moon child

independent multi-muse blog semi-selective || semi-private blog remake in progress || loved by valentina

[yeoumopi]

yeoumopi. (n.) a selective, low-med activity, oc blog for legacy children. with heavy influences from pop culture, such as korean dramas, ace attorney and marvel. forever wip. written and loved by val. forever under renovation.

a study in childhood, coming-of-age, duality, mythology/fantasy and morality. any in-character (ic) threads on this blog is a work of fiction and should not be treated as reality.

rules. muses.

[sasorikigai]

[ 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." 💥||

[yeoumopi]

Hinokari watches him. She watches him with the same careful attention she's always had when it came to her parents, especially to her father - the kind of attentiveness that she has learned to remodel because her father's kind of attentiveness to things is different from the way her mother is attentive to things, and one is not opposites of each other but perhaps complementary the way she has learned that two people may be compatible and coexist in their own grief and still be able to create something new.

Seven hundred kilometers away and an entire week or so spent away from a home that has been there her entire childhood, and she cannot help but think of what her father might be doing, of the patients her mother might be tending to and she does not say it in the postcard's note that she had missed both of them. What she learns instead too is that she has also seen the world and appreciated the lesson of what it means to be away, to be so far from home and know that her parents are waiting for her return.

And she sees it. The smile that is not a smile, not with curved lips with the sides pulled upward but the way her father's eyes do the smiling instead, in the way the sides crease and she has known that way of smiling since she'd been four, and sees it at every milestone achieved in fifteen years and counting and every victory he witnesses her between deployments, and every assurance that is not an assurance in the way he offers her that, rather something that is an affirmed certainty because Hinokari has learned that sometimes things must be named aloud so the weight does not drag one down.

The postcard finds its place beneath the brass lamp at his desk's edge - displayed and a spot earned because it is an honest way she can show her father what she does not write in the postcard, that she'd thought of him when they'd visited a souvenir shop and she thought it accuracy that it might be a memento he might appreciate.

Sit. Tell me what you did not write. Tell me about the motorcycle. Tell me about your cousin and what ever he had you staining....

The invitation. Earned. She had been waiting for this. She'd seen a lot in Tokyo, and there was no other person she wanted to tell her journey about than her father.

"Takuto-kun is smart. He is working something very, very messy. He stained some samples and let me sketch it. It's one of those plant enzymes that a student of his father had been studying closely. He did an assay - he said the reaction helps them study how cells repair themselves when they are exposed to heat. He said it would be helpful in the research his father is doing, but I'm pretty sure he just mostly wanted me to see the colours change."

The silence settles for a moment, and she lets it. She lets him receive her thoughts - the ones that have remained unnamed until he'd prompted her, which would have been the same ones that would have already written in her journal, with her hurried and unhurried script ( depended on the day ) with her rawest thoughts, unfiltered and honest; perhaps infuriatingly as honest as she has always been with her father.

Her eyes - dark obsidian with flecks of hazel - his and her mother's combined, and entirely hers - find him. Partly expectant of an answer, not a reaction. She knows her father does not react, not now, not ever. But she is also her mother's daughter, and she knows that he responds to her, and at some point she may have already quietly realized that she can dismantle her father's armour, the same way she has seen her mother try doing over the years of their marriage, patiently, lovingly.

"There were more pictures, Papa" she tells him. Matter-of-factly. "But of course, you keep the one where I'm standing up so straight."

[sesizzligindendarbe]

[sasorikigai]

@yeoumopi

[sasorikigai]

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

Kindergarten

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.

Elementary School

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.

Middle School

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 wore the suit.

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."

"I came," he agreed.

Hayato, from somewhere over his shoulder, added: "Barely. I had a chair warmed up just in case, you know. Standard procedure."

"I was here."

"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."

"Retire it."

"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.

[goldenagememes]

The ultimate affectionate gestures compilation (deleted post by fierymcmes)

Send one of the following prompts for my muse to reach out affectionately to yours !

Feel free to combine them ( example: send [ brush ] + [ push ] for my muse to brush the loose strand of your muse’s hair our of their face and then push it behind your muse’s ear ), reverse them ( example: send [ reverse + caress ] for your muse to caress my muse’s cheek ) and/or add details.

[ brush ] - to brush the hair out of your muse’s face / eyes / forehead

[ push ] - to push the loose strand of your muse’s hair behind your muse’s ear

[ caress ] - to caress your muse’s cheek

[ tilt ] - to tilt your muse’s chin gently to prompt them to make eye contact with my muse

[ curl ] - to curl my muse’s fingers under your muse’s chin while resting a thumb on their cheek, not quite tilting but just… holding

[ cup ] - to cup your muse’s face with my muse’s hands

[ place ] - to place my muse’s hand over your muse’s hand where it’s placed on my muse’s cheek

[ boop ] - to boop your muse on the nose

[ Eskimo ] - to brush my muse’s nose against your muse’s nose as in Eskimo kiss

[ nose ] - to kiss your muse on the nose

[ palm ] - to kiss your muse on the palm

[ knuckles ] - to kiss your muse’s knuckles

[ cheek ] - to kiss your muse on the cheek

[ lips ] - to kiss your muse softly on the lips

[ forehead ] - to kiss your muse on the forehead

[ lean ] - to lean forward and press my muse’s forehead against your muse’s forehead

[ pepper ] - to pepper your muse’s face with kisses

[ eyes ] - to kiss your muse’s closed eyelids

[ tears ] - to kiss away your muse’s tears

[ wipe ] - to wipe away your muse’s tears

[ gaze ] - to gaze into your muse’s eyes

[ roll ] - to roll my muse’s eyes at your muse affectionately

[ scalp ] - to massage your muse’s head

[ pat ] - to pat your muse’s head

[ top ] - to kiss your muse on the top of their head and then settle my muse’s cheek against it while holding them close

[ chin ] - to set my muse’s chin on the top of your muse’s head while holding them close

[ hair ] - to place lots of short, sweet, messy little kisses to the crown of your muse’s hair

[ run ] - to run my muse’s fingers through your muse’s hair

[ twirl ] - to twirl a strand of your muse’s hair around my muse’s finger

[ comb ] - to brush your muse’s hair

[ braid ] - to braid your muse’s hair

[ whisper ] - to lean close to your muse’s ear and whisper something to them

[ tickle ] - to tickle your muse

[ cheer ] - to try to cheer your muse up

[ faces ] - to make funny faces at your muse

[ shove ] - to playfully shove your muse

[ hand ] - to place my muse’s hand on your muse’s shoulder / neck as a way of supporting / comforting / reassuring them that my muse is there

