whole family of teleporters.” Eunha laughs, leaning out over the railing and extending a hand to catch a passing breeze. “I still can’t get over that. How crazy is it that I know a guy whose sisters can teleport?”
“She’d teleport you if you asked,” Kazuhiro tells her. “I think.”
“Really?”
“Probably. Rei-chan’s kinda nuts like that.”
The thing he likes best about Eunha is that she knows immediately that he means that in the best way he knows how to.
**
18
“What are you doing?”
“Signing your case,” Eunha says innocently, uncapping a permanent marker and gesturing to Kazuhiro’s composite violin case. “To commemorate us not being in a quartet together anymore.”
Things Kazuhiro hates about graduation: reminders like those.
“Um…okay,” he says, too timid and a little too enchanted by the idea of Song Eunha’s autograph on his case (she’ll be famous, he’s sure of it) to say anything else. “Is Tsubaki going to sign it, too?”
“Maybe.” Eunha smiles impishly. “Maybe just me.”
Kazuhiro can count the things he truly loves on one hand: teppanyaki, the steady fall of fingers against the fingerboard as he warms up with scales, his mother, listening to Chopin in the glass-walled atrium with Tsubaki when it rains, Reika’s water-drop laughter. But Eunha signs his case in perfect katakana and thinks he might need a second hand.
Song Eunha, he thinks. And another to the list of things he hates: endings.
**
“Hiro-kyun likes a girl,” Kimie says.
Kazuhiro has been home all of two seconds, and his suitcase still sits in the hall, and he can’t help but sigh. Of course she would.
“Kazuhiro likes a girl?” even Kazuki, who normally ignores both Kimie and Kazuhiro, raises an eyebrow. “Since when?”
“Oh, you guys didn’t know about that?” Reika pokes her head through the doorway from the bedroom down the hall. “Seriously? Damn. I thought you guys were in the loop.”
“No, I had to find out because some girl wrote her name on his violin case,” Kimie replies. “Because our dear little brother-“
Kazuki glowers. “Doesn’t tell us anything.”
“Such is life.” Kimie shrugs. “He should be glad I’m feeling merciful.”
Kazuhiro mutters something under his breath that probably isn’t particularly kind.
**
Gojo isn’t asleep. Utahime knows that by now: face-down under the covers never means he’s really tired. If he’s really exhausted he’ll flop onto the comforter with all of his clothes on and she’ll have to wrangle him under the quilt to keep him from falling when she upsets the bedclothes. He’s probably waiting for the latest gossip.
That, she can most certainly provide.
“The girls are forcing Hiro to bring this girl he likes to dinner,” she tells him, and she can’t help but chuckle. “Thought that was supposed to be our job.”
“Ugh, no,” Gojo groans, turning over so he can grab at Utahime’s shirt lazily until she acquiesces and lies down next to him. “Don’t make me think about that.”
“About what?” Utahime asks, settling in under his arm. He’s ridiculous and she can’t understand how he’s still so clingy after twenty-one years of marriage, but she’s concluded that it’s a habit he’ll never outgrow. “Dinner with Hiro’s high school crush?”
“Hiro having a girlfriend, Hime.” He buries his face in the crook of his neck. “He’s not supposed to be old enough to have a girlfriend. ‘S against the rules.”
“You poor thing,” she teases, patting his back with very little real sympathy. “Finally found something you can’t do, hm? Can’t keep your babies from getting older.”
“It’s so tragic,” he whines. “They’re all adults. Who said they were allowed to be adults? I don’t like adults.”
“Empty nester syndrome,” she laughs. “Yup. Saw that one coming.”
“But you said you like this girl?”
“She’s lovely.”
“And Hiro likes this girl.”
“He seems to.”
“And she likes Hiro?”
“I mean, she did write her name on his violin case.”
“And you’re positive she’s not an assassin?”
“How many assassins would spend fifteen years learning to play the cello well enough to get into the Toha Conservatory” – Eunha’s university, one of the more prestigious in Japan – “just to get close to a mark?”
“You’d be surprised, Hime.”
“She’s fine, Satoru.” He’s still hiding in her shoulder, but he raises his head when she bends to kiss his cheek. “You’ll like her.”
“I will?”
“It’s hard not to. She’s sweet.” Utahime smiles to herself. “She talked my ear off about how she and Hiro and this other girl in their quartet went all over Osaka trying to find the best strawberry shortcake.”
“Good taste.”
“She might actually have a worse sugar habit than you do,” Utahime laughs. “She’s adorable. I promise you’ll like her.”
“If you say so,” he says.
That should be the end of things. But Utahime can’t help but let Gojo’s words percolate in her mind, and it’s all of ten minutes before they hit her like a wall of icy water.
