Work Text:
Maki is fresh out of energy today.
She had only been assigned one simple exorcism today, nothing exhausting, and she’d planned to use the extra time for some of the little things she’d never realized before that mothers had to make time for. She could use the extra hours to work out scheduling for the next few weeks; she’d sort of been looking forward to it. She counted on that on-call time for things like this. But that had gone out the window the moment she saw the stack of paperwork that the local government had slapped on her desk.
That, of course, meant that the woman who was paid to deal with insurance claims was out of the office, so Maki had had no choice but to do it herself. Then, some lower-level bureaucrat at city hall, no doubt puffed up by the realization that he was dealing with a woman, had forced her to sit through three hours of nitpicking about the small details of the paperwork that she hadn’t been trained to attend to until she wanted to strangle him. And by the time she (just barely) makes it to the twins’ kindergarten in time to pick them up, she’s about ready to stalk off and smack the punching bag in the garage until she collapses with exhaustion.
Needless to say, this is not the day she would have chosen to be reminded that her daughter has never run out of energy in her life.
It’s not as if Maki and Yuuta don’t do everything they can to wear Tsugumi out. She’s up like clockwork at six in the morning, and half of those mornings they find her practicing aerials and walkovers on the tatami in their empty guest room. Kindergarten lasts until two, and after that, there is nearly always gymnastics or volleyball or swimming. She comes home after hours and hours of exercise and eats enough to put a grown man in a coma, and by all means, she really should be exhausted. She’s five, for crying out loud.
But today, in the pharmacy, having decided well in advance (everything Tsugumi does that she shouldn’t do is premeditated) to die on the hill of insisting upon fried chicken for dinner, Tsugumi seems like she’s just woken up, and Maki is at her wit’s end.
“We can’t have fried chicken every day,” she says for what feels like the sixteenth time, trying to keep her voice measured. “Fried stuff is bad for your heart.”
“But it’s okay because I get lots of exercise.”
Maki, who had been raised on a much-maligned vegetarian diet and eaten nothing with nutritional value for nearly a decade after being set loose in high school, does her best to explain to her young twins why neither of those extremes in diet is ideal, but right now, she’s too tired to be proud that it’s taken. At another time, it would amuse her that her kindergartener understands how calories work. Now it just grates on her nerves that she thinks she can bargain about this.
It’s been a hard day at work, and Yuuta’s has been even harder, and the only thing she wants is to pick up her children and her husband’s allergy medication and go home. It should be so easy. Shinsuke is perfectly quiet, worn out from a long day of being afraid of people and trailing behind her like a little duck. But Tsugumi just won’t let things run smoothly if there’s something she wants.
“We have chicken at home,” Maki replies through gritted teeth.
“But that’s not fried chicken.”
Of course the five-year-old will remember what was for dinner last night when it’s inconvenient.
“Tsugumi, we’re not getting fried chicken.”
“But why?”
“It’s not good for you.”
“But it doesn’t matter if-”
“I don’t care how much exercise you get, fried food is fried.”
“But-”
“ Tsugumi,” she snaps.
Tsugumi’s voice wobbles, rises in volume. “ Mama.”
They’re getting close to the front of the pharmacy line now, and the little old lady in front of them shifts slightly in a way that lets Maki know she’s listening. She pinches the bridge of her nose, but it does nothing to stave off the oncoming headache or the onrushing frustration trying to escape.
“I’m not going to change my mind, Tsugumi, why can’t you ever just listen to me the first time I say something?”
She doesn’t realize she’s raised her voice until somebody in front of them in line turns to look, something almost no one is bold enough to do. When she sees that, she looks down at Tsugumi, who looks so stunned that her little face is bright-red with shame and her eyes moist, and Shinsuke, so quiet behind her that she’s almost forgotten him, tugs at the leg of her pants.
“I thought it was okay to have fried chicken.” Tsugumi sniffles, her voice beginning to wobble again. “If I got lots of exercise. And I did ‘cause”-her voice hitches–“sensei made us do push-ups a bunch today.”
“Well,” she snaps, “obviously you thought wrong.”