[ shoulders ] - to wrap my muse’s arm around your muse’s shoulders

[ massage ] - to massage your muse’s shoulders and/or neck

[ soothe ] - to rub your muse’s shoulders soothingly

[ rub ] - to rub your muse’s back

[ body ] - to give your muse a full-body massage

[ snuggle ] - to snuggle to your muse’s side

[ support ] - to support your muse with an arm around their waist

[ lift ] - to lift your muse up in my muse’s arms

[ trace ] - to trace your muse’s scar/s with the softest press of my muse’s fingertips

[ ask ] - to ask your muse about their scar/s

[ scar ] - to kiss your muse’s scar/s

[ back ] - to hug your muse from behind

[ rest ] - to hug your muse from behind and rest my muse’s cheek against your muse’s back / shoulder

[ rock ] - to hold your muse and rock gently from side to side

[ tuck ] - to tuck your muse against my muse’s chest, covering them with the front parts of my muse’s jacket / coat, in order to keep them warm

[ head ] - to rest my muse’s head on your muse’s shoulder

[ cover ]  to cover your muse with a blanket / jacket / coat when they’re lying down

[ drape ] - to drape a blanket / jacket / coat over your muse’s shoulders

[ jewelry ] - to put a piece of jewelry around your muse’s neck

[ tie ] - to help your muse do their tie

[ smooth ] - to straighten your muse’s collar / lapel / brush a hand over your muse’s clothes to smooth it out

[ feed ] - to feed your muse

[ drink ] - to help your muse drink

[ pull ] - to pull your muse down to sit on my muse’s lap

[ bed ] - to push or pull your muse back on the bed when they try to get up

[ lap ] - to place my muse’s head on your muse’s lap

[ guide ] - to guide your muse to place their head on my muse’s lap

[ hide ] - to guide your muse to hide their face on my muse’s chest

[ help ] - to give your muse a hand when they’re stepping up or over something

[ touch ] - to touch the back of my muse’s hand to the back of your muse’s hand as if inviting to hold hands

[ thumb ] - to run my muse’s thumb over your muse’s thumb while holding hands

[ hold ] - to hold your muse’s hand and interlace our muse’s fingers

[ fingers ] - to play with your muse’s fingers absent-mindedly

[ nails ] - to tidy your muse’s nails and/or do a manicure

[ makeup ] - to help your muse put on their makeup

[ shapes ] - to trace imaginary shapes on your muse’s skin

[ pain ] - to kiss your muse where it hurts to soothe their pain

[ heartbeat ] - to place my muse’s head upon your muse’s chest, right over their heart, to listen to its beat

[redsamuraiii]

After The Rain (2018)

She admires him for still chasing after his dreams of being a novelist, in his 40s, while she gives up her dreams approaching 20s.

He admires her for still having the youthfulness and time to bounce back after hitting rock bottom in life, which he doesn't have.

[yeoumopi]

I have been struggling across my blogs and real life has been so demanding of me lately that I am left drained even on weekends. I'm going to be so much slower until I can find the groove again.

thank you for your patience.

[yeoumopi]

with the new season of ATLA live action out, and regardless whether i think it sucks/falls short or just aight, what if I wrote Hinokari and the Hasashi family as fire benders.

it's a thought.

[trufflesandcola]

Yumi Adachi and Hiroyuki Sanada in Hero Interview (1994), directed by Michio Mitsuno.

[sasorikigai]

@yeoumopi

[yeoumopi]

taking a break here for maybe a day. can be reached on the IMs. extended family's emergency and my sil needs my support rn.

[sasorikigai]

💥|| He hears it.

I can do better, Papa.

Five words. Five words and the architecture of thirty years collapses into something he does not have a name for yet but recognizes in his sternum, in the old scar tissue that runs along the left side of his ribs, in the specific grief that belongs only to the moment a father understands what he has built inside his child without meaning to, what she has reproduced in herself with the fidelity of someone who learned from the original and believed the original was the only available model.

He does not speak immediately.

This is important.

The silence before his answer is not the silence of a commanding officer calculating his next position. It is the silence of a man who has just seen something clearly for the first time and understands that clarity arrived too late to be comfortable, too soon to be entirely devastating, and must be received with both hands or not at all. It is the silence of a man standing inside a truth he helped construct and is only now, at the cost of watching it arrive in her voice, beginning to fully reckon with the dimensions of.

His arms do not loosen.

This is also important.

"Hinokari."

Her name. Only her name. The name her mother chose and he ratified with both hands pressed flat against the glass of the nursery because touching her then had required the permission of doctors and incubators and the particular terror of a man who commands without hesitation in every theater except the one that matters - the name he has spoken at seventeen thousand different frequencies across her lifetime, in the voice that belongs to briefings and the voice that belongs to kitchen tables at four in the morning and the voice that belongs to graduation ceremonies where he stood in the third row so that no one would photograph his face when she received the commendation, so that her achievement would belong to her without the annotation of his.

This is the voice that belongs to none of those.

"You cannot do better than you have already done."

He says it flatly. Not unkindly - nothing in him is unkind right now, nothing in him is capable of unkindness right now - but flatly, in the way he states facts that do not require ornamentation, that would be diminished by it. Rain falls. The fourth deployment ends. Hinokari Hasashi has not failed.

These are facts.

He pulls back. Not all the way. Enough.

His hands drop from her face to her shoulders, to the specific weight of his palms against the places where her body has been carrying what it has been carrying, and he holds her there and he tries to look at her - the reddened eyes, the puffed geography of her grief, the face that is her mother's in the softness and his own in the structure and entirely her own in the particular expression she wears right now, the expression of a soldier who has confused the truth of what she is with the distance between herself and what she believes she must be.

He has worn this expression. He knows exactly what it costs to wear it. He knows exactly what it costs to continue wearing it past the point where the wearing is sustainable. He knows because the mirror in the field quarters of the fourteenth deployment showed it to him at oh-three-hundred, and he had looked at it for a long time, and then he had looked away, and then your mother had called, and her voice had done what mirrors cannot.

She will not meet his eyes.

He notices this the way he notices everything - which is completely, which is without the compartmentalization he applies to operational data, because she is not operational data, she has never been, and the part of him that has always known this is the same part that reads the reports four times and stops at her name in the header. Her gaze has dropped to the middle distance, to the floor of the circuit, to some internal geography she is using as a substitute for the present moment, and he recognizes this too. He has lived in that geography. He has used it as she is using it now - as a place to stand when standing in the actual room requires more than the body currently has available.

He does not demand.

He does not order.

He does one thing.

His right hand lifts from her shoulder, slowly, with the deliberateness of a man who understands that sudden movements in this particular territory are not appropriate to the terrain, and his fingers find the underside of her chin - not gripping, not directing, the lightest possible architecture of a request - and he tilts her face upward by degrees. The way you redirect a compass. The way you turn something toward the light not because the light is required but because the thing deserves to know it is available.

