Chapter Text
Byakuya had wondered, growing up, if his parents enjoyed anything at all, really, or if their own careful status-seeking had squeezed the enjoyment out of them years ago. Their apartment was always neat, the entryway lined with polished shoes, the dining table free of clutter except for the seasonal flowers his mother arranged in a narrow glass vase. Even the television seemed chosen less because anyone liked it and more because it was the right brand to own.
His dad was a salaryman who wore navy-blue suits and worked long hours. Most nights, Byakuya heard him before he saw him: the rattle of keys at the door sometime after 9PM, the weary sigh as he stepped out of his shoes in the genkan, the smell of alcohol and cigarette smoke drifting into the apartment. His shirts were always crisp in the morning and wrinkled by the time he came home, tie loosened, eyes dull with exhaustion. He was often out late drinking with coworkers or stuck doing mandatory overtime.
Byakuya sometimes thought his dad barely knew his children at all; he called him “Byakuren” more than once, mixing his name with Ren’s without even noticing. Byakuya spent most of his childhood knowing almost nothing about his father beyond the shape of him sitting silently at the dinner table with the evening news playing in the background. He didn’t even know what job his dad had that kept him away from home so much.
His mother was a stay-at-home wife who had left the workforce after Byakuya’s older brother, Ren, was born, as expected. She handled all the finances while his father handed over his entire paycheck, as expected. She had impeccable taste that all the women in the neighborhood admired. Her hair was always styled elegantly, her blouses pressed, her nails clean and glossy in pale colors that matched the season. At neighborhood gatherings, she stood among the other wives with a polite smile, discussing school rankings and test scores, department store sales, and which families were doing well lately. In public, Byakuya’s mother was sweet and polite, the image of the ideal Japanese woman, as expected.
In private, she could be sneering and condescending, someone who took pleasure in people failing to live up to their expectations. She looked down on people who deviated from what she considered the proper path: women who kept working after marriage, children who talked back to their parents, families whose kids dyed their hair or struggled in school. Sometimes she would stand at the apartment window, watching neighbors crossing the courtyard below, and make cutting remarks in a soft conversational tone while hanging laundry to dry. She hated the single mother across the hall, despite the fact that her husband had died - the woman had gone back to work, which made her a failure in Byakuya’s mother’s eyes.
Ren, older than Byakuya by two years, fit the mold of what their parents wanted perfectly. Teachers described him as polite and mature. Neighbors praised how respectfully he bowed and how calmly he spoke. He knew exactly when to smile and when to lower his eyes modestly. But Byakuya knew most of it was an act. Ren was a schemer with a sharp eye for what would earn him praise, respect, or advantage. He cared about appearances more than anything else.
He was the golden child despite the way he would corner kids in alleys after school and beat them bloody for entertainment or to prove a point. He was careful about his targets. The boys he picked were always outsiders: troublemakers, poor kids, loners, the kind of children adults already distrusted. Byakuya still remembered the narrow alleyways behind the school, lined with bicycles and overflowing trash bags, Ren would bring his targets there with an easy smile and leave with scraped knuckles. And when some bruised child accused him, adults would shake their heads in disbelief.
“Ah, but Ren is such a respectful boy,” they would say. “If he hit you at all - which I doubt - you must have done something first.”
Ren would stand there looking embarrassed by the attention, rubbing the back of his neck modestly while teachers defended him. It always worked. Adults saw what they wanted to see in him.
Byakuya had never fit the mold that Ren did. He was a little too loud, too obvious with his feelings, too quick to laugh or cry. He stayed interested in childish things long after his parents thought he should have outgrown them. While Ren showed the restraint expected of him, even if it was fake, Byakuya talked too much about rockets and television shows and strange facts he’d read in books.
He slouched when he sat, forgot to speak formally to adults sometimes, and came home with grass stains on his knees from running around outside. His mother often looked at him with thinly disguised disappointment, as though he were something slightly embarrassing she hoped time would eventually correct.
“He’s almost…Western,” Byakuya heard his aunt say once when she was visiting, and Byakuya’s mother hushed her.
Byakuya still heard it, though
“Mom’s disappointed in you,” Ren said gleefully later that evening when they were sent to buy ingredients for dinner.
