at first it seems like the tail end of a bad joke, but tou-san’s health is never the sort of thing that ka-san’s joked about.
as he’d gotten older, there’d been scares. it was less than a week after mirai’s first long-term ANBU mission —— an entire year away from home, when ka-san had found him in the bathroom. he’d said he didn’t feel well but a life time of experience had apparently told ka-san it mattered, and they’d gotten him to the hospital in time.
a stoke. not a massive one. he was alright. but there was rehabilitation and the long process of making tou-san feel like he was capable again after a long hospital stay.
mirai had moved back in after that. the small apartment she could afford on her new salary didn’t seem as spectacular as it did when she was apartment hunting. thoughts lingered. if tou-san had passed while she’d been away… mirai didn’t know if she’d forgive herself. she didn’t know if her mother would forgive her, or her father would forgive her. ( they would of course. they loved her with this unconditional love that she didn’t understand. probably wouldn’t until she was a parent herself. ) it was just a precaution at that point.
against the stone that had settled in her stomach that whispered that her parents were getting older, that she had less and less time with them. that if she left they may not be here when she came back. it’s every growing child’s first fear.
but it’d been years ago now and it was pushed to the back of her mind. COMPARTMENTALIZED like they taught all the good little ninja to do.
her mask slips from her fingers and mirai’s face twists from confused to perfectly blank, another thing she’s learned in ANBU. he’d still… while she was… the clatter against the floor is missed because time seems to have slipped into the same void as sound and heat and mirai can only feel the cold of hospital air. her eyes settle and she looks at her mother. properly looks at her. at age, at the lines between her brows and the collection of tears between time worn wrinkles and oh. her husband’s dead. of course she’s crying and why isn’t mirai.
“oh,” slips past. it’s a breath. she feels it from the bottom of her lungs to her lips and she’s so keenly aware as her eyes start to sting and blink, damn it why is she like this.
she’d —— she’d wrapped so many emotions in swaddling cloth and refused to feel them during missions but THIS ISN’T A MISSION. this is the full weight of her worst fears hitting her and her father’s not even —— no good byes, no hellos, no smiles-behind-a-grey-beard and if her mother’s not in a room, if she was WAITING for mirai to return that just means there’s not even a hand to hold in a warm bed. no last words.
her teeth clench and she surrenders to the full weight of the sob as it hits her, rattling through her chest and there are hands on her shoulders, wrinkled hands with flesh so soft it’s almost like they’d never known the callouses that came from holding knives and shuriken and why.
why did her parents have to grow old like the rest of them? just objectively she knew but they’d survived. so narrowly, so barely had clung to life and why did it —— why did it ——
she has to be careful as she falls into her mother. because ka-san is old now too, and mirai’s full weight would be too much to throw on her these days. but her arms wrap around shrinking shoulders and her and her face buries in the front of her mother’s shirt and suddenly she’s five, and her words are failing the depth of complexity in the emotion she feels and she whimpers out a soft “mama,” because there’s nothing else to say.
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