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He’s a perfect baby.
He’s got a shock of pale hair and huge gray-green eyes and a very pink, squished-up button nose. He has ten tiny fingers and ten tinier toes, and his lungs work, and his mouth works, and his heart beats swift but strong. He blinks, he breathes, and he didn’t kill his mother on his way out.
Natsuo is a wreck, though.
Rei isn’t too surprised.
He called her from the hospital in such a flood of panic that she couldn’t differentiate individual words, and she had to figure out what was happening based on context. Eiji is also a perfect baby insofar as he made his extracorporeal debut after almost precisely nine months of uterine freeloading, which made it significantly easier to understand why Natsuo would be babbling so incoherently with medical-sounding background noise.
Rei shoos away the nurses who seem to think that Natsuo is experiencing a mental break, not an emotional revelation so powerful that it’s shaking him to his core. She’s tried both. She knows the difference.
There are still tears leaking out of Natsuo’s eyes, looking almost chagrined and apologetic, as he attempts to fit his broad frame onto a tiny corner of the hospital bed so that he can gather both Hayami and the little pink-faced bundle into his arms at once. Rei and Fuyumi are trading off wiping snot off of his face. From the faint, slightly bewildered look of delight that Fuyumi sends her, Rei knows that they’re both thinking it—just like old times. Just like when Natsuo was three, and four, and five, right up until Touya told him that big boys didn’t cry.
Shouto called a few minutes ago, shouting over road noise that he’s on his way. He sounded eager and a touch nervous. He deals with children in the job often enough, but he’s never seen a newborn that shares his genetic material before. Rei wonders if it’ll scare him or charm him. Likely a bit of each.
Hayami seems torn between beaming at little, little Eiji and beaming at Natsuo. She’s radiant in her exhaustion—illuminated with the love.
Rei is happy for her, and distantly envious, and annoyed at herself for superimposing the old pain onto the new joy. Natsuo has enough mixed feelings for both of them. The last thing she wants to do is remind him of the shadow that lingers just outside the door.
Eiji is a perfect baby.
And the kind part of Rei—the generous part, the part that won’t be bent or bowed or shattered, the part that no power on Earth could burn away—wishes Enji could see him. She wishes Enji could see that he hasn’t ruined everything. She wishes he could see what they always could have had. She wishes he could see that the world is much too strange and cruel and wonderful to punish him forever, and that it will give him a perfect grandson whether any of them have forgiven him or not.
Sometimes she thinks she has—forgiven him, that is. Sometimes she thinks that no one ever could. Sometimes she thinks that it doesn’t matter very much. They’re here, now. They’re all still alive. The universe keeps spiraling through the dark. He isn’t the same man he was; and he is. It’s over, and it will never die.
It fades, though—like Shouto’s scar, like an old tattoo, like the echo of Hayami’s ear-splitting, heart-rending screams as the last of the contractions brought them all to this.
There are so many beautiful things in the world, and those are brighter.
Rei leans in to wipe tears off of Natsuo’s chin again. He has Enji’s jaw, and Enji’s nose, and his eye shape, and his brows—even his ears.
She can already see that Eiji won’t have those.
She cried, years back now, when she heard the whole story about Eri—about the scared little girl being ripped apart day after day after day, putting herself back together again because she didn’t have anywhere else to go.
That was for money. For profit. For greed.
For power.
At least Rei’s pain had had a purpose. Enji had crushed her underneath him because he couldn’t find the footing to hold up the world.
If she hadn’t tried, at the start, to help him build the walls of the prison, he might not have survived. Hawks probably wouldn’t have. Which means that none of them ever would have stood on the scorched, blasted Earth and saved it with their bare hands.
Enji almost destroyed her.
And he has saved more lives than she could ever hope to count.
People make unmourned sacrifices every single day.
One of those people bursts into the room just then, every inch of him covered in dust except for the brand-new surgical mask slapped on top.
He skids to a halt and stares at little, little Eiji, cradled in Hayami’s arms, gazing up at her and occasionally shifting a tiny fist among the blankets.
