random prompts: hanzo attending hinokari's graduation milestones. which years does he miss and which years does he not miss? what are his internal thoughts/feelings about this? bonus points if hayato also teases him.
Random Inbox Shenanigans || @yeoumopi || always accepting!
The Ones He Missed, The One He Kept
He made it. Barely - he'd flown back on a transport that smelled like fuel and MRE wrappers, still in half his uniform because there hadn't been time to change, and he'd stood at the back of a room full of paper cherry blossoms taped to a chalkboard while thirty five-year-olds sang a song about frogs. Hinokari had spotted him before she'd even reached the little podium they'd built for the "graduates." She hadn't waved. She'd just gone very still, very focused, the way she did when something mattered too much to risk breaking it by moving.
Afterward she'd handed him a construction-paper medal that said BEST DAD in green crayon, the D backward, and he'd worn it pinned to his uniform on the flight back to base until Hayato had to remind him to take it off before debrief.
He hadn't known, then, that this would be the last one for a long time.
He missed it. Deployment, the kind with no communication window, the kind where Miharu had to explain to a nine-year-old why Papa's chair at the ceremony had his name on a folded card instead of him in it. He found out afterward - much afterward - that Hayato had sat in that chair anyway, uninvited, because he said a Hasashi shouldn't have to look at empty furniture. Hinokari had let him. She'd let her uncle hold her flowers and take the photo and pretend, for one afternoon, to be something he wasn't, because the alternative was an empty chair and she was nine and didn't want to explain that to her friends either.
Hanzo saw the photo three weeks later on a satellite uplink that dropped every few seconds. Hayato's arm around her shoulders. Her smile aimed at the camera the practiced way children learn to smile when they've decided not to be disappointed out loud.
He didn't say much when he saw it. He didn't have words yet for the specific shape of that failure. He just saved the photo to a drive he kept for things he needed to remember and not look at too often.
He missed this one too, though not for lack of trying - a training accident on base needed a commanding officer present for the incident review, and rank did not care that this was the second graduation in a row. He called her that night from a hallway outside a hospital room, voice pitched low so the person on a ventilator two doors down wouldn't wake.
"I'm sorry," he said, and meant it with a weight that surprised him.
"It's okay," she said, in the voice of a thirteen-year-old who had learned to say it's okay fluently, automatically, the way she'd learned kanji - through repetition until it no longer required thought.
It was not okay. He knew that. He suspected she knew it too. Neither of them said so.
Hayato, predictably, had been there. Hayato was always there. It had become a kind of joke between them by then, black-humored and only half a joke - don't worry, Uncle Hayato's got the graduation-chair rotation handled - except Hanzo didn't find it funny so much as necessary, the way morphine is necessary. His brother filling the space he left. His brother's face so identical to his own that for one unbearable half-second in the photos, it almost looked like he'd been the one who came.
He hated that it helped. He hated more that he needed it to.
High School - and Enlistment
He came. He came early - arrived the day before with a garment bag holding his dress uniform, which he did not put on, because Miharu had looked at him with the particular flatness she reserved for moments she considered non-negotiable and said, You will wear a suit like every other father in that gymnasium, Hanzo. She does not need General Hasashi in the third row. She needs her father.
He sat between Miharu and Hayato - his brother had, for once, not needed to fill a chair meant for someone else, and seemed almost put out about it, like a man denied a familiar role - and watched Hinokari cross a stage in a cap two sizes too big, and felt something in his chest that he recognized, distantly, as the same thing he'd felt at seven years old watching his own grandmother laugh at something no one else found funny. Uncomplicated. Whole.
He'd helped her with the physical assessment paperwork the week before - sat across the kitchen table going line by line through medical waivers and fitness benchmarks with the same careful attention his grandmother had once given persimmons, because if this was happening, if she was doing this, he would not let bureaucratic carelessness be the reason anything went wrong for her. He'd run her through drills in the yard at dawn before either of them told Miharu, both of them sweating and neither of them saying what they were actually afraid of.
She passed. Of course she passed. She was fast in a way that had nothing to do with the training and everything to do with something she'd inherited without asking for it.
He signed the enlistment consent as her father, not as a commanding officer, though he was aware - sharply, uncomfortably aware - that these were no longer separable in the way he might have wished. His own father had signed papers like this without looking up from what he was doing, approval given the way you'd stamp a form. Hanzo made himself look up. Made himself watch her hand move across the page, the same careful, unhurried script Miharu had taught her, nothing like his own clipped signature, nothing like his father's economy.
He did not tell her what he felt, standing there. He didn't have the vocabulary his grandmother would have had, the ease with which she could hand you a truth wrapped in something gentle enough to hold. But he tried. That was the whole architecture of the last eighteen years, as far as he understood it - not to give her a version of himself, hollowed and disciplined and useful, but to give her something worth becoming, and let her choose whether to become it.
He wanted her to have a childhood he could point to and say: this was not what mine was.
He wanted her to enlist because something in her burned toward it, not because grief had scraped her clean and left a uniform as the only shape that fit the emptiness.
He did not know, yet, whether he'd succeeded. He suspected he wouldn't know for years. Possibly decades. Possibly not until she was standing in some kitchen of her own, finishing something someone she loved had left unfinished.
But she'd smiled at him after the ceremony - not the practiced smile from the elementary school photo, not a performance for anyone's benefit - an actual smile, unguarded, aimed only at him, and said, "You came."
Hayato, from somewhere over his shoulder, added: "Barely. I had a chair warmed up just in case, you know. Standard procedure."
"You were here-here, yes, remarkable, truly a modern miracle, someone alert the JGSDF." Hayato clapped him once on the back, hard enough to be brotherly, gentle enough to not actually be an insult. "Should I retire the chair? I've grown attached to it. Sentimental value."
"No promises." But he was grinning, the same grin they'd shared since before either of them could form full sentences, and under it Hanzo could see what his brother wasn't saying outright - good, I'm glad, I didn't want to keep being you for her, I only ever wanted to be enough until you could be there yourself.
Hinokari, watching the two of them with the specific exhausted fondness of a girl who'd grown up with an uncle who was legally, biologically, spiritually a walking backup copy of her father, just shook her head. "You're both so weird."
"We contain multitudes," Hayato said.
"You contain one multitude, split down the middle at birth," she said, "and he got the serious half."
Hanzo, despite himself, felt something that might have been a laugh sitting just beneath his ribs, unfamiliar and warm, the way sun feels on skin that has mostly known shade.
He thought of the persimmons. Of a promise made at seventeen in an empty kitchen - warrior in the garden - and understood, for the first time in years, that maybe he had not entirely broken it after all.
