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There’s an uneasy familiarity to the feeling of resistance beneath a knife. It’s not really something Maki would expect to be reminded of in a setting as domestic as the kitchen of her sister-in-law’s vacation home in Katsuragi, but dried persimmons have a gellish texture with just enough give to be cut but not so much that they don’t resist her knife. It’s no new sensation to a woman who’s had to hack through far worse than dried fruit before.
Don’t be so morbid, she thinks, shaking herself. She’s only recently learned to hate the way that the violence of the rest of her life slips into the peace of her home sometimes. The last place she wants to be thinking about sawing off curse limbs is on a rare weekend away, slicing up hoshigaki for her six-year-old son. They’re a specialty around here and she’d been warned a thousand times not to miss out, even though she’s never understood the appeal of eating something that looks so suspiciously corpselike on the outside, but Shinsuke can’t get enough of them.
Good. He’s too young to be associating his recently-discovered favorite snack with anything as vile.
He never seems to get cold, even when he’s not dressed in enough layers and he should ( since when do I worry about things like that?), and she finds him on the engawa when she’s finished cutting the hoshigaki, setting the plate down next to Shinsuke before she sits down herself. He looks up at her but doesn’t say anything.
“I don’t know why you like this stuff so much, bug,” she tells him. Shinsuke, customarily, only shrugs. She pushes the plate closer. “But eat up.”
“Thanks,” he says, softspoken as usual, and reaches for the plate. He’s not looking at his mother - apparently the autumn-reddened maple trees on either side of the front gate are far more interesting - but she knows not to take it personally. Shinsuke doesn’t like eye contact; neither does Yuuta, when it’s anyone but her.
Sometimes the silence stretches on too long, though. Tsugumi would usually fill it, but Tsugumi had wanted to go into town with her father, so there’s no one to start up a conversation if she doesn’t. She doesn’t mind her son’s reticence, but she can’t help but feel, sometimes, like it’s proof that she simply doesn’t interest him - that, if true, would sting. She’d longed for her parents’ love in vain for so long that she’d never stopped to wonder if parents (the good ones) ever longed for their children’s love just as much.
And it’s not that she does. She knows that Shinsuke loves his family. It’s just…
Awkward. That’s the word. And Maki hates very little more than the feeling that she doesn’t know how to talk to her own son.
Sometimes she feels without reason like he knows she has too many hard edges for someone as soft and sensitive as he is - she’d looked at his favorite snack and seen curse flesh, felt it give beneath her knife when she’d sliced it up to give to him and thought of violence. He’s hard to talk to, even though he means well, and though she loves her children so fiercely that it aches, she’s never been entirely sure that he’s safe in her hands. It’s hard to believe - after so long - that her hands are safe for anyone, let alone a little child.
Other mothers she knows are forever reaching for their children, but not Maki - she would draw away if Shinsuke reached for her hand now, taut as she feels every time she’s had a weapon in her hand even for a purpose as noble as cutting up fruit for her son. It had been easy when they were babies, but the older her twins grow, the harder it gets to touch them and believe she isn’t staining them with the blood on her hands.
Only with Yuuta, who knows violence as well as she does, can she love with the same hands that kill; with her children - still so young, still so pure - it is risking too much. She can cut hoshigaki and sit beside Shinsuke while he eats, she can pack them the warmest clothes they have for weekend trips when it might be chilly, she can kiss their foreheads when they’re half-asleep, she can tell them they can always come to her - but right now, Maki thinks that she couldn’t reach over and hold Shinsuke’s hand if her life depended on it.
She despairs herself of that sometimes. Six-year-olds should be able to reach for their mother’s hands when they cross the street without worrying that they’ll be turned away. She’ll never forget the time Shinsuke had tried - he’d turned those wide, sad blue eyes on her as if to ask her why he couldn’t have the security of his hand around hers. She’d frozen, not because she hadn’t wanted to but because entirely without realizing it she’d trained herself to believe that she couldn’t.
It had taken her so long to regain the ease with which she’d touched Yuuta when they first met after what she’d done at the Zenin estate, and she’d still felt guilty. She had relented, in the end, not for the sake of his happiness but because he’d assured her that his hands were as filthy as her own. But Shinsuke and Tsugumi can’t make that claim, and she cannot - cannot - touch something as precious as her own flesh and blood with unclean hands.
Sometimes she tries anyways, reminding herself that she’d wanted her mother’s touch more than almost anything at the twins’ age, and the way they look up at her with the sweetest kind of surprise on their faces when she does almost makes her wish she did it more often. But that is the quieter of the two voices in her head; the louder tells her to pull away, stay safe, love her children from afar no matter how wrong it feels, because she is not the mother they deserve.
They’re too sweet for her - Shinsuke, who is so shy that she’d hidden behind her legs when she’d tried to drop him off for his first day of kindergarten, and Tsugumi, who even at six is doggedly determined to look out for her shy twin in any way she can. They’re the best of her, the best of Yuuta, the best this world has to offer, because children who haven’t yet learned not to be good to each other always are, and she…she is broken, she thinks of killing when she cuts the fruit that her son loves to eat, she has shattered so many times and forgotten how to put herself back together on her own. (She used to be so good at doing things on her own - how it’s weakened her, being loved so dearly.)