The streets outside were crowded with people heading home from work and school, bicycles rattling past them while signs flickered on one by one above the shops. The smell of grilled meat drifted from a yakitori stand near the station. Byakuya adjusted the grocery bag awkwardly against his chest; the thin plastic had split near the bottom, and he had to hold it carefully so the onions and tofu wouldn’t tumble onto the sidewalk. Ren, being Ren, didn’t have that problem. His own bag swung lightly at his side.
He didn’t bother keeping up his polite act around Byakuya, partly because he didn’t respect him enough to bother.
“I’m aware,” Byakuya muttered.
“You are kind of a baby,” Ren said thoughtfully. “I mean, you’re twelve and you still cry so easily.”
“Better than tearing up because you’re trying to manipulate someone and crying’s the way to get what you want.”
Ren grinned at that, sharp and pleased with himself beneath the glow of the streetlights. “But it works out for me.”
And that was really the core of it.
Ren wanted to be liked and respected above all else, and he didn’t really care what he had to do to present that front. He understood instinctively how people worked and how he came across to them, and because of that, doors opened for him everywhere he went. Teachers liked him. Adults trusted him. Other kids followed him even when they were nervous around him.
Byakuya acted before he thought about appearances, and people seemed to take that as proof he was foolish. He laughed too loudly when something was funny, cried too easily when something felt unfair, and cared about things openly instead of pretending not to. Around Ren, and around most adults in his life, it often felt like sincerity itself was childish.
✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧
When Byakuya turned fourteen, he realized he would die one day.
His grandfather keeled over during his daily walk in early December. An aneurysm, the doctors said afterward. Quick. Painless, supposedly. One moment he had been walking through the neighborhood park in his thick winter coat with a bag of dried fish tucked into his pocket for the stray cats that followed him around, and the next he was gone.
His grandfather had always seemed indestructible to Byakuya. He was a sprightly old man with deep laugh lines and nicotine-yellowed fingers who went drinking with his friends every other night and woke up early every morning anyway. He liked cheap baseball games on television, fed every stray animal he came across, and told long rambling stories about growing up during and after the Second World War. He had survived bombings, food shortages, economic collapse, and decades of exhausting work, only to die suddenly on a cold sidewalk.
At the funeral, Byakuya sat stiffly beside his parents while incense smoke curled thickly through the air of the temple. Relatives dressed in black murmured softly to one another while monks chanted somewhere beyond the sliding doors. His mother cried delicately into a handkerchief. His father stared blankly ahead with reddened eyes and said almost nothing all day. Ren looked bored more than sad.
Byakuya couldn’t stop thinking about it afterward.
One day, he would die too.
The thought lodged itself inside his head like a splinter. He would grow up, get a job, maybe get married, maybe buy a house, maybe have children. He would worry about bills and groceries and work deadlines, and then one day his body would fail and he would turn to ash and slowly fade from memory until eventually nobody alive even remembered his name.
What was the point of it all, being alive?
The question hollowed him out for sixteen months.
Food tasted like ash in his mouth. School felt distant and muffled, like he was experiencing everything through several panes of dirty glass. He stopped laughing as loudly. He stopped talking so much. Every morning he woke up already tired, carrying around the constant cold certainty that everything ended. It felt like his soul had been left soaking in freezing water for too long.
His mother praised the change almost immediately. She told relatives he was finally calming down and becoming mature. Teachers complimented how quiet he’d gotten in class. Ren barely seemed to notice the difference at all.
Byakuya couldn’t talk to anyone about what he was feeling. Every attempt sounded melodramatic or stupid once the words reached his mouth. So instead he kept thinking about death constantly. What it would feel like. Whether there was anything afterward. Whether human beings only invented meaning because they were frightened animals trying to distract themselves from oblivion.
Why bother being alive if everything looped eventually back into nothing?
Then one afternoon in April, he was sitting alone on a bench outside the train station after school.
Tokyo moved around him in its usual blur of noise and motion. Salarymen hurried past with loosened ties and briefcases bumping against their legs. High school girls clustered near the vending machines laughing loudly over something. Trains rattled overhead while recorded station announcements echoed faintly through the air. The concrete around the station still held the damp chill of recent rain.
And there, near the edge of the bench, a tiny white flower had pushed its way up through a crack in the dirt beside the pavement.
Byakuya didn’t know what kind it was. It was small and delicate and slightly crooked, its thin stem trembling whenever the wind from passing trains swept through the station plaza. Surrounded by concrete and exhaust fumes and cigarette butts, it looked absurdly fragile.
How pretty, he thought.
