Chapter Text
The kitchen was warm. Too warm. Jokichi had opened the window, but the breeze that drifted in was thick, humid and wet, and it carried the smell of the hydrangeas that his great-grandmother-in-law had planted along the fence. Well. The smell was fine. The heat was not. He really hated this type of heat.
He was stirring the miso soup with his right hand and checking the rice cooker with his left and trying not to think about the fact that his wife was sitting at the table behind him, reading a novel, and that every few seconds she would look up and watch him. He could feel her gaze on the back of his neck like a physical thing. Warm. Heavy. Not threatening—she had never threatened him, not really, not in the way people meant when they said the word—but present. Always present.
It was his week to cook. He's been learning more recipes lately, picking up the slack whenever his wife needed to be away. Which was lesser and lesser, these past few years.
"Anata," Ryoba said, amused, "the fish is burning."
He looked down. The fillet in the pan had developed a dark brown crust on one side. Not burnt. Caramelized. He flipped it anyway, because arguing with Ryoba about the difference between caramelization and burning was a conversation he had lost seven times before and would lose an eighth.
"It's fine," he said.
"Mhmm." She turned a page. "If you say so."
This was their marriage. He had met her at Akademi High School, in the spring of his final year. She had been a first-year then, bright and imposing, with gray eyes that followed him in the hallways. He had thought she was going to be another fling. He had thought she was harmless. He had been wrong about both, but by the time he realized it, he was already hers.
Not through force—not like how her family expected, anyway. They could never tell their story to anyone. And it was something strange, at least. What they have. Through the way she smiled at him when he wasn't looking. Through the way she remembered how he took his tea. Through the way she eliminated obstacles without ever asking for credit, without ever expecting thanks.
He had never seen her do anything, at first. He had simply noticed that the girls who pursued him tended to transfer schools or lose interest or disappear from his life entirely, and he had decided, somewhere along the way (and what a way it all was), that he didn't mind.
That was the part he didn't tell anyone. The part he barely admitted to himself.
He didn't mind.
He felt off, knowing that. But still. Ryoba was frightening, yes. Ryoba was intense, yes. Ryoba had done things—specific things, terrible things—that would continue on whenever he heard of whispered rumors and the occasional confession. She knew that he knew. And god, he hated that he knew. A lot of things, really, that he just shoved at the back of his mind.
But she had never raised a hand to him. She had never raised her voice. She had simply... loved him. Fiercely. Endlessly. In a way that should have felt suffocating but instead felt like being wrapped in a warm blanket on a cold night.
Maybe the bar he put was low, but he craved the heat at the dead of the night whenever she had to do her obligations.
Regardless, he had made peace with this. Through much habit. Fifteen years of waking up next to her, of watching her braid her hair, of listening to her hum while she watered the garden, had worn down the sharp edges of his fear until all that was left was a dull, familiar ache. He loved her, he thought. He didn't know what love was supposed to feel like. But when she smiled at him, he wanted to keep her smiling. And when she didn't, he wanted to fix whatever had broken.
That was love, wasn't it? The desire to fix? The desire to hold it, mold it, if it ever died?
He couldn't figure it out at times. He thought he would, but a decade later he still had too many questions. But he had done his duty too, and that was picking up after her many, many messes.
An accomplice in all but name.
"Aya-chaaan," Ryoba called toward the window, "are you going to help your Mama or are you going to sit there all day?"
"I'm thinking," came the voice from the veranda. She had taken to becoming more “serious” lately.
"Thinking about what?"
"Things."
Ryoba laughed. It was a sweet laugh, the kind that made strangers turn their heads and smile. Many of his coworkers fawned over her whenever she came by to drop off his lunch. Like clockwork, she would maneuver her way into any social situation with a sticky sweetness. Jokichi had learned, over the years, that the sweetness was at least real.
It was not a mask. It was just that the sweetness and the other thing—the thing that had made her do things that normal people did not do—coexisted in the same body, like two fish in the same tank, never quite touching.
"She's like you," Jokichi said, watching his daughter's silhouette through the window. Small. Still. Unmoving, staring at the way the trees rustled with the wind. She was inclined to nature just like he was.
"Mm? How so?"
"Doesn't do anything she doesn't want to do."
Ryoba set down her book, a recent crime novel she had taken to editing. A favor from a friend. Her gray eyes—the same gray as her daughter's, the same gray as her mother's, the same gray that had appeared in old photographs of women he would never meet—softened.
"She's like both of us," she said. "That's the point of children, isn't it? To see yourself reflected back?"
"I wouldn't know. I'm a man."
She stood and crossed the kitchen in three steps. Her hand touched his arm, light as a moth. "What does that have to do with it? You're a good father, darling. Better than you think."
He wanted to believe her. He tried to believe her. But every time he looked at Ayano—at the way she watched the world, at the way she didn't flinch when other children cried, at the way she had asked him, last week, "Papa, what does it feel like to be scared?"—he wondered if he was failing. If he was supposed to be teaching her something he didn't know how to teach. If the emptiness inside her was something he could fill, if he just tried hard enough.
He knew, intellectually, that it wasn't. The emptiness was hereditary. Azebiki's journals (which she gave him after they picked Ayano off from their....trip) had made that clear.
It was not a lack of love or attention or proper parenting. It was a condition, like being left-handed or having perfect pitch. You couldn't parent it away.
But knowing something intellectually and believing it in your bones were two different things.
And he desperately wanted to. To help her. He didn't know how.
"Anata….." Ryoba tasted the soup, and made a small wrinkle in her brow. "Needs more salt."
"You said that yesterday."
"Yesterday it was too much salt. Today is less." She sprinkled salt into the pot—too much, he would have to add water to balance it, they had opposite tastes—and then reached up and kissed his cheek. "There. Perfect."
Her lips were warm. She smelled like jasmine. He did not pull away.
"Ayano," Ryoba called, "come inside. It's too hot out there."
"I'm fine."
"You'll get a heatstroke. Then I'll have to nurse you back to health, and I'd cry if you ever got too sick"
A pause. Then the sound of bare feet on wood. Ayano appeared in the doorway, her face flushed, her dark hair sticking to her forehead. She looked at the table, at the fish, at her mother, at her father. Her expression did not change, though the redness of her face made her look like a boiled lobster.
"I'm not going to get a heatstroke," she said, her pale face turning redder due to the coldness of the aircon*.
"Mm. But you came inside anyway." Ryoba beamed. "Because you love Mama, don't you?”
Ayano did not confirm or deny. She walked to the table, sat down, and stared at the fish.
Jokichi served the soup. He sat across from his daughter. He watched her eat, methodically, one bite at a time, and wondered what she was thinking. He always wondered. She was a locked box, and he had never found the key.
"Ayano," he said, overcome by something he couldn't name. "are you happy?"
She looked up. Chewed. Swallowed.
"What does happy feel like?" she asked, parroting her question from last week.
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at Ryoba, who was smiling her sweet, unreadable smile.
"That's a good question," Ryoba said. "Tell us when you find out."
Ayano nodded and went back to her fish.
Jokichi ate his burned fillet and tried not to think about the fact that his nine-year-old daughter had just asked him to define happiness, and he had no answer. He did. But he couldn't answer her. How could you explain to the blind what a color was like? To the deaf what your favorite song sounded like?
This is fine, he told himself. This is normal. This is what families sometimes do.
But he didn't know, god. Sometimes he doubted. He barely even knew what a father was like. But he'd die trying.
The fish was a bit dry. But it must've tasted good, since his daughter finished her plate clean. He gave her seconds when she spent too long staring at her plate again.
At the very least, she inherited his appetite.