"Look at me," he says.

Quiet. Not a command. Something adjacent to a command but inhabited differently - a command that has taken off its rank insignia and folded them on the table beside the door. The voice that asks because the asking is the only honest form the request can take, here, in the long afternoon, on the circuit where no one is watching and nothing is being evaluated and the only frequency active is the one that has existed between them since the hospital room that smelled of antiseptic and Miharu's exhaustion and the particular terror of a man who had, for the first time in his life, held something he could not tactically protect.

She does not look immediately.

He waits. He has been waiting, in one form or another, since the tenth deployment. He has learned, at considerable personal expense, that the waiting is not passive - it is the most active form of presence available to him, the one that says I am still here, the room has not changed, the man in front of you is the same man who was here before the words - and he holds the waiting the way he holds everything else that costs him, which is quietly and with both hands and without putting it down until it is ready to be set down.

Slowly.

She looks up.

And he is there. He is simply, entirely there. His eyes - dark as coal in its settled form, dark as the thing coal becomes when it has held enough heat for long enough, which is not darkness but its own specific quality of warmth, the warmth that does not announce itself but is simply present when you are close enough to feel it - his eyes find hers and do not move.

He does not look away.

He does not look past her. He does not look at the operative or the file or the name in the header or the report filed with clean hands and clean prose that accounted for everything except the forty minutes. He looks at his daughter, the way he has always looked at her, which is completely, which is without the editorial distance he applies to everything else because everything else in his life is not her, has never been her, will never require of him what she requires which is the whole of his attention given freely and without deduction.

His expression is not managed.

This is the part that would startle the unit, if the unit could see it. The Brigadier General whose face in the field is a controlled topography, whose expression under pressure is the expression of a man who has decided what to show and shows only that - this man's face, right now, is not doing any of that. It is simply present. It is simply his. The weariness that lives underneath the discipline. The love that has no operational category and has never required one. The specific grief of a father who recognizes his own architecture in his child and understands, finally and fully, what it cost to build it.

She can see all of it.

He is permitting her to see all of it.

"I did not stand here and tell you the things I told you - " and his voice finds something lower, not softer, but more interior, the frequency that exists beneath the frequency, the one Miharu has always heard even when he could not produce it voluntarily, the one he has been slowly learning to access without her as the intermediary " - so that you could hear not enough inside them. That is not what I said. And if that is what arrived, then I have - " the jaw. The familiar tightening. The thing that happens when he is refusing to let something move all the way through him before he is ready, before the words are built enough to hold the weight of the thing moving. " - I have not yet learned to say the thing I mean as clearly as I require."

He breathes. Once. Deliberate.

"I have been a general for nine years," he says. "Before that I was a colonel. Before that a major. Before that - " something almost happens in his expression, something near to rueful, the ghost of the man who was twenty-three and certain of everything because certainty was cheaper than the alternative and the price of the alternative had not yet been presented to him " - I was a lieutenant who believed that the purpose of a body was to absorb what the mission required of it and produce no complaint. Who had decided, with the magnificent stupidity available only to young officers and people who have never been shown another model, that the weight was the proof. That how much you carried, and how quietly, was the metric by which a soldier was measured."

He does not look away from her.

She does not look away from him.

This is its own kind of progress. He notices it and does not name it aloud because naming it would make it self-conscious, would introduce the editorial distance that this moment is specifically without, and he will not do that. He will simply receive it. He has been learning, at Miharu's patient instruction and at the cost of more four-in-the-morning conversations than he can count, to simply receive things without immediately processing them into utility.

"I was wrong about this," he says. "I did not learn I was wrong about this until the cost of being wrong had already been paid. By me. By your mother, who paid beside me without having agreed to the terms of the transaction, who stood at the kitchen table and received the pieces I could manage to give her and never once told me the pieces were insufficient, even when they were." A pause. The weight of it. "By men whose names I carry and do not speak often, because some debts do not get narrated. They simply accumulate, in the body, in the place behind the sternum where the things that cannot yet be spoken collect until the conditions change."

His thumb moves. The old reflex. Cheekbone to jaw. The mapping of the fact of her face.

"A bamboo stalk in a typhoon," he says. And something shifts in his voice, quieter, almost like a story- the cadence that belongs to something received and carried forward, as people carry the tools handed to them when they were young enough that the hands of the person handing them were very large. "You know what happens to a bamboo stalk in a typhoon."

He does not wait for the answer because she knows the answer. She has always known the answer. She was raised in the house with the small print of it in the corridor, the one her mother placed there and that Hanzo passed every morning for twenty-two years without commenting, because some things do not require comment - they require only proximity, only the sustained presence of someone who understands what they mean and trusts that the understanding will transfer by nearness rather than instruction.

"It bends," he says. "It bends all the way to the ground. It touches the earth. It permits the storm its full expression and does not pretend to be something other than a stalk in a typhoon, and it does not apologize for bending, and it does not stand in the aftermath and call the bending a failure." The coal warmth of his eyes, steady. Present. Not moving. "And then the storm passes. And the stalk rises. Not because it was strong enough to refuse the storm. Because it was built correctly enough to survive it."

He says it without ceremony.

Without performance.

"That is not weakness. That is the only engineering that survives what this work asks of us across a career's full length. I did not understand this at your age. I did not understand it at forty. The understanding arrived the way expensive understanding always arrives - after the invoice, not before - and your mother stood in the kitchen and she said something to me that I did not yet have the capacity to receive, and then I did not receive it, and then two years later I did, because the body eventually learns what the mind refuses, and I - " the stop. The deliberate, weighted stop. " - I do not want the understanding to cost you what it cost me."

The afternoon is long around them.

His eyes have not moved.

He is looking at her - her specifically, her entirely, the daughter who carries his architecture and her mother's softness and her own specific gravity that belongs to neither of them and was never going to, was always going to arrive as its own thing, which is what he had known in the hospital room and had not known how to protect properly because protection and control had felt, at twenty-nine, like the same instrument, and he had not yet learned the difference.

"You have not failed me," he says. "The arithmetic does not permit it. What you have done is carry more than a body is designed to carry for longer than a body is designed to carry it, and you have done this because I taught you to, because the architecture of this family teaches it without meaning to, because I gave you a name that precedes you into every room and I did not - " and here something moves through his face that he does not discipline back, because she is looking at him now, because she can see him, because the cost of letting her see it is smaller than the cost of her not seeing it, smaller than the cost of her standing here and believing she has failed the man whose face is right in front of her showing her something other than failure " - I did not protect you from what that costs. And that belongs to me. Not to you."