“My little duckling isn’t a duckling anymore,” she murmurs, tucking her face against Gojo’s clavicle.
He’ll always be her duckling, but the thought that he might only be in memory now makes her feel like she’s aged a year in a second. He’s odd, and always will be, but he’s not a fussing baby or a klutzy, stumbling toddler or a confused grade-schooler anymore – he’s tall and lanky, like his father, and his elegant fingers are calloused with hours of practice over a decade and a half. He carries himself with a quiet dignity that she recognizes as her own, he keeps Reika company when she won’t let anyone else in, he thinks about things like girlfriends now, and the excerpts she hears from his bedroom when he practices are from Paganini Caprices and not clumsily-played Kreutzer etudes or his endless early repetitions of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. He’s hardly the little boy he was and he hardly acts as if he needs his mother.
She’s proud of him, endlessly so – she only wishes she’d known that being proud could make a person so, so sad.
**
“You must be Hiro-kyun’s girlfriend.” Kimie smiles wolfishly. “Good to meetcha. I’m Kimie.”
Eunha takes one look at Kimie – nearly identical to her brother in everything but her eyes, blue where Kazuhiro’s are brown – and blanches.
“Kimie,” Kazuki chides. “You’re scaring her.”
“Nah, she’s fine. See?” Kimie gestures to Eunha, who still looks petrified. “Nothing wrong with her!”
“Right,” Kazuki says faintly.
Eunha gets the feeling that this isn’t going to be an uneventful dinner.
**
“I’m about to do the most Gojo Satoru thing I’ve ever done,” Utahime announces, laying aside the wooden spoon she’d been using to stir and planting her hands on her hips.
True to form, her husband looks up from his vegetable-chopping at her voice. “Hm?”
“Hiro’s in the living room with Eunha and the girls,” she says. “I’m gonna embarrass him.”
“Embarrass him?” Gojo raises his eyebrows. “Didn’t think you had that in you.”
“Maybe you’ve rubbed off on me.” She knocks her elbow into his arm. “Dunno. I just saw an opportunity and I feel like I’m gonna regret it if I don’t take it.”
He nods, then waits for her to act.
It takes a moment – she gives him a few looks and nearly bursts out laughing several times before she finally manages to get the words out – but when she’s got her bearings back, she shouts, “duckling!”
No answer. She collapses into a fit of silent giggles. He’s ignoring me, she mouths, shoulders shaking with mirth – as if the object of his affections won’t know that he was the one being called if he doesn’t respond to that name.
“Duckling,” she calls again, once she can do it without laughing, “we need you to come set the table!”
“You are evil,” Gojo says under his breath.
“Wouldn’t have married you if I didn’t have a crazy streak, would I?” Utahime’s eyes dance with amusement. “Couldn’t pass up the chance to embarrass him a little.”
“I know,” he says. “I love you.”
**
“Finally! Took you a while,” Utahime says cheerily as soon as Kazuhiro enters. He’s brought Eunha with him, probably not at his own behest. “Doing okay, Duckling?”
He gives her the stoniest look he knows how to give.
“Mother,” he says through gritted teeth. “Not in front of the company.”
**
“Why ‘Duckling’?”
Kazuhiro looks like he’d rather die than hear his mother answer that question. Utahime briefly wonders if she’s gone too far, but Eunha certainly doesn’t seem the least bit put-off by that embarrassing remnant of his past, so she figures she’s not really jeopardizing anything by answering. “It was kind of an accident,” she says. “The onesie we brought him home in was yellow, and Satoru made this comment about how his hair felt like down, and it kinda just clicked. So we started calling him Duckling.” She smiles at the memory. “And I guess it just stuck.”
“That’s so sweet,” Eunha replies, wide-eyed.
Kazuhiro still looks like he wishes the wall would absorb him.
**
“Oh, are we embarrassing Hiro?” Kimie smirks. “Didja tell her about how he used to run into everything as a kid?”
“Or how he talked like a dictionary when he was in grade school and Kimie would make him help her study for Japanese tests because he was freakishly good at remembering obscure kanji,” Kazuki adds.
“Or how he cleans my apartment more often than I do?”
“That’s not even embarrassing.” Kimie side-eyes her sister. “Except maybe for you.”
“Guys,” Kazuhiro cuts in, sounding a little faint. “Could we maybe not?”
**
“I am so sorry you had to sit through that.”
“Don’t be.” Eunha smiles, poking Kazuhiro’s arm to get him to look up. “I love them.”
“You do?”
She nods. “They’re a lot of fun.”
“Well,” he sighs, “I’m glad someone thinks so.”
