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He comes home one day to find a shocking sight: his wife is sitting at their dinner table, staring down at the phone in her hands, and crying.
Even if Kyouko has opened up to him greatly over the years, it’s still a rare sight to see her actually weeping openly. When she’s upset, she usually goes quiet and tense until he can coax the worry out of her frame with a massage and a smile. So to see her actually falling apart like this…Makoto braces himself.
Whatever it is, it can’t be good.
“Kyouko…?” he ventures – he doesn’t know what to ask, how to phrase it without making things worse, so he opts to let the question just trail off. She knows him well enough by now to get what he’s going for, though, so there’s no need for elaboration.
She absent-mindedly brings a gloved hand up to wipe away her tears (and that makes him even more concerned –she hasn’t worn her gloves at home in years). When she speaks, her voice is unsteady, the most pained he’s ever heard it.
“I…received a call from my grandfather today.” She pauses, breathes. “He’s…he’s dying.”
Ah. Makoto understands immediately. He knows how important the Kirigiri family head is to his wife—he’s the man who raised her and loved her after her father left, the first person she wanted to find once they escaped from the school, the one person aside from him that she considers family. The blow must be a devastating one.
It is instinctive for him to lean down and wrap his arms around her shoulders, offering comfort in the way he knows how. “Which hospital is he at?” he asks gently. “We can go visit him, if you want.”
Of course it’s “we”. He has his respects to pay to the Kirigiri head as well, for allowing him into the family, and beyond that, he wants to be there to support Kyouko. He knows she’ll want to see her grandfather before he passes, but he also knows it will hurt her, seeing her strong grandfather so weak. He doesn’t want her to face that alone.
Makoto also knows she’d do the same for him in a heartbeat. She’d helped him find his family as soon as she’d checked on her grandfather, had stood beside him even when he made questionable decisions borne out of his never-ending faith in the goodness of people, even during the end of the world. The more in love with each other they’d fallen, the more he’d noticed the little things she did to express it.
So he has no problem supporting her and doing the same in return. If it means rearranging his work schedule a bit in order to free himself during visiting hours, he doesn’t mind – ensuring that his wife doesn’t lose hope as a result of such a tough loss is more important right now, and he figures that a death in the family will excuse any absences.
He doesn’t mind if she cries in front of him, as unused to it as he is, because he would rather be there to dry her tears than leave her alone like that. He knows she appreciates it in her own way – a watery smile, a squeeze of the hand.
Kyouko is going to be okay, he promises the dying man. He’ll make sure of that. And if she wants to name a son after the grandfather she loved, he can think of no better way to honor him.