And then, immediately after: how pointless.
The flower would bloom and wilt and die without anyone noticing. It had no purpose. No lasting impact. No legacy. Yet it still turned itself toward the weak afternoon sunlight anyway, existing as fully as it could for the brief amount of time it had.
Ah, he thought. That’s the point.
There didn’t have to be a point. Maybe existence didn’t need some grand justification to matter. There could still be beauty and curiosity and kindness and joy. There could still be brief moments that made being alive worthwhile even if they vanished afterward. To exist at all was already impossibly unlikely. Maybe that was enough.
He started smiling again after that. Slowly at first, then all at once. He went back to reading books about space exploration late into the night. He started talking too enthusiastically in class again. He laughed loudly with friends and annoyed teachers by asking too many questions.
Why did it matter if his mother thought it wasn’t proper? One day all of them would die anyway, and nobody centuries from now was going to care that Ishigami Byakuya had been slightly irritating and far too excitable.
Ren had his own existential crisis. When he was seventeen, he watched a motorcyclist get hit by a truck while walking home from cram school one rainy evening. Ren came home pale-faced and silent, school uniform damp from the weather, staring blankly at nothing while their mother fussed over him. For months afterward, Ren moved through life stiffly, as though something inside him had locked into place. He started smoking cigarettes despite their mother’s outrage. Byakuya would sometimes catch him standing alone on the apartment balcony late at night, smoke curling into the dark while city lights reflected faintly in his eyes.
For a little while, Byakuya thought maybe they could finally understand each other. He tried to explain his own realization one evening while they sat outside a convenience store eating cheap noodles from plastic containers. Cars hissed past on rain-slick streets while neon signs reflected in puddles around their feet.
“We only get this one life,” Byakuya said earnestly. “So shouldn’t we just try to enjoy it? Be kind to people? Learn as much as we can?”
For a brief moment, he actually hoped this could become something between them, some point of connection strong enough to make them brothers instead of strangers who happened to share blood.
Ren snorted smoke out through his nose and gave him a disgusted look. “I want to be remembered,” he said flatly. “Enjoy your hippie feel-good bullshit. I don’t need to be kind and I don’t need to know everything. I need a legacy.”
The fluorescent lights of the convenience store turned the smoke pale blue around him. He looked tired and angry and deeply certain of himself all at once.
Byakuya never tried having that conversation with him again.
Because what was the point of any of this, really, if you weren’t kind to other people while you were here? What was the point if you didn’t spend your short little life trying to understand the universe just a bit better than you had the day before?
Maybe that wasn’t the meaning of life in some grand cosmic sense. But it was enough meaning for Byakuya.
✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧
Things didn’t change much as they got older. Ren got into a good university with glowing recommendations from the principal and excellent exam scores, even if Byakuya was reasonably sure he had cheated at least a little. Their mother had cried when the acceptance letter arrived, pressing a hand to her mouth while relatives called throughout the evening to congratulate them. Their father had actually come home early that night carrying an expensive bottle of sake, his face flushed with pride in a way Byakuya rarely saw.
Ren majored in electrical engineering, though he seemed to spend as much time drinking as he did studying. The area around campus was packed with cramped bars and cheap restaurants full of cigarette smoke and loud conversations, and Ren moved through those places effortlessly. He was handsome in the way people trusted immediately, because he looked like he was out of a magazine spread: slim face and body, dark hair that always fell neatly into place, smooth skin untouched by acne or shaving cuts. He could barely grow a beard, which only made him seem more refined and youthful. Even drunk, leaning back in a noisy izakaya booth with his tie loosened and a beer glass dangling from his fingers, he looked composed.
His looks only helped him get away with things. His grades were mediocre at best once he actually got into university, but professors liked him anyway, and other students flocked to him instinctively. Ren always seemed to be at the center of a group, laughing easily while people listened to him. Girls hovered around him. Other boys copied the way he dressed and talked. Even when he skipped lectures or stumbled into class hungover, people treated it like a charming flaw instead of a real problem.
Byakuya, on the other hand, didn’t get that kind of grace from people. His hair had started going white midway through high school, first in scattered streaks near his temples before spreading further until classmates started joking that he looked middle-aged at sixteen. He had a smattering of stubborn stubble he often forgot to shave because he was busy or distracted, and it made him look rougher than he actually was. He wasn’t built like Ren, either. While Ren stayed slim - he smoked a lot and didn’t really eat - Byakuya spent hours training because he wanted to become an astronaut, and the workouts broadened his shoulders and thickened his frame. His hands were calloused from weightlifting equipment and machine tools in the engineering labs.