Quiet.

The kind that has texture. The kind that is not empty but full - full of the circuit's indifferent air, the long afternoon light, the accumulated weight of the things that have finally found the room to be spoken.

"The transfer remains a choice," he says. Careful. Returning the table to its position. "It is on the table. It will stay on the table. You will not be required to receive it today or carry it anywhere before you are ready, before this moment has passed and the weight of it has settled into something you can evaluate without the forty minutes still present in your blood."

His hand is still there. Still warm. The warmth that does not announce itself.

"But before you receive that choice - " his voice drops, to the place below the place, to the frequency that has no rank " - I need you to understand that it is not the commanding officer telling the operative she has arrived at her limit. It is not assessment. It is not the name deciding the inheritance has been insufficient."

He looks at her.

Coal-dark. Coal-warm. The warmth that has been there since the hospital room and has never once required her to earn it.

"It is the father," he says, "telling his daughter that the weight I carry when your name is in the header is mine. You did not create it. You cannot resolve it. You are not responsible for it, any more than the typhoon is responsible for the bending."

The circuit does not care.

He does.

He has always.

"You bent," he says. The simplest sentence he has spoken in thirty years of operational language, of briefing cadences and citation language and the prose of after-action reports that account for everything except the human interior of the events they describe. "Today, on this circuit, you bent all the way down. And I was here. And the ground received you. And nothing broke."

His thumb.

Once.

The old warmth of it, the first language, the one that predates every frequency.

"The rising," he says quietly, his eyes steady on hers, dark and warm and entirely present, "does not have to happen today." 💥||

[yeoumopi]

Five words, and Hinokari has unknowingly dismantled the entire architecture of her father's thirty years; she has always been dismantling her father's armour ever since she'd been able to speak and walk and run towards him, which is quite young and Hanzo recognizes this, because this is the thing he has built inside her, and she is only modelling what she has seen, what she has observed, and internalized, and the imitation is simply not imitation but a thing reproduced because this is who she is currently.

I can do better, Papa.

This is the thing about Hinokari. She has lived with awareness, is aware of the name she carries, and the weight of the legacy it equates to, and she has borne the name and its weight without complaint, always carrying the thing that she has seen her father do, the thing that her mother also does, and she has watched both her parents carry the grief, the love, the joy and their duty - all of these things existing at a common point without diminishing each other.

A moment of silence.

Important, as all things concerning the two of them.

The silence is not comfortable, but whether it is comfortable or not does not matter because the uncomfortableness is necessary to allow for clarity to arrive, as all things do when it concerns Hinokari and Hanzo, and her father finally realizes the full dimensions of the truth he has constructed in her.

Hinokari.

Her name. Four syllables. Child of fire - she is the child of her parent's fire combined, metaphorical fires that represent their virtues: her father's stubborn tenacity and her mother's present patience. Their combined stillness. It is the name her parents have given her; Miharu chose it, because she thought that from the first hour she'd been placed in her arms, she had seen the uncanny resemblance that her daughter has with her husband, and the resemblance has become more profound through the years. The name that Hanzo agreed to, as he'd looked into the nursery nine hours after the delivery and the nurses and doctors have placed his daughter, swaddled, in an incubator, and he could not stop looking through the glass while his wife rested and recuperated and he'd thought that his daughter, the child that had become possible when he'd thought otherwise, has immediately become the center of which his entire existence now revolves and nothing else matters except the fact that he must not fail her the way he has thought he had failed Harumi and Satoshi - who are the two people he still holds his grief for, and the physician he married has not once asked him to forget them but merely asked to be permitted to exist alongside them, alongside the grief.

The same name that he has spoken in different frequencies, in different cadences, in different theatres - the briefings, the kitchen conversations at four in the morning, the school events, the graduation ceremonies.

This voice is different.

This is the clarity he will give her and she is slowly receiving it. She has not yet arrived at this yet.

Her eyes are red; there are circles around her eyes, darkened and puffed by the crying, and her face carries not only sadness but exhaustion and still her features are soft - her mother's softness - and the architectural blueprint came from him - her father's face and cheekbones and dark eyes - and it has the particular expression of a daughter, of a soldier, of the operative who cannot seem to close the gap between herself, what she truly is, and what believes she must be.

She does not yet know that her father had once worn this expression. She does not know the cost of it yet. She suspects, that the headaches are the cost.

Her mother had told her father what she'd seen, and her father had known.

She cannot meet his eyes.

The not-meeting is remarkable. She braces, and she knows he will notice, because she always meets his eyes, those dark obsidian irises that are too, too similar in shape and shade, and it is one of the things they share, which had been obvious since the first day she'd clung to her father one time in a briefing, and her father had spoken to his subordinates because she did not want to leave his side and Hanzo had no choice but to continue the briefing and Hinokari had been quietly clinging to her father's shoulder as she watched him speak to the soldiers about strategies and plans and maps.

The right hand - both his hands have landed on her shoulder - moves unhurriedly, and they gently lift her chin, which tilts her head up, which lifts her gaze so it meets his. A redirection. A reminder.

Look at me.

This is not a command, but an ask. The asking that is honest, the request in this shape because it is the only accurate form it exists in, and the only accurate form it must exist in, and it is here, it exists now in the long afternoon, on the indifferent circuit and it is in the frequency that has long since existed since the hospital room where she'd arrived with her strong opinions and her determination.

She does not look at him immediately. Not because she is stalling, but she is still in that geography of which she is currently using as a substitute, the thing her father has recognized immediately because he has his own version of it, and Hinokari has built her own from his blueprints, and she is using it as a place to stand when the body is scarce of its materials to stand in the actual room she must exist in.

Her father is extremely patient. He waits for her. He is waiting still.

Then.

She finally looks up.

Papa is there. The way Mama is present. The way Mama has taught him to be. His eyes are on her. They do not soften. But they are warm in ways that coals are dark and warm and still hold the embers of the fire that once burned with them, and it is the warmth that one would feel standing close the hearth.

She sees it: not the controlled, managed expression of the Brigadier General who does not give his subordinates anything except what he chooses to show them, but the one beneath. The weariness beneath the discipline which she has always seen at four, at five, at seven, at nine, at fifteen, and even know, and that is so different from what she had briefly seen on her own in the mirror, which is similar in the grayness, which did not make the official reports, but what has been left of the forty minutes in the dark.

"I heard you, Papa. I'm just--" Her jaw tightens in the same way his had done so. "I'm just. I don't know how to close the gap. I heard you." This is the turning over, the process of arrival, the trying to name.

