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Teenagers were terrible liars.
They were overconfident, cocky, self-sure things that thought themselves smarter and tricker than anything in the world, and that always made it fairly easy to see when they were lying.
Still, he rarely called them on that, even in private.
He wasn’t their parent and that was the biggest lie he always told himself, shoved deep down into his gut, that pit of all the other little lies and half-truths, he was not their parent, he would not do the “parent thing” of quietly taking them aside to talk out their shit like Gris, or Tomme, or Bro. He wasn’t going to do the parent thing because he didn’t need to.
But he still knew.
Some of them were more aware than others that he did.
Riyo was as sharp as her scissors. Always had been, was always forced to be, be it by herself or the phantoms of the life that came before, if it could be called that. She knew. She always knew when he watched her like a hawk, her mannerisms, that she didn’t flinch when other kids would cower, scream, or cry. The poor girl was tough as nails when she shouldn’t have had to be, and long ago he’d learned to not take pride in that to not feed that dark thing stirring in her. She had done good to temper herself and he was still working on getting her to let go of that willingness to kill. She was fierce, probably the strongest fighter on the team when it came to brass tacks, but just as dogshit at lying as the rest of them whenever she insisted her first instinct was anything but doing whatever it took.
He joked he lost his sense of smell years ago from all the chain smoking and scrambling around in polluted zones after trash beasts but she still smelled like gunpowder more days than not and there was always that tiny little flinch if things went south too fast where he could see her contemplating reaching for that pistol, always tucked away.
Enjin wondered, less these days, just how aware she was of how measured he was in his praise especially after Zanka joined up.
Or rather, he scooped him up like a sopping wet kitten thrown out in the rain. That kid was a sponge for any praise and half-baked compliment he could get from anyone he even mildly respected and a brick wall to anyone he didn’t. He didn’t try to show it outwardly but teenagers were shit liars, and Zanka could never fully hide just how deeply attention from his not-a-new-parent touched him.
Enjin hated having to be the better liar and hide the absolute disgust that coiled in his stomach like writhing mud cobras knowing where that kind of attention seeking could go.
Idolization.
That type of fawning, Semiu had called it, was a steel trap ready to snap shut and take off limbs on the kid at any time. Sheltered and yet neglected all the same, he wasn’t sure if Zanka ever fully realized how shit a lot he got in life- he was aware enough to know something wasn’t right, that what he’d become was less a child and more a tool of prestige and the closest thing to nobility not found in picture books, but he wasn’t Riyo, or Semiu, or Gris, or himself or Amo.
He hadn’t grown in the true way of things for the Ground, not in the same way.
Zanka surely didn’t see it, not yet, but every damn day Enjin made sure to have plenty of smokes on hand for when that day hit and eyes on him ready to turn Umbreaker into blades to tear at anyone who would try and take advantage of it.
Eisha and August at least, they were pretty normal. Sure, the par for the course orphans, parents gone too young, but they at least had some family. Loud, oppressively so, bullheaded and practically a living legend type of family that would hopefully one day get Eisha to grow a bit more a backbone, but that wasn’t his thing to worry about because he wasn’t their dad, hell, he wasn’t even their cousin, not really, no matter how much August insisted and he’d call Alice ‘Auntie’ out of a long ago habit, just like stealing roaches out of her ashtray when-
He wasn’t a damn parent but damn the way Rudo needed one more oft than not.
He was the spitting image of-
What the hell was it like up on the Sphere to spit out a kid so spiteful, so angry, so violent but also so empathetic to the point of self destruction? He could barely connect with other people yet held any scrap of trash and garbage up on a pedestal that was near religious. When the kid did act like a human being, rather than revenge and hate bundled into the shape of one, he got through to people in a way that was so uncanny it was almost frightening.
In one moment being so near to beating Amo to death and so viciously it left every adult in the room frozen because it came so fast none of them could even process it, and in the next… making himself and her more human than any of them.
