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It’s a quiet day when he decides.
A small, unsubstantial murmur of a thought, crossing his mind as he looks at the birds rustle amongst themselves in their spindly nest - a unit; a family.
Sure, it’s a detached sense of “family”: they’re birds, they’ve got no concept of family or friendships or relationships. It’s all moral obligation—
Uruha clicks his tongue under his breath. If birds don’t understand family, how are they meant to understand morality? Is he actually losing it? After all this time? Now? They’re not doing it for morals, but because it’s the only thing they know how, and because it’s something they know they have to do, obviously. He scoffs at his own stupidity.
He goes back to his birdwatching, a strange sense of longing hanging behind his eyes. Family. The word is bitter on his tongue, similar to one of the extortionately sour sweets Misaka would shove down the back of his throat in stakeouts during Seitei to “lift spirits”; he doesn’t dwell on it, doesn’t let its barbed syllables sit on his tongue— at least not immediately.
Uruha watches. Disregards the slight distortion the double glazed window brings. Watches as the eldest bird drops worms (no more than writhing smudges in his vision, his eyesight has gotten… significantly worse over the years, though he hates to admit it) into the small mouths of its chicks, desperate and hungry and weak and pathetically dependent. But simultaneously, he recognises his past self in them.
In birds.
He feels like a fool.
But he can’t help but feel the twinge, that distant pinch in the back of his skull as he watches their pitiful, silenced cries. He remembers reaching out, too, hopeful and begging and desperate for any scrap of attention he could get to help him crawl out of the hole he was forced into.
‘Mr. Uruha! Good morning!’
He turns his head to see Hakuri standing in the threshold of the room, tiredness haunting his eyes and slumping his posture.
‘Hakurin!’ He turns to the low table before him as the boy moves into the room, sitting down opposite him, and reaches for the teapot. ‘Tea?’
Hakuri nods, smiling softly and eyes alight. ‘Please.’
Lethargy returns to his eyes as his smile fades gradually, watching as Uruha pours the tea into a porcelain cup in front of him.
The older man pauses for a moment too long as he places the teapot down, hands folding over one another atop the cypress table (Hakuri only knew that because Uruha had told him a very long and confusing story involving Samura, Shiba and furniture shopping, which, in all honesty, he couldn’t remember the details of - only that a scene had been caused over wood grain). He turns his head to look out of the window, and Hakuri follows his gaze, landing on a bird's nest settled between branches in a tree in the garden. His vision blurs slightly from the ghosts of sleep in his eyes, but he can just make out a family of them - at least six. Something strange pinches the back of his conscience, setting his heart off beat; it’s enough for him to turn back towards his tea.
‘You haven’t been sleeping again.’
‘I still get enough.’
‘Hakuri.’
He looks up. He’d gotten so used to hearing his nickname, he’d almost forgotten it wasn’t really his name.
‘I’ll try. I’m sorry.’
Uruha looks perplexed for a moment, picking up his cup. ‘Why are you apologising?’
Words jump around Hakuri’s mouth, jumbled and contorted and confused, unable to escape. Why… was he apologising? Force of habit? Maybe that was it. Or was it just out of politeness? Or is it an expected response? Or was it because of being called his actual name? Or isn’t it wrong to not be sleeping? It can impact his health and—
‘Hakurin, trust me, I know you can’t just try to sleep more. There’s no need to apologise, I understand.’
He nods, exhales. He feels horrendous for it, but sometimes he manages to forget Uruha isn’t constantly out to get him. He forgets that he offered up the spare room in his home after he’d offhandedly mentioned not having a solid place to stay. He forgets that Uruha must’ve once been in his position, from what he could piece together from half-minded comments and long pauses constituting as replies. He hates himself for forgetting, but Uruha won’t reinforce that self hatred. He gives him the space, the time, even just the opportunity to digest his own feelings; to pick them apart and realise “where am I actually feeling this from?”, and in some instances even help him through that step. He’s grateful - beyond it, really, for Uruha’s consideration and understanding.