"You have just said I have nothing to apologize for. Then how do I explain the guilt?" No one died, not yet. But the toll, the evidence of the chaos, the destruction and the rubble and the image of her peers who have found themselves buried beneath the rubble who are the same ones she had found beneath that debris and it is not any easier with knowing that within that wreckage is her father too, who lies bruised and broken but always alive and she has not looked away even when something beneath her armour moves always - she has internalized all of these so quickly, and the shape of those images have morphed into something cruelly monstrous, and she has taken them in too, the way she has taken everything in, and everything is stored somewhere in some chamber of her body, and there are several chambers; she arrives at this.

You know what happens to a bamboo stalk in a typhoon.

She knows. She has always known because her mother had placed a small print of it in the corridor somewhere in their home and everyone had passed it every morning, and if anyone had any comments about it, the commends made it into private notebooks than discussed or commented about.

It bends. The bending is not weakness, he tells her. That is its mechanism of survival so that it may continue on living, an engineering, a strategic advantage - and her father had mistaken the ability to carry the weight of the work they do and what the work demands of them, and she'd been prepared to pay the cost but--

But.

He will not allow her to pay for it just because this is the architecture built into her too. This is her father's love, and the love carries instruction, an early correction because she already knows things that had taken him a much longer time to understand in his fifty plus years of existence and thirty something years of service in this job, in this work and she'd followed him into the battlefield because at seventeen she'd decided that she wanted to be that person who finds people, who helps manage the pain, the bridge between the field and the infirmary.

You have not failed me, he says. This is the fact.

This is what he gives her, which is the language he names for her because she does not have the language for it yet, and has not arrived yet, and has not yet known how to close the gap between what she is and what she believes must be.

The circuit is still quiet. Still indifferent.

The transfer remains a choice. She does not know if she must take it. She does not know if the transfer is the correct choice to make. There is no certainty to it, and Hinokari has always been certain from the first day she has learned to move, learned to talk and listen. You are not required to receive it today. Not before she is ready. Not before she has figured out how to close the gap.

I need you to understand that it is not the commanding officer telling the operative. This is as clear as day. This is the plain language that her father knows how to tell her, which exists here, exists because he has always been her father first - always Papa then commanding officer. Not the assessment.

She is still. For a breath's length, she is still. She has always been still. Listening, formulating the words. She did not ask for the legacy and the weight of his name, which is the name they share, and she is a Hasashi. She cannot resolve the weight of it, and weigh it against the calculated arithmetic of the mission.

You bet. Nothing broke. This is what he concludes for her. For them. The rising does not have to happen today.

She is quiet. She feels the warmth. The one that predates everything that came before her. His warmth.

"Papa." A deliberate pause she has learned to recreate nearly perfectly, and the imitation, the mimicry is not simply a replication, but something honed, something refined, something nurtured, something tended through the years.

"If I transfer, who will come and find you?"

[yeoumopi]

miharu's letters to hinokari - 1/?

Her mother is a pilot. The greatest pilot she has ever known. A woman, whom her father describes, who moves forward and someone who does not fire warning shots and is fully engaged in everything she engages in, wholly, fully, and her mother is always certain.

She is nine when the first set of letters have arrived. This letter is the one that she reads first:

My Little Firelight,

I love you. This is the first thing you must remember.

I love you the way your father loves you, which is the loudest way this family declares love, which is the kind that blooms in silence. Do not mistake love as endurance, though in a way it is. Love is grief that continues.

I love you, my little firelight.

I have thought about what I must write here. I know that when you receive this, which I hope you never do, I am no longer with you. Not physically.

I am sorry, my love. I have tried to come home to you and your father, and you know this well. That the trying is love itself.

I am so sorry that I will not get to see you grow up. I do not know what the future holds for you, but you are my daughter, and we come from a family of warriors, and your father also comes from a family of warriors, which makes you, also a warrior.

I am so sorry, and I am writing this apology without regret. Regret is for people who have not tried, and gods know I have tried so, so hard to come back to you.

Thank you for being my daughter. Thank you for choosing me to be your mother. I knew from the first day I found out that I had been pregnant with you, until the day the stork has finally delivered you to me - I knew you would be the new center, the new anchor of my life. Not your father - he has been a good anchor, but you, my love, have been the light and anchor the same.

I will always remember your first cry, your first words, your first steps, your first days of school and the last days of every school year. You have come to me on a winter's Tuesday, and your cry echoed in the hospital room - you have a lot of opinions already before you have the language for it. Before you had words to name things.

You were placed in your father's arms, and I have watched something move him, which is never nothing, and it is not a simple shift in his expression, in his jaw. Which I already know you have gotten from him. You have always had his face, his features. He will say otherwise that the softness is from me and he will not be wrong about it.

Thank you for being my child, for learning to listen in the silence.

My heart aches knowing that when you receive this, your father is going to be still. And so will you. You are so much like him, in your innocent curiosity and firm stubbornness, in the way you both feel things so strongly, and the way you have taken things in and sometimes it worries me that you will keep holding things in until you can no longer hold them, and this is perhaps the one thing I need you to do for me.

Your father - he is a man of few words. He will not always have the language for things. But he is precise and accurate. And you, my firelight, must name things as they are, precisely, because naming addresses things always and it is better to address them early before the entire scaffolding collapses.

He will also teach you things that I will not be able to teach. He will teach you discipline. How to stand. How to endure. But I have taught you already what you must learn: to speak. To name things that frighten you, that hurt you, that make you hesitate. It is permitted, always. Even when the world tells you it isn't. Silence is a language you already speak, but it can be a wound if you leave it unbroken.

I do not want you to simply inherit the endurance that comes with silence.

This is the true courage: the breaking of it because it must be acknowledged. And courage is not the absence of fear. Remember this, my little firelight. It is the naming of it.

If you are angry, say so. If you are sad, say so. If you are afraid, say so. If you love, say so.

Your father will not always have the words. Sometimes you will need to give them to him. I know, I have done that too, before you arrived.

And when you do, he will listen. He always does. He extremely good at waiting, and as good in the listening. He will not always have the words, for an answer, but he will give you one. Which you know, has always been true.

The world will have versions of truth. Stay firm in your beliefs, but allow yourself to learn if you find your beliefs challenged.

There is a life outside of duty. Live it. You do not have to be simply shaped by duty. I want you to make choices. Not because you are asked, not because the world demands you must choose. But choose so it will serve you well. Softness is a choice. Joy is a choice. Rest is a choice.

You are allowed to choose yourself.

The journal is my gift to you. When the world becomes too loud, keep writing. And when it is not enough, when the world becomes too dark, the silence too loud and sharp, when the grief is heavy - go to your father. He will not fail you. He will hold you. He always has.

I wish to see you become who you will be. I wish to be there to always tell you that you are enough. You have, always been enough. I wish that I am there to remind you that you do not have to be perfect. You do not have to be Papa to be loved.