Tsugumi’s lip wobbles. She’s not angry, she’s not going to throw a tantrum–that look is different–but her face is crestfallen, and Shinsuke keeps tugging at her pant leg, ever more insistent.
“Mama,” he says quietly, a little scared. “Tsu-
chan
isn’t being bad, Mama.”
She asks for Yuuta’s medicine blankly, ignoring the stares, and walks out of the pharmacy barely aware of where she’s going. Neither of her twins leans against her on the train home. What will later probably be guilt is brewing in the pit of her stomach, but so much of what she feels is the pent-up frustration of having to be somebody’s punching bag for the day that she doesn’t think about it much. A cursory platitude offered to Shinsuke so that he won’t start crying is all she can manage.
Then they’re home, and Yuuta greets them with so much warmth that one would think he’d never worked a day in his life, and she finally notices that there are unshed tears in Tsugumi’s eyes, and she can’t not think about it anymore.
She tries to run from the room when Yuuta greets her. A tear slips down her cheek, and Maki tries to call after her, realizing only now that she’s seen Yuuta greet the twins the way she was supposed to earlier.
She won’t come, though. Tsugumi turns her head–Maki can see a few more tears fall in the seconds she’s looking at her mother–but the moment she opens her mouth to apologize, Tsugumi shakes her head vehemently and bolts for her bedroom. And Maki is left kneeling in the middle of the kitchen, her hand extended as if to reach out and catch her fleeing daughter, and she feels her chin start to tremble.
Everyone and everything is quiet for a moment until Shinsuke goes to join his sister and Yuuta moves to kneel next to Maki.
“Maki,” he whispers, “honey, did something happen?”
“She…she wanted fried chicken.”
“What else?”
Yuuta knows her well. Tsugumi gets over petty things quickly for somebody who digs in her heels so much, and he must know that whatever is making her run from her mother is much deeper than a meal.
“She said she thought she could have it because she got a lot of exercise.” Recounting it makes her chest hurt. “And I just snapped.”
“Maki-”
“Yuuta,” she says numbly, “I’m a horrible mother.”
“Why, Maki?”
Refutation never works on her right away, and he knows that, too. He’s altogether stopped trying to reassure her until he knows what’s making her upset, and sometimes she appreciates that, but right now, she wishes he wouldn’t ask any questions.
“You saw that, didn’t you?”
“Did you have a fight?”
Deflecting, as usual. “She ran away like she was scared of me.”
“Did something-”
“I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”
“You’re on the floor, saying you’re a horrible mother, and both of our kids are crying, and you think we’re just not going to talk about why?”
That stings–it shouldn’t, but it stings. Maki winces and wishes he’d take his gentle hand off her back instead of pressing in a little harder like she likes.
“Work sucked,” she says. Her voice is so thin now that it’s barely audible. “And I was mad, and Tsugumi wanted fried chicken, and she asked over and over, and I got so mad that I yelled at her in line at the pharmacy and now she’s afraid of me.”
“Did you apologize?”
“I was trying to, but she just…ran off.”
“Sweetheart.” Yuuta sits down beside her, legs crossed, and Maki, who hadn’t realized that kneeling was starting to hurt her knees, quickly joins him.
He takes one of her hands and plays with it absentmindedly, tracing the lines of her palm. It’s a surprisingly careful gesture for one that’s meant to seem nonchalant.
“What, Yuuta?”
“All you need to do is apologize,” he says. “Kids are really forgiving like that.”
“She wouldn’t even let me!”
“So…she needs a minute?”
“She looked
scared,”
Maki insists. “Of
me
, Yuuta.”
“Can I say something?”
She says nothing, knowing he’ll say it whether she agrees or not.
“I didn’t think she looked scared, sweetheart,” he says, tracing the heel of her hand with his thumb. “She just seemed sad.”
“You don’t run away from people because you’re sad.” She tucks her knees up into her chest and cannot remember the last time she felt so helpless. “You saw her face, Yuuta, you did .”
“You know what that looked like to me?”
“Fear,” she says flatly.