His mother hated the way he looked. She often bought him oversized sweaters and loose button-down shirts that hung awkwardly from his frame, clearly hoping to disguise the muscle she thought looked inelegant. When they went shopping together, she would hold clothing up against him with a small frown and comment that he’d looked “more refined” before he started training so seriously.
Byakuya got into the same university as Ren, and despite the school’s prestige, nobody seemed particularly impressed because he was simply the younger brother following behind him. Relatives compared their entrance exam scores over dinner as though they were discussing weather. Professors who recognized his last name often brightened at first before realizing which brother he was.
He chose mechanical engineering, because it was fascinating, because he’d always liked machines and figuring stuff out.
But he also pursued a degree in history because he genuinely loved it, even if everyone around him treated the choice like proof he lacked discipline or ambition. He liked reading about ancient civilizations and scientific breakthroughs and failed kingdoms. He liked tracing how one discovery or invention rippled outward through centuries of human history. To Byakuya, it all felt connected.
Ren openly mocked him for it. Their mother sighed whenever it came up in conversation, embarrassed by what she clearly considered an impractical hobby attached to an otherwise respectable career path.
“What exactly are you planning to do with history?” she asked once over dinner when Byakuya came for a visit. “Teach middle school children?”
Byakuya laughed it off because it was easier that way, and he didn’t care anymore what his mother thought, not really.
He’d learned young that the best response to mockery was often to smile like it didn’t bother him. So when classmates teased him for getting too enthusiastic during lectures or for rambling about rockets and ancient engineering techniques, he leaned into the joke instead of pulling away. He laughed loudly, shrugged his shoulders, and kept talking anyway.
They were all going to die one day. Byakuya intended to enjoy himself along the way.
He met Yamazaki Konomi during his second year.
She was another engineering student, serious and studious in a way that made professors immediately adore her. She usually sat near the front of lecture halls with her notes organized in perfect, careful handwriting, dark hair tied back neatly while everyone else around her looked half-asleep. While other students complained about assignments, Konomi approached problems with a kind of calm focus that Byakuya found genuinely impressive.
She specialized in combustion engineering and eventually pursued a PhD studying fuel systems. Even as an undergraduate, she was brilliant enough that older students sought her out for help. Byakuya had seen graduate students twice her age listening carefully while she explained equations on whiteboards in cramped lab rooms late at night.
She was beautiful too, in a classic way. Konomi had long black hair, pale skin that burned easily in summer, and enormous dark eyes that made her seem more delicate than she actually was. In reality, she was stubborn and resilient beneath the reserved exterior. She worked herself mercilessly hard and rarely complained about it.
People constantly teased her and Byakuya about supposedly dating. They spent enough time together for the rumors to spread naturally: studying in the library until closing time, eating cheap convenience-store dinners between lab sessions, arguing cheerfully over equations while walking across campus.
But Byakuya had never had feelings for her, and she clearly didn’t feel that way about him either. They worked well as friends precisely because there wasn’t any romantic tension there. Byakuya could make Konomi laugh in a way few people seemed able to, and she tolerated his disorganization with long-suffering patience. At the same time, they were fundamentally different people. Byakuya tended to gravitate toward loud, talkative women who matched his energy, while Konomi was thoughtful and reserved, someone who listened carefully before speaking.
Besides, Konomi had been charmed by Ren almost immediately the first time they met.
It happened during a university festival. The campus was crowded with students and visitors moving between food stalls and club displays while paper lanterns swayed overhead in the evening breeze. Ren had shown up late wearing a dark coat and that easy smile he used whenever he wanted people to like him. Byakuya remembered the exact moment Konomi looked at him for the first time across the crowded courtyard. Her posture shifted almost imperceptibly, her expression softening in a way Byakuya had never seen before.
And Ren noticed too. Of course he did.
Ren was good at reading people. He knew exactly how to make Konomi feel singled out and understood. Around her, he lowered his voice slightly, listened attentively when she spoke, and presented himself as ambitious but thoughtful. He asked questions about her research and remembered the answers later. He walked her to train stations at night and carried heavy books for her without being asked.
