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The third morning after Miri insists they sleep together, like a real family, as she puts it, Rei wakes up to sunlight streaming through the window and not little feet jumping on his chest—which is a welcome change. A glance to his right confirms that Miri’s still fast asleep next to him, her hair fanned out across both pillows, while Kazuki’s side of the bed is empty.
How horribly domestic: Kazuki’s side of the bed. A bed in a room filled with his things—even though he doesn’t pay rent—erring just on the side of too small to share, with a child calling them both her fathers; this whole situation is starting to get unnecessarily complicated. Admittedly, though, Rei thinks he’s probably slept better in the last few nights of them humoring Miri’s request than he has in the last six months at least. He checks over his shoulder out of habit before tucking Miri into her blankets, lightly patting the top of her head and immediately feeling ridiculous. Do kids even like that kind of thing? It seems more like the kind of way you’d treat a small puppy.
Either way, it’s not like he would know—Rei doesn’t have much experience with either. In the kitchen, Kazuki is studying his laptop so intently that it looks like he’s reviewing mission details until Rei catches a glimpse of the brightly colored children’s outfits on the screen.
“Buying clothes,” he explains. “For Miri, not myself.”
On his screen, there’s a preview open for a pink-and-orange raincoat that is only available in sizes labeled little girl and big girl. “I can see that,” Rei adds dryly.
“Yeah,” Kazuki responds, still focused on cleaning up the online shopping tabs he has open.
“So I guess that’s it, then?”
“You were ready to kill her a few days ago,” Kazuki says, not looking up from his laptop.
“Yes,” Rei agrees, because it’s true. When he’d suggested taking a shot right through her, she’d been an asset, not a person—much less a child. He’d been trained for that: quick compartmentalization, turning undoubtedly complex people into paper-thin cutouts. You couldn’t think for too long about the lives and hobbies and families of your targets without going insane. He stays quiet for a moment. “You still haven’t told me what exactly happened with her mother.”
They haven’t had the time—Miri may be too young to grasp half the things they say about work in front of her, but you’re never going to see your mother again might be a different story. “You got the picture,” Kazuki says, finally looking up at him. “She didn’t want her.”
Kazuki tends to be a pretty good judge of personality—it’s why he tends to handle the people side of their assignments. If he thinks there’s really no hope at all for them being able to take Miri back to her mother, as his tone seems to suggest, there probably isn’t.
Still, the whole idea of family—of children, really—is something like his blindspot. Not that Rei would ever say this out loud, but. “And what did you tell her, exactly?” he asks.
“If I could’ve gotten her to take Miri, I would have,” Kazuki responds, sharp. He’s being overly defensive. Rei doesn’t mention it. “But—it’s a violent environment. And then she started talking about how grating her voice is, and I just couldn’t leave Miri there. She doesn’t want to be a parent. I asked if she felt that pang of motherly instinct and she just talked about how much she hated her. What kind of parent hears the sound of their own child’s happiness and resents it?”
Once, when Rei was eight, his father had caught him feeding one of the estate guard dogs and killed it on the spot. “I don’t know,” he says. Then, “we live in a violent environment, too.” And for good measure, “if you think all women have a secret ‘motherly instinct’, I think I might be able to tell you why you can’t get a girlfriend.”
“I don’t mean it like that,” Kazuki responds. “I meant it, like… when you see something small and defenseless, don’t you feel bad? It’s human to feel bad, I think. Anyone would.”
He’s saying something instead of someone because he’s appealing to Rei’s tendency to take in strays; it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out. But animals are different from a living, breathing little girl. Sure, they’re alive, but they can’t talk, or tell you things, or call you papa. Rei’s never looked into the eyes of a street cat and been forced to confront his six-year-old self.
So maybe it’s normal to feel bad, but it’s a lot more complicated than that. And besides, normality has always been something of an unfamiliar concept for Rei—he took out his first target before taking his first calculus class. There’s a clear disconnect between him and other people; Kazuki is merely an exception to the rule. “If we try to get rid of her,” he says, logical, “there’ll only be more questions to answer.”
Kazuki exhales heavily. “Right,” he says. “Right! It’d cause more problems than it’d solve. So the best course of action, really, would be to take her in.”
Rei doesn’t say anything. It’s clear as to why there isn’t much room for things like family in this line of work; Kazuki is usually the one stressing it. To tie yourself down to people—to connect with them, to care deeply about them, to love them—is never a good idea. All it means is that there’s one more person your opposition might take out in their efforts to get to you.
A formal attachment is a death sentence. Rei had learned this by nature of being born. Kazuki, he knows, learned this lesson the hard way. It’s part of why Rei has never once called Kazuki anything other than his partner, not even his friend. To imply anything past a work relationship would be to open them both up to weaknesses they can’t afford. Putting a child into that kind of situation would be crazy.
“Probably,” Rei says simply.
“Besides,” Kazuki adds, “you’ve been actually sleeping lately. At this rate, those permanent dark circles of yours might actually have a chance of going away.”
“I thought you weren’t going to comment on that.”
“I usually wouldn’t,” he returns, “but you know I notice those things about you.”
“Okay,” Rei says, and that’s that. Kazuki taps his fingers on the table.
“If you think,” he starts, and hesitates. “It doesn’t have to change anything.”
But it does—not changing anything would mean dragging Miri through gunfire until her motor skills are strong enough to allow her to fire a pistol on her own, and that kind of life isn’t one Rei is eager to pass on to anyone. She may not get to have a normal life, but she shouldn’t have to have a bad one.
“It will change things,” he says.
Kazuki shakes his head. “For us, I mean,” and Rei’s about to tell him that he got that already, genius, before realizing that he means them—as in, the two of them, not their shared profession.
He doesn’t bother answering that, because he’s pretty sure the answer is it will, again, and they both have enough to deal with right now. Kazuki turns back to his laptop. “She said her favorite color is purple,” he says, “so I’m doing my best to keep that in mind.”
You would have made a great father, Rei doesn’t say, because that would dredge up too many memories, and they don’t talk about themselves often; too dangerous, as always. Instead, he powers on his console and keeps silent. The familiar controls should be an easy distraction—if you make your child reassemble enough assault rifles when they’re young, they just might grow up to play violent video games—but he still finds himself barely paying attention to the screen, caught on the idea that there’s a little girl asleep in the other room who genuinely believes he’s her father.
Miri enters at half-past nine, tapping at Kazuki’s knee until he relents and lets her sit on his lap. Rei watches from the couch as she makes her own fashion judgements, ignoring Kazuki’s protests about how his choices weren’t that bad, Miri, you’re being a little too harsh.
He doesn’t need to ask himself what his father would have done in his situation, because he already knows—one bullet between the eyes and he'd never have thought about it again.
Miri didn’t ask to be born to a father like hers. Rei hadn’t, either. It’d be hypocritical of him to fault her for something like that.
“Papa Rei,” she says, very seriously, “do you like this?” He follows the line of her pointer finger to the screen to find an extremely hideous pair of patchwork overalls.
Kazuki doesn’t say anything; just raises his eyebrows. “…It’s ugly,” Rei says finally, and Miri laughs, high and loud, clapping her little hands together.
He still doesn’t smile. Rei isn’t a father, not really, and he never will be. Not legally, not biologically, and perhaps that’s for the best, because formal attachments never work. But in terms of informal attachments, maybe—he watches as Kazuki holds up a finger for Miri to play with—he can make another exception to the rule.