“Oh,” Shouto breathes, his mismatched eyes huge above the border of the mask. “Oh, wow.”
Natsuo grins. He smooths some sweat-matted hair off of Hayami’s temple and kisses it. “Compliments to the chef.”
Hayami snorts and then starts laughing softly.
Rei steps back so that Shouto can creep up closer, almost tiptoeing. Fuyumi’s phone is already out to catch candids. Rei took some photos of her, too, so that she won’t disappear from the recollection of it.
Shouto tips his head as he approaches the bed very cautiously, hands twisted together behind his back. “What kind of baby is it?”
Natsuo stares blankly. “Uh… our… baby?”
Fuyumi bites her lip on a grin. Rei reaches out and pats Shouto’s shoulder gingerly. Even a light touch raises dust. “A boy. His name is Eiji.”
Shouto darts a glance at her, brow furrowing for a second in a way that’s too familiar.
His eyes widen a fraction and then narrow as he recognizes her expression. He still struggles to parse the convoluted things that people say, but he has always been able to read a warning on someone else’s face.
She’ll explain the baby’s name to him later. Natsuo wouldn’t be able to handle talking about it now.
“Yup,” Hayami says, beaming at Shouto as he irons out the trace of bewilderment. “You have a nephew.” She adjusts a fold of the blanket around the tiny, tiny face and shifts Eiji forward, more than up. “You want to hold him?”
Shouto actually steps back. His hands wrap around each other again, in front of him this time, too tightly. “I don’t—want to hurt him.”
Natsuo makes a face at him. “Didn’t you defuse a bomb last week?”
Shouto blinks. “That’s different.” He looks down at his dust-caked palms. “And my hands are filthy. I’d better not—”
“It’s nice,” Fuyumi says, crossing to him to catch his elbow and tug him over to the sink closer to the door. “It’s really special. You won’t hurt him. I promise.”
Shouto goes quiet, but he obediently scrubs his hands and stands painstakingly still to let Fuyumi swipe at some of the dust on his chest with a paper towel.
Rei can’t hold the reluctance against him. Eiji looks fragile—and he is. His bones aren’t even finished yet. He can’t move himself, can’t help himself, can’t protect himself—can’t even identify a threat.
He’s a perfect baby.
And he’s completely at the mercy of the world.
Shouto doesn’t have Natsuo’s stature—that is, Enji’s—but he’s grown so much taller and broader since high school that he towers over the little old ladies that he’s constantly walking across the street, and the children that he snatches out of burning buildings, and all the other unthinkable horrors that he flits in and out of every day.
None of them even asked what he was dealing with before he got here.
None of them really want to know.
But he’s more than big enough, now, to make a newborn look even more delicate.
“Like this,” Natsuo says, lifting the tiny, wriggling bundle out of Hayami’s arms and positioning the crook of his own arm to balance Eiji evenly. “Just be careful of his head.”
“His head is huge,” Shouto says, eyes wide in awe but intently focused. He shuffles forward, angling his arms to mimic Natsuo’s, glancing back and forth between the baby and both Natsuo and Hayami.
“You’ve got him,” Fuyumi says, soothingly, although her hands are hovering in the air as Natsuo passes Eiji over. “There he goes. There he goes.”
Eiji fusses, and Shouto freezes. Hayami leans forward far enough to rub her knuckle against Eiji’s tiny cheek. “It’s okay. This is your uncle Shouto. You’re the safest baby in Japan right now.”
Tentatively—one cautious, jerky motion at a time—Shouto gathers Eiji closer in against himself and adjusts the blanket, smoothing it down. Eiji releases another wet, hitching breath and then settles, blinking up at Shouto silently.
Shouto’s shoulders sink as he exhales. Rei feels like her heart’s too full, watching him falling in love with his tiny nephew in real time.
“Hi,” Shouto whispers, so softly that she can barely make it out. “Welcome to being a person. It kinda sucks sometimes. But you’ve got a lot of people who love you. You’re gonna be okay.”