“Needing a minute,” he says. “Feeling like her mom was really mad at her and not wanting to get snapped at again.”
Maki’s stomach sinks. “Isn’t that the same as being scared?”
“I mean, it probably startled her,” he says. “Her mom not being so careful like she always is.”
Maki turns her head, and it’s just enough for Yuuta to catch her chin and hold her there, stroking her jaw with his thumb. His eyes are soft, compassionate, and she deserves so much less that it makes her want to wrench her face away, but she doesn’t.
“But that’s not being scared, Maki.”
“I don’t know why you’re trying to act like it was no big deal.”
“I’m not, Maki.”
“Sure.”
He squeezes her cheeks at a moment far too heavy for something so playful, and she scowls. “I just know you’re not a horrible mom and she’s not afraid of you.”
“But she is.”
And, if Maki is fully honest with herself, and admits that she’s a time bomb whose own mother only ever taught her how to resent a daughter, she should be. She may not have heard the whispers behind her parents’ backs when Maki was expecting because no one believed that a woman who was rumored to have killed her first family could be trusted with a second one, but she’s gotten the message all the same. Maybe that’s only practical, if all it takes is one bad day at work.
“She adores you, Maki,” he says gently. “Why would she be scared of you?”
“Because-”
“I think she just needs a minute.” He pats her knee. “Then I’m sure she’ll hear you out.”
Hear her out. Honestly. Tsugumi is five.
“Do you think so?”
“If Tsugumi is smart enough to get how calories work, don’t you think she’s smart enough to understand that people say things they don’t mean when they’re having a bad day?”
Maybe. Probably. On most days, Maki is prouder of that than of anything else–how smart her little girl is. Tsugumi has always known things she wasn’t supposed to, and how to get the upper hand, and she loves that, watching her daughter’s mind work. But that feeling, that trust, pales so easily in comparison to the fact that Maki’s words from earlier echo in her head alongside her own mother’s, and they sound almost the same.
“What if she doesn’t, though?”
“You’re her mother, Maki.”
“Yeah, and? I
killed
mine.”
“Maki.”
He’s never as quick to shut down anything as he is the implication that Maki is anything like her mother. This time he does it in only a single word, too firm to bother arguing against.
“Fine, then, when?”
“How about I get dinner going, and you go talk to the twins?”
It feels too soon, but Maki nods anyway. She doesn’t have much energy left for resisting.
She could take Yuuta’s bait, forgive herself because her mother would never have even thought of apologizing, but she can’t let herself step over such a low bar and call it a leap. She was supposed to be so much better than this; she’s not supposed to get the kind of grace her husband keeps on trying to shove down her throat, not unless she can know she isn’t making her mother’s mistakes. To be merely better than her mother is to have done nothing at all.
After all, Maki had looked at her newborn twins and loved them on instinct alone. That alone makes the bar her mother set impossible not to surpass.
She has to be more than that, firm but warm, no-nonsense but forgiving, someone her children can trust. Not the kind of mother who shouts at her little girl in a pharmacy because she thinks like the kindergartener she is and hadn’t known that her mother was at her wit’s end.
But she knocks at the door anyway and calls, “Tsun Tsun?”
“Go ‘way, Mama,” she shouts from inside, hiccuping in the middle, still in tears.
“Shin- chan ?” she tries. “Bug?”
He doesn’t answer, either. Maki’s mother would’ve stopped at that, scoffed and thought how ungrateful her children were to have denied themselves the privilege of her apology. Maki knocks again, harder, and when that doesn’t bring anybody to the door, she opens it herself.
Tsugumi’s face is an angry, splotchy pink, and Shinsuke is curled up next to her. She rubs at her wet eyes and gives her mother a look to kill. She’s earned it–she knows she has, she can’t blame such a little girl for her defensive anger–but she still winces. It’s only here, on the receiving end of Tsugumi’s anger, that she realizes how right Yuuta had been, that her daughter really does adore her.
“Tsun Tsun,” she says softly, lingering in the doorway. “I came to say I’m sorry.”
