Chapter Text
“You’re very well-behaved,” Emma told her son, and he offered her a gummy babble in return.
It was tradition to name your child something of an inside joke, in her husband’s family. A child adopted in the summer might be named Fuyumi for a ‘winter beauty’, or Mahiro for ‘largely correct’ if they weren’t the first choice. She used to think it was funny until her husband had taken one look at the blonde wisps of hair and declared their child to be named Shinji.
‘True Child’. Or, if you added the surname from his father's family, Hirako Shinji — ‘Plain Truth’.
She sighed. “You would have made a brilliant Shinji Shayk,” she said quietly, rocking him back and forth.
It didn’t matter that half Emma’s family on her father’s side were all blond, or that they were originally foreigners from the West Branch of the Reverse World where blonds were all the more common, or that her own brown hair looked so much closer to gold in the sun.
She fought him on it, of course she did. That was his ramrod straight hair to her waves, his wide mouth and thin lips to her full cupid’s bow, his brown eyes to her green. Shinji was his as much as he was hers, she swore up and down, in every single way.
Both of them were allowed to stay.
(She felt like she had lost, anyways.)
The first time he truly acknowledged his eldest grandson after his disastrous naming ceremony was a decade later.
There was a question, posed during their yearly flower-viewing, spoken out of turn. He thought it might even have been an interesting one, something that should have been beyond the child’s comprehension to ask, but that mattered little in the face of the Kansai-ben it was drawled in. Improper language, like the filth around them spoke.
It did not matter that they lived in— owned— the Thirty-First District, or that their nobility was minor. Not when his son was blessed with a born child, which was the only reason why he deigned to consider the boy to be kin. Most souls simply appeared at the age that they died and were relocated into the Rukongai, but a birth in the Soul Society? Few managed it, and almost all accounts were from noble families in the Seireitei. Supposedly, a soul-birth introduced a new soul unto the cycle to replace those lost to the stagnant world of Hueco Mundo and purged from the cycle by the cursed quincy. A blessing from the Soul King; a sign that they were worthy.
Teeth bared in a smile, he selected a firm rod from the closet. He would correct this tongue from the fool boy, unworthy as it was to be spoken by someone of their prestigious position.
(He would hear that drawl for the next three decades until his passing.)
Shinji-nii ate a lot, Naruhito remembered, until suddenly he didn’t. And it wasn’t that they were poor— the furthest thing from it, Ojii-sama claimed— but he remembered his mother and harsh whispers in his grandfather’s study, and Shinji-nii growing thinner and thinner for years until Otou-san left with him one day and came back alone.
Shinji wrote letters, sometimes. He was at Shin’ou Academy, the one where they trained shinigami, and he got to learn magic and carry around a sword and eat two entire meals a day and speak however as he wanted. Naruhito wrote back that he was going to be sent off to a boring old academy for scholars and moaned about their father’s awkwardness in trying to drag him into bonding activities, and Shinji doodled a cackling chibi in reply.
Really, if their father was going to bond with either of them, it should have been his brother. Naruhito was just some kid they’d picked off the streets who hadn’t been around long enough to pick up the dialect of the Thirty-First yet, which apparently was all their grandfather needed to adopt him? Shinji was Ojii-sama’s actual flesh-and-blood, and Naruhito had heard the gossipy women in the market and their kids talk about how lucky Otou-san and Mum were.
Two of his cousins— adopted, like him— flung the door aside with identical grins and a ball in hand. He quickly signed off on his letter and left it to dry before running after them, a grin of his own stretching wide. Time to make the most of it before he got locked away in a smelly old room full of books.
(Decades later, in an old room full of books with laugh-lines and silver on his head, he fell asleep and didn’t wake up. He would have laughed at Shinji-nii’s smooth face and perfect head of gold like he usually did when his brother visited, if it wasn’t for the fact that it was for Naruhito’s own funeral.)