Byakuya tried to warn her once he realized where things were heading, but he gave up quickly because it was hopeless. Anything negative he said about Ren just sounded bitter or jealous. And honestly, Ren really was charming when he wanted to be. Most people only ever saw the version of him he chose to present.
Konomi fit perfectly into Ren’s plans for his life. She was beautiful, intelligent, modest, and hardworking, the sort of woman parents bragged about. She came from a respectable family. Professors admired her. Other women envied her. Standing beside Ren, the two of them looked like the kind of successful young couple people assumed would naturally build a perfect life together.
And for his part, Ren genuinely seemed captivated by her. Not necessarily in the deep, selfless way Byakuya thought love was supposed to work, but in the way Ren became obsessed with things he considered valuable. Konomi was someone impressive enough to reflect well on him. Someone beautiful enough to display proudly. Someone intelligent enough to raise capable children with him someday.
They got married when Ren was twenty-six and Konomi was twenty-four, midway through her PhD. The wedding was elegant and expensive, full of crisp suits and polite smiles and carefully arranged flowers. Their mother cried through most of the ceremony while relatives whispered approvingly about what a perfect match they were. Ren looked smugly satisfied with himself the entire day. Konomi looked beautiful and nervous and exhausted.
She got pregnant shortly afterward and somehow still finished her PhD not long after giving birth to Senku. Byakuya honestly didn’t know how she managed it. Whenever he visited their apartment during those months, Konomi looked half-dead from lack of sleep, dark circles beneath her eyes while research papers and baby supplies competed for space across the living room. Yet she kept going anyway, stubborn as always.
And look, Byakuya already believed that the point of life was other people. Knowledge, kindness, connection. He loved humanity in a broad sense already.
He just had never been particularly interested in marriage or children for himself. At twenty-six, he still felt too young somehow, too unfinished. Kids seemed exhausting - sticky and loud and constantly on the verge of accidental death. Every time he rode the train home from work and saw exhausted parents wrestling screaming toddlers, he mostly thought: absolutely not.
Then he visited Konomi and Ren about a month after Senku was born, and something inside him shifted so suddenly it almost frightened him.
Konomi answered the door wearing loose sweatpants and one of Ren’s old university hoodies, her dark hair tied messily back instead of styled neatly the way it usually was. She looked exhausted. Not just tired, but fundamentally worn down in the way only new parents seemed to become. And yet when she glanced toward the bassinet near the couch, her entire expression softened in a strange way.
Ren wasn’t home yet. Work, apparently.
“Do you want to hold him?” Konomi asked after Byakuya had been there maybe ten minutes.
Byakuya immediately panicked. “I’ve never held a baby before.”
“You’ll survive,” she said dryly.
Then, before he could argue further, she carefully lifted Senku from the bassinet and deposited him into Byakuya’s arms with the confidence of someone far too sleep-deprived to care about his nerves.
Byakuya froze.
Senku was absurdly small, but warm and surprisingly heavy despite it, wrapped tightly in a pale blanket patterned with tiny stars. His cheeks were round and soft, his little fists tucked stubbornly near his face. A month old and still somehow looking deeply excited to be alive already.
He’d been asleep when Konomi handed him over, but as Byakuya stared down nervously, Senku’s tiny face scrunched up slightly before his eyes blinked open.
Red. Not brown or dark gray like most newborns sometimes had. Properly red, sharp and startling against his pale skin. They focused on Byakuya with an intensity that felt bizarre in something so tiny and so new. Weren’t baby brains still mush when they were this little? For one ridiculous second, Byakuya had the overwhelming impression that the baby was evaluating him.
“Well,” he murmured, feeling ridiculously like the baby already thought he was an idiot, “you look like you’re already judging people.”
Konomi laughed tiredly from the couch. “He does that. Gets it from Ren, I think.”
Senku kept staring at him. His tiny hand wriggled loose from the blanket and latched unexpectedly around one of Byakuya’s fingers with surprising strength.
And that was it.
Something inside Byakuya cracked wide open so suddenly it almost hurt.
He had loved people before in the abstract, philosophical sense. He cared about humanity and the future and kindness and all of that. But this was different - immediate and profound and terrifying in its intensity.
Looking down at Senku, Byakuya understood suddenly why people stayed alive through impossible things for their children. Why they worked themselves to exhaustion. Why they kept going.
This tiny, strange little person existed now. He wasn’t Byakuya’s kid, but his nephew, and the greatest wonder in the world.
And Byakuya already loved him enough that it scared him.