[ souvenir ] sender brings receiver something special from a trip
Hinokari is fifteen, having returned from a school trip in which her mother had allowed her to come along, to Tokyo which had been far from from where the Hasashis reside, far from her father's base and an opportunity to meet with her cousin who is also there. She finds her parents in the living room, days after she'd returned from the said trip, procuring several things - spent with her own pocket money - trinkets and little souvenirs that made her think of them while she'd been away from home.
She finds Hanzo in his study, the home office that has seen almost the same exact configuration throughout the years, the same home office which she'd come straight to, when she knows her father would be working a little more because a general's work does not simply end like that.
She enters the study without a word, and Hanzo would know the sound of her feet when she is excited to show him something, when she had a bad day from school or when she just feels she could use some company. Her hands hold a post card which she lays flat on his desk, and lets him receive it. On one side, an illustration of a vintage model of a motorcycle, certainly replicated from some original by some unknown artist. On the other side, the space filled with her handwriting which is chaotic, a little hurried and not like the clean script in her journals:
Trip was fine. Didn't die. Didn't break anything. -H
She doesn't speak, but waits in the silence in which both father and daughter are fluent in.
Her mother gets the picture she and her cousin have taken together. Or rather, taken by cousin Shin. Takuto and Hinokari both wearing lab coats, pristine white, and blue-gloved, looking at something on the laboratory bench - a sample of a stained cross-section cut specimen, dyed to the science for what her cousin calls organelle visibility. Proof that they have connected somehow, and actually got along.
And so she waits. Waits for her father to look down from the reports he'd been reading, waits for him to put aside the charts and maps sprawled on the table even for a breath because she needs her father and not the general.
🐝 * ― 𝑻𝑯𝑬 𝑭𝑰𝑽𝑬 𝑳𝑶𝑽𝑬 𝑳𝑨𝑵𝑮𝑼𝑨𝑮𝑬𝑺. ( add " + " to reverse the action ) || @yeoumopi || accepting
💥|| The reports do not so much stop demanding his attention as they cease, for one suspended moment, to exist at all. Hanzo's eyes lift from the grid of coordinates and casualty projections the way a man surfaces from deep water - slow, deliberate, as though surfacing too quickly might cost him something.
He does not need to ask what she carries. He has heard her footsteps against the hallway floor a thousand times over fifteen years, has catalogued every cadence they can hold - the clipped, furious stride of a bad day, the dragging shuffle of exhaustion, the light, uneven skip of a girl with something to give. Tonight her feet had told him everything before she'd crossed the threshold.
His gaze finds the postcard where she has laid it, and for a moment he simply looks - not reads, looks - the way he might study a photograph taken from reconnaissance, cataloguing every line before permitting himself to feel anything about what those lines mean. The motorcycle rendered in faded ink, some vintage machine long since retired to memory and museum glass, its chrome caught mid-gleam by an artist who will never know how many hands this small rectangle of cardstock would pass through, how much weight it would come to carry.
He turns it over.
Her handwriting greets him - not the disciplined, copybook script she performs for her teachers and for him when she wants something, but the true hand, the hurried scrawl of a girl writing standing up, perhaps balanced against a train window, perhaps scribbling between one attraction and the next, unwilling to let a single spare minute go unclaimed. Trip was fine. Didn't die. Didn't break anything. Four words orbiting the shape of everything she does not say - that she thought of him while she was away, that some part of a foreign city, seven hundred kilometers and an entire childhood removed from the compound gates, had still turned her mind homeward, had still made her stop and spend her own small currency on a piece of card stock bearing a motorcycle neither of them has ever owned.
Something in his chest performs a maneuver too old and too practiced to name. It is not softening - Hanzo Hasashi does not soften, not even here, not even now - it is closer to the moment a blade is finally sheathed after long use, the release held in the wrist rather than surrendered to the air.
His hand, the same hand that hours ago traced troop movements across acetate overlays, now closes around the postcard's edge with a gentleness that would astonish the fifty-some operatives who answer to him without question. He does not smile, not with his mouth. It happens instead at the eyes, a fractional easing at their corners, visible only to the one person alive who has ever been trained to read it.
"No injuries," he says, and his voice has already shed its command register, has already dropped into the lower, unhurried timbre reserved for this room, this hour, this daughter. "This is the only casualty report I have received all week that pleases me."
He sets the postcard upright against the small brass lamp at his desk's edge - not filed, not shelved, but displayed, granted a place among the ordered austerity of his workspace the way a general might position a captured banner. It will remain there long after she has gone to bed. He looks up at her fully now, reports forgotten, maps forgotten, the war-room quiet of the study rearranging itself around the two of them like something exhaling.
"Sit," he says - not an order, an invitation wearing an order's clothes, the only kind he knows how to give. "Tell me what you did not write. Tell me about the motorcycle. Tell me about your cousin, and whatever he had you staining under glass that made you stand so straight in your mother's photograph, like a soldier." A pause, weighted, deliberate. "Tell me everything the postcard was too small to hold." 💥||