And she loves this family, this life. But she is certain that she does not deserve them. And even after nine years, she doesn’t know how to ignore the voices in her head telling her that she’s only as strong as she is when she doesn’t ask for help, that she’s meant for crueler things than marriage and motherhood, that she’s damaged and spreading her rot to the people she holds dearest.
Absentminded, Maki looks down at the plate of persimmons - empty but for one. He must’ve been eating them as quickly as he could, or else she’s been lost in thought for longer than she’d realized. Shinsuke notices her watching him and meets her eyes with a faint smile as he takes the last slice of persimmon.
“Did I pick good ones this time?” she asks, trying to muster a smile.
“Mmhm,” Shinsuke tells her. “They taste like cinnamon.”
Maki doesn’t see the appeal. “Is that a good thing?”
“Yeah.”
This time her smile, if strained, is real. “Good.”
“Thanks,” he says, kicking one of his shoes against the edge of the veranda. Sometimes Maki wonders if Yuuta used to do that when he was younger and carefree - Shinsuke looks so much like him in every feature but his hair that it’s impossible not to compare the two. Maybe he had; maybe he’d stopped.
At least - she can’t say much for herself as a mother, but she can say this - he won’t have to stop.
It’s not a risk she should take, but Maki reaches over and ruffles her son’s hair. “Any time, bug.”
She has no idea why she started calling him that - probably stole it from Nobara, who has too many kids and too many nicknames for them and too many variations on those nicknames - but it fits. It doesn’t make sense (does the word ‘bug’ ever have a positive connotation?), but it’s affectionate without being cloyingly sweet and it tells him that she loves him, no matter how hard it is for her to show it. For what it’s worth, he never tells her to stop. She’ll take that as a ‘go ahead,’ because she doesn’t want to.
Stop, that is.
**
“I was cutting persimmons today,” Maki says, her hands combing out the post-shower tangles in Yuuta’s hair as he rests his head on a towel laid across her stomach. “Thought about hacking off curse limbs.”
“Maki-chan,” he says gently. “We’ve talked about this.”
“I know, Yuuta, it’s just-”
“You can’t control those thoughts,” he cuts her off, gentle as ever.
“Yeah, but-”
“Maki,” he says, more firmly. “You can’t.”
“Maybe,” she says weakly.
“You know I’m going to keep telling you that until you believe it, right?”
“Yuuta,” she murmurs. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what, Maki?” he lifts his head, raising himself on his elbows to look at her. “Don’t help you?”
“I don’t need-”
“The things we’ve seen weren’t our fault, Maki.” His eyes always look a deeper blue when he’s like this, liquid-earnest. “I’m going to keep telling you that until the day I die.”
Or the day she believes him, the day she can cross the street with Tsugumi’s hand in one of hers and Shinsuke’s in the other because she’s no longer afraid to stain them - whichever comes first.
“I know that,” she says, fragile. “I…I promise I know that.”
“I know you do,” Yuuta says, lying down, “but you don’t feel it.”
“No.” He’s always been able to read her. “I don’t.”
“I’ll keep trying,” he says, sweet, honey-tinged without a hint of falseness. “I’m good at making you feel things.”
The corners of her eyes lift as she smiles. Nine years ago, the thought of hearing Yuuta make a joke like that would’ve been unfathomable. He’s so much more confident now, so self-assured - it warms her chest with pride to know that she did that. She, and her insistent praise and her dauntless faith in him and her choice to be a mother when she could think of nothing more terrifying, and no one else, is the reason he can tease, can crack jokes. He is the one good thing she has ever done.
It is not enough for belief, but it’s a start.
“Good luck,” she says wearily.
“I don’t need it,” he says, lifting his head to edge aside the towel and lift her shirt so his cheek touches the bare skin of her stomach. “I’m not trying to convince you of anything that isn’t true.”
“Yuuta-”
“Your thoughts don’t come from you, Maki,” he interrupts, delicate, somehow still firm, his hands smoothing over the planes of her stomach to the spot that’s just the slightest bit softer than the rest - her body’s only reminder of her having carried twins. That spot is barely even visible, but it’s always felt incongruous with the harshness she expects of herself - a little softness in all that hard, corded muscle. She wonders why he’d chosen to point her there.
“Your body isn’t a weapon,” he murmurs, pressing his lips to the spot, then pulls her shirt back down and raises himself to her eye level. He takes her hand and pulls it to his lips, which graze her knuckles, then his chest. She watches, transfixed.
“Your hands,” he says, opening the palm, kissing its center. “They’re not dirty.”
“Yuuta…”
“You can love them,” he tells her. “You don’t have to hide.”
He knows she doesn’t believe him, but they’ve done a thousand variations on the same exercise a thousand times now, and it never discourages him. Maybe that’s his goal, wearing her down chip by chip. He might succeed. He might not.
He looks at her, liquid-earnest - those are Shinsuke’s eyes, too. Tsugumi’s.
She’ll let him try.