It’s still an alien feeling to him, even with how he was treated so kindly by Chihiro and the others, even with how he was cared for by the Masumi and the nurses at the hospital.
Hakuri’s eyes bore into the translucent darkness of his tea, doing anything to avoid direct eye contact. Uruha’s chest aches from the familiarity of the action. He hums, picking up his own cup and again taking a sip, feeling it scald his throat on the way down (an old war habit he’d used to keep himself… present. At first it had been blindingly painful, but after eighteen entire years, it hardly causes him to flinch anymore). His gaze once again drifts to the bird’s nest, still in the middle of a feeding frenzy. A faint smile ghosts his lips, expression softened with fondness.
‘You know, I think they’re sparrows.’
‘Huh?’ Hakuri looks up, confusion blaring on his face.
Uruha nods towards the nest outside, ‘The birds. They look like sparrows.’
He narrows his eyes and looks once again out the window to the nest.
‘No…’ Hakuri begins, trailing off.
‘…No?’ Uruha murmurs, narrowing his eyes. A hand instinctively comes up to rub his forehead.
‘They’re swallows. Not sparrows.’
Uruha nods bashfully, a chuckle spilling from his lips. ‘My mistake - the last time I went birdwatching was with Mr. Samura during the war!’
Hakuri looks at him in a way that makes him feel like whatever he just said made him sound incredibly cheesy and old. In all honesty, it’s probably true.
‘Birdwatching is fun, in a way. Boring at the same time, but spotting a certain bird before Tenri was always….’ He trails off, staring out the window. His lip is bit, but his eyes are vacant, expression blank.
‘Maybe we could go sometime, as I said: it’s been a long time since I last went. It’d be good for us to get out of the house like that, wouldn’t it, Hakurin?’ Uruha says, almost wistfully, eyes on the birds.
‘Really?’
He nods, laughing, turning back to face the boy across from him. ‘Of course, why not?’
Hakuri smiles and that murmur of a thought grows louder, past a whisper, past a muttering, into a fully fledged and formed statement. And for a second, he swears he sees himself - young again, fresh faced enthusiasm bursting from his eyes - fractured into pieces, a broken mirror. A broken mirror he’s more than willing to pick each individual, shattered piece up off from the floor and help put back together, disregarding the seven years of bad luck. Not because of moral obligation, but because he feels as if that’s the only thing he should be doing from here on out. Luck be damned, he wasn’t leaving Hakuri in the same situation he himself had been in.
He remembers being seventeen, too, and getting that first glimpse of a life; a “life” he carved for himself through bloodshed and nights of totalling civilian casualties until his brain frayed at the edges. He doesn’t want that for Hakuri, let alone anyone else; he wants Hakuri to realise there is more to his existence than what’s happened to him in the past, that there is hope for him to live a long, happy life (even though he himself had technically died for a good solid few days but that’s… irrelevant to the moment at hand). He saw glimpses of someone reaching out in Rokuhira and even Samura, but neither of them had the understanding or time in a war to offer a hand to him; he doesn’t want Hakuri to end up in the same way— wouldn’t wish it on anybody.
‘Do you have binoculars?’ Hakuri asks, going to pick up his tea.
Uruha presses his lips into a line. ‘We, uh, might have to go on a trip to the store before we do any birdwatching, Hakurin.’
The two of them burst out in laughter, Hakuri having to put his tea down with the back of his hand held to the back of his mouth. It’s not like the joke was anything so extraordinarily funny it warranted the reaction, it’s just with any barely humourous conversation with someone who’s like a son to you, suddenly everything is funny.
So he’s not alarmed, or taken aback, or even remotely surprised when the thought of officially adopting Hakuri comes across his mind. It’s something that had been continuously growing in the peripherals of his conscience, so when the thought finally fully materialises, he’s used to it - expectant.
It’s just something he knows he has to do.