But if you are reading this now, my wishes have become memories.

You are my daughter. You are proof that I have lived a life worth living.

I am still with you. No matter what.

Always, Mama

[sasorikigai]

💥|| She goes still.

That is what she does instead of speaking. That is the answer she gives him when the words have run out or have not yet arrived or exist somewhere in the body before they become language - she goes still, the particular stillness that Hanzo recognized as his own the first time he saw it in her, when she was four days old and he had held her against his chest in the hospital room that smelled of antiseptic and Miharu's exhaustion and something he did not yet have a name for, and she had simply settled, had assessed the situation with whatever instrument a four-day-old uses for assessment and had found it sufficient and gone quiet inside it.

He had understood then that she was going to be like this.

He had not understood then what like this would cost her.

Her tears are wet through his shoulder.

He feels them land. He feels the specific geography of her grief against him - not performed, not managed, not the contained version she offers to the circuit on ordinary days when she does not know he is watching, when she finishes a hard set and goes quiet in that way and he observes from the distance that commanding officers are supposed to maintain and tells himself it is fine, she is fine, the Hasashis move forward, the Hasashis do not stop on the circuit - this is the unmanaged version.

The version that has been accumulating since the tenth deployment. Since the first headache that did not leave. Since the night she came back from the exfil and filed her report with clean hands and clean prose and did not write a single word about the forty minutes in the dark or what they had required of her or what she had left of herself in that tertiary position that she will never entirely retrieve.

He holds her and he does not speak yet because the words require earning and he is earning them.

He thinks of the things she cannot know about him.

Not the classified record - she has clearance enough for the operational shape of him, the professional outline, the Brigadier General who leads from the front and has always gone first and whose unit would follow him into terrain they could not see the end of because he had never once sent them somewhere he would not go himself. That record she knows. She has grown up inside the edges of it, has understood from an early age that her father's work had weight, had cost, had a geography of its own that sometimes followed him home and sat at the dinner table without being introduced.

What she cannot know is the other record.

The one that lives in scar tissue. In the way he cannot sleep on his left side, still, after the incident in the third year of command that he does not speak about and that Miharu knows only in pieces, only in the version he was able to give her at four in the morning when the pieces were the best he could manage. In the concussion he did not report for seventy-one hours because he had been thirty-six and had believed - with the specific, costly stupidity of a man who has confused endurance with leadership - that reporting it would fracture something in the confidence of the unit that he could not afford to fracture.

It had not fractured the unit.

It had given him three weeks of phantom headaches and a version of Miharu he had not seen before or since: not frightened, not angry, but settled into a terrible patience, the kind that physicians develop around the facts that cannot be changed, and she had said - quietly, at the kitchen table, at four in the morning - you are not permitted to die for pride, Hanzo. I will not allow it.

He had not known, until she said it, that that was what he had been doing.

He thinks of the men he has lost.

Lost in the complete sense of the word. The sense that has no administrative softening. Sergeant Okafor, twenty-two years old, the finest reader of terrain Hanzo has commanded in thirty years of service, who did not come back from the crossing in the fourteenth year and whose absence Hanzo still locates sometimes in the specific silence that follows a successful exfil - the silence where Okafor would have said something dry and accurate and the unit would have exhaled into it. Lieutenant Park, who had a daughter who would now be Hinokari's age, and whose face Hanzo still finds, on the fourteenth of March, arriving without permission. Three others. The names are not for this moment but they are always with him, always present the way healed shrapnel is present - not always painful, not always loud, but shifting when the conditions change.

He has led from the front.

This is the part they write about him. What they do not write is the arithmetic of it - that leading from the front means every loss is proximate, every failure of protection lands on the conscience of the man who was there, who was in the same geography, who went first and still someone did not come home. He has carried this arithmetic for twenty years. He knows precisely what it does to a body, sustained over time, without relief, without the permitted acknowledgment of the weight.

He knows what it is doing to her.

He knows because he recognizes the architecture of it. It is his architecture. He built it and she was raised inside it and she has reproduced it in herself with the fidelity of someone who learned from the original, which is the thing - the specific, sternum-deep thing - that he cannot look at directly for too long without something in him becoming unsteady.

He speaks.

"You have nothing to apologize for," he says, and she has not apologized, not aloud, but he says it anyway because her silence is shaped like an apology, is carrying the weight of one, and he has been fluent in her silences since before she had words to replace them with. "Nothing. Do you understand me."

Not a question. A deposition. The kind he delivers when the matter is not open for dispute.

His hands find her face. He pulls back just enough to see her - not to inspect, not to assess the way a commanding officer assesses, but to see her the way he saw her in the hospital room, the way he has always seen her, which is completely, which is without the editorial distance that he applies to everything else in his life because everything else in his life is not her.

"I have concussions I did not report," he says. "I have dressed my own injuries at oh-two-hundred so that no one on the unit would see me favor the left side. I have made decisions about my own body that your mother has - quietly, and with the patience of a woman who knew the argument would not land until I was ready to receive it - disagreed with. For years."

His voice.

"And I have lost people."

He stops here.

The stop is its own sentence. The weight of it fills the space the words leave behind and he lets it sit because it is true and it is present and it is the part of the inventory that does not get lighter with rank or time or the accumulation of operational successes that are supposed to, in theory, offset it.

"I have lost people who were under my protection. My command. My responsibility. And I carried every one of them forward and I did not stand on a circuit and let someone hold any portion of that weight because I had decided - at nineteen, at twenty-four, at thirty-one - that holding the weight alone was the same as being strong enough to hold it."

He breathes.

"It is not. I understand the difference now. I paid to understand the difference, and your mother paid beside me, and I will not - " the jaw, the tightening, the thing that happens to his face when he is refusing to let something break all the way through - "I will not watch you purchase the same understanding at the same price."

Quiet.

The circuit indifferent around them. The afternoon long in the way that afternoons go long when the things inside them are larger than the time allotted.

His thumbs move. Once each. The same gesture, always the same gesture, cheekbone to cheekbone, as if he is marking something, as if he is reminding himself of the fact of her face.

"I need to ask you something," he says. Slower now. The cadence of a man who has been carrying a question for two months and has finally arrived at the place where it must be spoken. "And I need you to understand - before I ask it - that it does not come from doubt. Not of your capability. Not of your judgment. Not of anything you have built or earned or bled for."

He holds her face.

"I need you to consider a transfer to a different squadron."

The words exist in the air between them.

He does not rush past them. He lets them be what they are.

"Not because you cannot do this work. You can do this work. I have watched you do this work in conditions that would have ended the careers of officers twice your age and twice your years of service, and there has not been a single moment - not one - where I have looked at your file and seen anything other than an operative who has exceeded every benchmark I set, every benchmark the unit set, every benchmark you set for yourself."