Maybe he will be.
Maybe they all will.
Natsuo leans down to kiss the top of Hayami’s head, then her ear, then then nudges his nose at her temple.
“You’re amazing,” he murmurs, and if Rei hadn’t been straining to hear Shouto, she probably would have missed it. It’s not being said for her. “You’re amazing, he’s amazing—look at him.”
Hayami’s hand looks heavy, but she’s smiling through the shadows under her eyes and reaching up to Natsuo despite the shakiness. “Look at us.”
Natsuo winds both arms around her again, drawing her in close, torn between gazing at her and at Shouto, who is finally relinquishing the title of the baby of the family.
Rei makes herself breathe out slowly. She makes herself let the hurt wash through, and holds out a sieve to catch the sparking slivers of happiness it leaves behind.
It all feels so far away that she could convince herself it never happened. She could make herself forget.
When she was pregnant with Touya, Enji would lie awake with his warm right hand spread on her stomach, worrying so hard that you could hear it—worrying about her, about the swelling mass of cells, about his legacy.
It was in that order, at the start.
It was in that order until the fear started to eat away at him, and then ate through him—the relentless, ravening terror that he was running out of time.
And when the fire consumed the kindling, it did what fire always does.
It found more fuel.
But that was a long time ago now.
And it gets further behind them with every moment—with every tiny little breath that Eiji takes.
Rei has worked very, very hard over the years to make her peace with the pieces. That’s been her endeavor. You have to live. Even if the bleeding never really stops, you have to keep moving. You have to try.
She’s no god and no government—no omniscient spirit, no great authority. She doesn’t decide who gets punished. She doesn’t decide what someone else ‘deserves’.
She decides on herself.
She decides what direction her next step will be in.
She’s decided that she doesn’t want to carry the anger. Anger is what made this, and what fed it. Anger is what set them all alight.
She knows she can’t will it away. She knows it will win, some days, no matter how she fights. She knows that it will nestle into her grave alongside her.
But it matters, to choose. If she doesn’t try to beat it, the bitterness taints everything, and there are so many things that she still wants to taste.
Breaking more won’t un-break anything.
Locking Enji out won’t make any of it go away.
So she lets him in. She lets him stay. She lets him keep proving the apologies, and keep trying to help.
When Fuyumi lowers her phone and glances over, and their eyes meet, Rei knows she’s thinking it too.
They understand why Enji isn’t here. They respect Natsuo’s right to hold this out of his reach.
But there’s something sad about it all the same.
He helped build all of this. He made them who they are. He would be so strangely gentle, these days—more like he was when it was just Touya, when all of it was new, when he still knew how to hope. Rei remembers, still. She remembers how careful he was, in spite of the hugeness of his hands, the first time he held Touya, in a room so much like this. She remembers the sparks of the tears in his eyes, and she remembers the way he kept swallowing, harshly, until they went away.
He said Watch me, and she did.
She watched him pry open the doors to that part of himself again.
She watched him fight the bloodiest battle yet—against the grief, and the ghosts, and his endless insecurities.
She watched him learn how to love.
The idea of too late is self-centric. It was too late for her, certainly—but the world doesn’t revolve around her gravity. The world doesn’t care. The world keeps changing.
He’s changed for the better.
And she has, too.
It’s a shame he can’t see his first grandchild flailing tiny limbs and then settling in against Shouto and closing those big, beautiful eyes. It’s fitting, too. It’s not quite right, but it isn’t wrong, either.
Like most things.
Rei reaches out to wrap one arm as far as she can around Shouto’s shoulders, which are almost too wide and too high for it these days. She holds out the other arm, and Fuyumi steps in close.
Shouto’s right, as he so often is—the strange, off-kilter wisdom doesn’t come as a surprise anymore. He sees the world differently.
Eiji is loved.
They all are.
That’s what matters.
And they’re going to be okay.
Everything is going to be okay.