Tsugumi pulls her covers up to her nose and stares up at Maki suspiciously from over top of her quilt. It would be endearing if she weren’t so desperate for a sign that Tsugumi is going to hear her out.
“No, you di’n’t,” she says.
Maki frowns. “Yes, I did.”
“No,” she says stubbornly. “You’re mad at me.”
“Tsun, that was-”
“And I said go away.”
There’s something strengthening about being talked back to.
Maki crosses the room and pulls up the child-sized chair that lives by Tsugumi’s bedside, as much for the benefit of whichever parent is checking on the twins as it is for her. She touches her daughter’s forehead, smoothing her bangs out of her eyes, and the gentleness of it comes so naturally that for a second it takes her aback.
“Tsun Tsun, are you listening?”
Tsugumi tries not to look at her, but her eyes dart over to Maki for just long enough that she catches the movement.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you.”
Tsugumi purses her lips, but she still doesn’t look at Maki.
“I know I shouldn’t talk to you like that,” she goes on. “Even if I’m tired, or you don’t listen.”
“I got lots of exercise,” she protests.
“I know, Tsun.”
“So can I-”
“Sometimes I have to say no to you.”
“But why?”
“It’s my job, Tsun.” She pokes Tsugumi’s forehead, emboldened by her petulantce as much as by her lack of fear. “Moms get fired if they’re too much fun.”
“Ngh.”
“But I never have to yell,” she says. “And I’m sorry if I scared you.”
She knows she must have, because Tsugumi only does this, hiding her real feelings with annoyance, when something bothers her and she doesn’t have the words in her five-year-old vocabulary to describe it yet. She’s known since she ran away earlier but only now does it really sink in.
She should ask first, but she thinks it would kill her to ask right now, she wraps Tsugumi in her arms without a word.
Maybe that’s selfish, meant to console herself and not her daughter, but her own mother wouldn’t even have thought to do it, so she gives herself the pass to do it anyway.
“You shouldn’t have to be scared of your mama,” she murmurs.
Tsugumi was a little stiff at first, but she starts to relax, and Maki feels the slight pressure of her arms trying to wrap around her. She pats Tsugumi’s back, then cradles her head to her shoulder, and she starts to feel almost limp in her arms.
“‘M not scared,” she says, and Maki doesn’t think she’s ever more obviously lied.
“Don’t be, Tsun.”
She wants to tell her that she loves her, but it feels like a time for quiet, and in place of the words, she presses a kiss to the crown of Tsugumi’s head. When Shinsuke, who is almost asleep, stirs beside her, she opens her arm, and he ducks under. He is, as always, almost feverishly warm, but next to cold, scrawny Tsugumi, it is welcome, and she tightens her grip on the both of them.
“Bug,” she murmurs, even though he hadn’t been the one she came to apologize to. She had, after all, made him cry, too. “I’m sorry.”
He says nothing, clutching at Maki’s shirt. It does not erase entirely the feeling that she doesn’t deserve to be forgiven so easily, but the relief it is to know that her children aren’t too afraid to be held like this overtakes the guilt, and she stays like that until Tsugumi starts to stir.
“Shin-
chan
is making me hot,” is the explanation she offers.
She’s just a kid, Maki. She doesn’t think like you.
She has to remind herself that sometimes, when her own brain makes it near-impossible not to think about the parallels between her mother and herself. Tsugumi never met her grandmother, or her aunt, and she doesn’t know anything about the example Maki is so afraid to follow. Maybe the twins will remember her mistakes, but they’ll remember them as flukes, not as evidence that their mother doesn’t love them, or wishes she’d never brought them into the world.
She kind of hates it when Yuuta is right about something she was certain of, but he had been. She’d have thought this was one he’d get wrong, knowing how much easier it is for him to be gentle than it is for her, but he knew how they would react, and this time, she’s glad he did.
There are a handful of people whose favor she doesn’t want to lose, but it would be her children who would hurt her the most if they looked at her with fear or contempt or disgust. A younger and more naive Maki would have told her that she cared too much. Now she knows–that it’s inevitable, loving these children.
She may have her mother’s blood, but she’s always been good at breaking the rules, and she will not make her mistakes.