A pause. Something moves through him. It surfaces briefly in his expression and then he disciplines it back, not out of habit but because it needs to be said clearly and he cannot say it clearly if he lets it surface fully.

"But I read your last report four times. And on the fourth reading I stopped at your name in the header and I could not continue."

He says it plainly.

"A commanding officer who cannot read past his daughter's name in a post-action report is a commanding officer whose judgment is compromised. Not by weakness. By love, which is - in the operational context - the same liability."

His voice drops.

"If something goes wrong in a tertiary position - and positions go wrong, Hinokari, I have watched positions go wrong for thirty years, I have been the one positions went wrong around - I cannot be the officer who makes that call and also the man who goes home to your mother. I cannot hold both of those. I have tried to calculate whether I can hold both of those and I cannot find a version of the arithmetic that works."

He breathes.

"A different squadron gives you a commanding officer who sees only the operative. Who can make the decisions that need to be made without - without the weight of your name in the header. Without what I carry."

And then, carefully, because this is the part that matters most and he is not a man who has always known how to say the part that matters most but he has been learning, has been learning for twenty years in the kitchen of the house that smelled of her mother's cooking and his field gear:

"I am asking. Not ordering. I am asking - as your father, outside of rank, outside of the frequency - what you want. Because I have already given you enough by simply existing. The name. The expectation. The scrutiny of people who cannot do the mathematics of what you have cost yourself to stand here."

His hands are still on her face.

This man. This man who has gone first for thirty years and taken the concussions and carried the names and led from the front and refused, repeatedly, at considerable personal cost, to let anyone see the weight - this man is standing on a circuit in the long golden afternoon holding his daughter's face in both hands and he is not a general.

He is not performing anything.

He is a father who has been afraid since the tenth deployment and has been doing the only thing he knows how to do with fear, which is to keep moving, keep watching, keep reading the reports four times, keep counting the eleven steps across the circuit until the counting is the only thing standing between him and the full weight of what it means to have sent her somewhere that asked forty minutes of dark of her and gotten a clean report back.

"Whatever you decide," he says. Quiet. Final. The voice that belongs to no frequency. "You are not the legacy. You are not the name, or the weight of it, or what anyone in that building has decided your inheritance requires of you."

His thumbs.

Once each.

"You are my daughter. You were that before any uniform. You will be that after every one."

He pulls her back in.

The circuit does not care.

He does.

He has always. 💥||

[yeoumopi]

She is still.

She is always this still, when her body finally recognizes that the environment around her is safe, that it has permitted her to be vulnerable. This has always been her answer, the answer she gives her mother, the answer she gives him when there are no more words to expressed, or when she has no language sufficient enough to name the thing she feels, and she knows they will eventually arrive or come into existence, stored somewhere in a chamber of her, that has not yet become language. This is the stillness she has inherited, learned from him, and the same thing he'd recognize and also unwillingly nurtured through the silent dialect that is the scaffolding of the architecture of their family.

Her body has decided it is safe.

Her tears land on his shoulder and her silence needs no words.

The tears are not performed, not managed, not contained - this is the shape of her grief and this is not the version she holds and offers sparingly even to her peers, not the version she has held as a smaller version of her, not the edited one where she has learned how to exist in spaces that require little assistance as possible and she has learned how not to need what is absent.

This is the version that has become heaviest, accumulated since the tenth deployment. The first headache that has not left her. The result of coming back from the exfil and she'd filed her objective findings with clean factual summarization of events than the accounting of forty minutes in the dark, never fully retrieving what had been left of herself in the tertiary position and the journal entry that same night is missing pieces also.

The silence holds them, and he holds her and they do not need to speak, because words are difficult even though they both know it exists somewhere beneath their sternums.

Hinokari thinks of her mother too. Mama would know what to do, would always seem to know what to say.

Her tears land against his shirt, like water quietly seeping through membranes and her face has reddened and her eyes have puffed from the crying, because the crying is the outward channeling of the things that have accumulated in her body and still cannot find the words sufficient enough to name cost of the tenth deployment, the bill that the body has presented in its accounting and her mother has not said anything about it, except that she is not fully cleared yet and she does not know how she will face her mother, or her colleagues.

Even here she does not know how to stand before her father, who is her commanding officer but right now she needs the other guy - Papa - and the vulnerability is disgraceful and she should have hidden it, should have endured, should have continued to move forward.

You have nothing to apologize for, he says this to her as if there is nothing wrong with just surviving and giving herself to the cause, which is the work, her father's work and it is in the world she has chosen to follow him into, and she did not know it would take this soon for her to finally break.

She is apologizing quietly, because she is his daughter and she knows the weight of expectation she did not ask for but the world has demanded this is the price of being the child of someone who has endured, lost and rebuilt again. And she is breaking in this silence, in this stillness, because this is what she does not tell him and he will hear:

I am sorry for not being strong enough. I cannot recover fast enough. I am not perfect. I cannot be you, Papa.

Ever since she'd been old enough to understand, the architecture is this:

She must endure. She has learned to exist in spaces where the unavailable cannot be needed. She must not break.

Nothing, he says. The kind of deposition that any counter-argument will not hold. It is not a question.

Her gaze falls - shame.

She is folding herself into something smaller, but she cannot be smaller now, because this is Papa and he is telling her his own grief and still she knows that the work will have the concussions, the headaches, the injuries, the quiet hours that are too honest and too loud, and the arrival of knowing and fully understanding that the work is not and never can be borne alone. And he asks her if she understands.

She understands. She thinks. But the knowing is not the same as arriving. It never is. The mind is aware, but the body has not yet arrived. Or perhaps it was the other way around.

I have lost people.

She knows this. Her father has lost people. She does not know if it's losing the people he loved - Harumi and Satoshi, the two people he tried so hard to protect, but could not, and there is a grief that comes with this loss. And then there is the different kind of loss, which is losing the people he commands, the soldiers under his command and he survives them and knows that they have been lost, made collateral in the calculated decisions he has made--

And now.

The circuit remains indifferent. Gray, cold. Dimmed. The afternoon is long and is witness to the thing that is happening in this room and she is listening - the listening is trying in itself, and this is the first time that the listening has costs her, because it is not the frequency she knows, and she is starting to question when the frequency has changed.

His thumbs move across her cheekbones, the particular warmth that she recognizes, her body recognizes it and this is the one thing that is sure at this moment which is the moment that is after the forty minutes in the dark, and her body is still trying to catch up and the adrenaline has not yet left her blood.