**
22
January
Time passes, wings unfurl, changes come and go; the Gojos have season tickets to the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra not for their son but for Song Eunha, principal cellist. Kazuhiro had always insisted she was better than him and never without reason.
But Reika never favors those concerts.
It’s almost easy to believe things are fine, sitting in the very back of a crowded Yokohama concert hall as the Kanagawa Philharmonic tunes to the oboe. Her brother – fourth stand, first violin, impressive for such a young musician – is impossible to find even with his shock of white hair, but she doesn’t need to. There’s something about the rarefied feeling of watching an orchestra and the fact that she has an ally onstage whether he knows she’s watching or not that comforts her.
Here, she’s not Gojo Reika, barely able to drag herself out of bed when she’s called in for a mission. With her striking bob and easy good looks, no one here would know that her head is still pounding after last night’s appointment with the bottle; no one would know she had a brother in the orchestra, either, whose life and direction are far more stable than her own. It’s Reika who had all the potential – all the coordination and social adeptness that Kazuhiro never did, all of the Clan’s favor as a bearer of the Six Eyes – but it’s he with the steady maturity, the sterling career, the dimple-cheeked girlfriend with a list of accomplishments even more impressive than his. But that doesn’t make her jealous.
Only a little hollow, knowing she had the potential and wasted it. She likes being here to see that her brother didn’t.
Shostakovich, the program reads when she flips past all of the ads to the page that lists the night’s selections. She scans the informational blurb beneath the list of the pieces and composers; she doesn’t like to read, really, but it talks about a city under siege and a silent cry of grief and she thinks that she likes this Fifth Symphony already.
Maybe tonight she’ll listen and forget.
**
22
April
Kazuki had come to Yokohama tonight – alone, unaccompanied even though her husband had offered – only for the program. A Russian soloist whose name she doesn’t recognize is to lpay piano concerto she’d dreamed of playing as a little girl, before sorcery had made it impossible to keep up with her lessons; that is the only reason for her presence at her brother’s first concert of the spring concert cycle. She regrets that.
Kazuhiro is nearly as tall as their father and impossible not to spot from the front row with his white hair and lanky build, and it strikes Kazuki that it’s been ages since she saw him last. Ages since she saw any of them, really – not since the wedding. She comes tonight to let this orchestra play for the baby her siblings had learned about in a FaceBook post. And the opening chords of the concerto sound like a call to arms.
I’ve been so cruel, she thinks, and she doesn’t know where on earth to start to do something about it.
**
22
June
There’s no place Kimie would less like to be than a crowded symphony hall tonight, but the tickets had been free and Haruki had insisted. It’s part of his ten-step “Get Kimie’s Life Together” plan, going out more. If nothing else, she takes comfort in the fact he’s as out-of-place in a suit and at a concert as she is, if not more so.
You should support him, Haruki had said, then launched into some lengthy anecdote about how his family had rallied around his second-youngest brother when he’d announced his intention of going to dental school even though none of them could pretend to understand why he’d want to. I’m sure he cares about you.
He doesn’t, but that doesn’t hurt Kimie much. Kazuhiro lives in his own little bubble, isolated by age and profession from his sisters, and she doesn’t blame him. It’s not exactly fun in the wider world, trying to run from reminders of her family’s estrangement. She wonders if Kazuhiro even knows that they’re estranged – he probably doesn’t.
“You okay?”
Haruki notices her stiffen and presses his hand over hers.
“Yeah,” she says, nodding slightly and flipping her hand to lace her fingers through his. “I’m good.”
**
23
September
The ticket-takers and the senior citizens who frequent the Kanagawa Philharmonic’s concerts all know the Gojos now. Sort of. For all they know, they’re a sweet middle-aged couple of teachers whose son, fresh out of music school, is a violinist; if the husband’s impeccable clothes make them seem far too wealthy to be schoolteachers, nobody mentions it. They’re loved here, fixtures after a few months, and bored concierge workers and lonely widows seeking consolation in music think the way that the wife still clings to her husband’s arm after decades is sweet.
They’re proud of that – being normal, not sorcerers or clan heads or the strongest anything, but as an ordinary husband and wife who are proud of their son and who love good music. Gojo can’t honestly say that he knows what’s going on, but Kazuhiro is somehow involved, and Utahime loves their symphony nights, and that is reason enough to enjoy it. Normalcy – it’s hard to come by in this line of work. Neither can help but be grateful that one of their children had the foresight not to follow in their footsteps.
Perhaps it’s frowned upon, but Utahime’s a little old for caring, and she leans her head against her husband’s shoulder when the curtain rises. Love you, she’s saying without words.
We made that, says his squeeze of her hand when he spots Kazuhiro.
We did, says her return squeeze.
He’s come so far, her duckling has.