He let the smoke come out of his nostrils like some sort of dragon, relishing in the burn through his sinuses and letting the feeling of a too distant yet too close type of burn fade from his mind.
Those kids were all right shit fucking liars, but so was he when he was their age, and that thought kept coming up, bubbling like tar.
That he could transparently see every time they lied about being okay, that they were having an entirely normal time surely, letting every beat of trauma and hell roll off their back like raindrops on the waxed fabric he ran his fingers along- Deep in the pit of his stomach he knew that.
Alice had seen the same with him then and done as he was doing with them now and just being nice in pretending not to see it, to not call him on it to his face. At least, she’d done it for the lesser of his shit. The more intense breakdowns, spirals, and self destruction she was always a bullhorn over making sure she was heard.
When he’d-
Of all of them, Rudo was the one he had to be the most careful with in his not-parenting and was taking from all the lessons and missteps he’d made with the others. Gentle yet firm like he had been with Riyo to teach her how to be a person first, but distant enough he wouldn’t attach himself like a leech, living and dying by the praise he gave like Zanka. Shikage… he probably should have intervened sooner, but that one was a whole different can of worms that settled like a rock in the pit of his stomach.
Like any parent, he probably fucked up the first couple of them in more ways than he’d ever know, than they would either, and some day they’d probably cry and shriek and scream and do anything in their power to not do the same to their own, but he had to keep stressing it to himself- He was not their dad.
He wouldn’t get pissed if they did as teens did, sneaking about at night for whatever the hell it was they did sneaking into each others’ rooms, or for noticing when there were a few less cigarettes in his pack or that bottle of whisky he kept on the windowsill was a little more empty than it should have been.
He knew damn sure that the latter was probably Riyo- she’d shown him more than once she could pick locks, breaking into ruined buildings when things got too hairy or a trash storm unexpectedly rolled through, and even with her clunky boots could be quiet as a mouse when she wanted but he wasn’t her dad. If she wanted to steal a few swigs of liquor now and again, let her.
He still didn’t know which one of them was sneaking his smokes as if he wouldn’t notice though, and maybe he would do the dad thing and get a little angry about it, given he reached into the pack for another and found it empty.
Riyo joked, once, he sneezed like a dad, loud, booming, and without care to not startle anyone nearby. She’d also joked that if he ever did have kids one day, that he was so terrible at playing barber she’d do it herself, lest he scar them for life.
“You’d probably be that dad to unironically give a kid a bowl cut.”
“That or just buzz it all off.”
“Yeah!”
Despite the bets Riyo and Zanka were hashing out themselves on just how terrible Enjin’s hypothetical future children’s hair would be, especially that most of the time he just used his fingers as a comb no matter how much it irritated Riyo that he never took care of it properly, he bit his tongue. He did have some experience with little kids, Eisha was just a tiny little bean of a thing when-
Enjin’s hunches were usually right and he had one, gnawing away at his innards like a filthy scavenger, that more oft than not those kids did view him as the closest thing to a parent they had in this world. Real parent involved at some point, for better or worse, or not.
As much as he wanted to deny it, he really couldn’t. Not in the real way.
Not when it came to the things that mattered.
Being there, good or bad. Awkward lectures where he didn’t particularly have any point at all other than shit wasn’t their fault, the bad and often far too nebulous analogies to other problems, shit he’d done real or not as examples, building them up better than anyone who had come before him did.
Better than the people in his life should have.
Forever and always he was going to eternally worship the pedestal he built Alice up on, she tried her damnest with a haughty, irritable, absolute fucking mess of a kid he was. By the time he rolled around as a skinny, scrawny, mouthy little shit her parenting days were long behind her after all and it wasn’t her job to be his mom- that’s why he never called her such and never would. Couldn’t blame her for it though, he wasn’t blood and didn’t even pretend like he wanted to be.
Really, some days he was a real fucking asshole and much as Rudo was a living expy of how he was then, he could only kick himself as seeing it so much.
He wasn’t their fucking father but shit, someone had to be.
He was just as much a shit liar as they were after all.