She did not know she would need him even now. She'd always been strong, independent, sufficient always, like how he'd raised her because the world is never lenient towards the children of decorated generals.

I need you to consider a transfer to a different squadron.

What she hears: you are not enough. You have failed me.

Despite his assurance. Despite the fact that he'd told her, plain and clear as day that she is capable. That everything she has earned, built, and even bled for. That she can work, and can do the work. That she has exceeded every expectation set before her, set by him and she'd exceeded because she needs to be great.

The truth arrives without the authorization of either of them: her father is compromised. She is a liability to him, because the last report had her name, and she'd sat in the dark for forty minutes and he was not there, and this is a simple fact but not simple to name.

She does not answer him. Not immediately. The stutter in her breathing happens once. Involuntary, unauthorized, as though the body has decided the override is the correct response. Something inside her continues to fold, the quiet folding inward, the old reflex of making herself smaller because disappointment is the thing she has learned to avoid but it lands anyway.

She cannot meet his eyes, which is the tell tale, and she is summoning all the courage to even do that - the meeting costs her too, and she is managing barely because the words he spoke have already detonated in ways he did not intend.

Her voice is barely a thread when it comes. A wisp of smoke.

"I... I can do better, Papa."

[sasorikigai]

[ bunny ] sender gives receiver a bunny kiss by rubbing their noses together back and forth

Hinokari is five.

Snow is rare where the Hasashi estate sits at the corridor between Osaka and Kyoto, indifferent to the mountains that keep the snow in its peaks lest the sky permits the landing of white flakes where the cold air has ushered and the sky is grey and the snow falls and mutes the world in a blanket that Hinokari always seems to find magically beautiful.

She is five. Her face is aimed at the sky, and this time, she only observes. This is the snow that comes rarely in Osaka, to their home like a family friend that comes to visit every few years. She sits by the engawa, bundled up as her mother insists, and her nose has already been coloured pink with the cold.

Her father finds her there. She hears the soft side of the shoji behind her. She does not turn immediately; she knows he is there. She has heard his footsteps before the doors have slid sideways, because she is his daughter, who always has learned to listen even at this tender age, young and there are other things she will learn and listen to, and still she knows the way the boards creak under his weight. When he steps into the engawa to join her, she feels the shift in the air - familiar, warm. The kind of warmth he carries and does not simply offer anyone else but her, and her mother - the kind of warmth she always runs towards.

She finally turns toward him.

Her nose is pink, cold. Chilled by the winter air.

He finds her here, lowers himself and they sit next to each other.

She turns to him, smiling with eyes that glint some kind of mischief - the same glint her mother does, which is both a tell for mischief and simply just innocent smiling because the world is not allowed to prove her wrong - not here, and she reaches up to him in her childish innocence.

Her father lowers himself, leans in. Just enough for their foreheads touch. Their breaths, Hinokari files this too, fog in the space between them.

Without hesitation, she bumps his nose to his.

Bunny kiss, Papa.

She needs not state this. She knows he knows.

Warm against cold skin.

Then.

A giggle. Soft, unstoppable. Unconcealed. And the world feels a little less cold than it had arrived.

DIFFERENT KINDS OF KISSES || @yeoumopi || accepting

💥|| The laugh comes before he can stop it.

This is the thing about her. She does not give him time to armor up against it.

In the field, in the briefing room, in the particular silence he wears between himself and his subordinates like a second skin - there is always a half-second. A breath of space between stimulus and response where Hanzo Hasashi lives, where he makes his decisions, where he has trained himself to exist in the discipline of that pause. His men know this pause. His men have learned this pause the way they have learned his silences, the way they have learned that the stillness in him is not absence but presence - compressed, deliberate, a coil that does not release without intention.

Senior Commander Hasashi does not react. He responds. There is a difference, and every officer beneath him has come to understand that difference intimately, has come to measure themselves against it the way young soldiers measure themselves against everything they hope one day to become.

Hinokari does not give him the half-second.

She bumps her nose to his nose and the laugh comes immediately, low and unguarded, and it is real - which is the rarest thing Hanzo Hasashi owns, which is the thing his men would not recognize if they heard it in the street, which belongs entirely and without negotiation to here - this engawa, this cold gray afternoon, this five-year-old who has colored herself pink sitting in the snow that comes rarely to Osaka like a family friend who cannot stay long.

He cannot stop it. He does not try.

There was a time, many years ago and before her, when the inability to stop something would have registered as failure. The commanders who shaped him were not soft men. Softness was the thing you carved out of yourself in the early years, the thing that fell away like excess material from stone until what remained was the thing that could function in the places men like him were sent. He had been good at it. Exceptional at it. There are commendations filed somewhere, in offices he rarely visits, that speak to the particular quality of what he had become. Decisive. Precise. Possessed of a composure that his superiors noted and his subordinates feared respectfully and his enemies learned, at cost, to be wary of.

He had not known, then, what it would mean to meet his daughter.

He had not known that she would simply undo the architecture of all of it with her nose against his nose and a giggle she cannot contain.

The cold had announced itself to him earlier - hours ago, while he was running laps on the base track, the gloomy sky deepening and the air sharpening in the back of his throat in that specific way that precedes snow. He had been three kilometers into his fourth lap when the first flakes descended. Slowly, the way snow always does here, the way it tests the permission of the ground before committing to it, before settling into the particular silence it brings with it.

He had known it immediately. Osaka does not often allow this. The snow comes seldom, stays briefly, and there is something in him - the part of him that is not a soldier, the part that existed before and underneath the uniform, the part that is his mother's son and then later Miharu's husband and always, always, his daughter's father - that had felt the flakes land on the back of his hand and thought of Hinokari before he thought of anything else.

She will be at the engawa.

He had known it the way he knows the layout of every building he has ever been responsible for. The way he knows his squadrons - the particular tells of each of his officers, the way Aleksander from Bravo favors his left side when fatigued, the way the captain of Charlie goes quiet before he questions an order he disagrees with. He knows the people in his command the way a man must know them when their lives depend on his knowledge being complete. But that knowledge is constructed. Built deliberately, piece by piece, because he chose to build it, because it is his responsibility to build it.

The knowledge of his daughter is not constructed.

It simply is. It arrived with her.

He had finished his laps in the snow and showered and settled into his home office with the week's reports spread across the desk - Alpha squadron's quarterly performance metrics, two disciplinary reviews he'd been sitting with, the draft of a tactical assessment he'd promised to his superior officer by Friday. He had changed into his joggers and the dark henley soft against his skin, because when he is home he is permitted to be warm, and warmth is something he carries perpetually in his own body the way some men carry cold. The snow outside the window had steadied from a suggestion into a certainty. The world had gone quiet with it.

He had lasted perhaps forty minutes before he rose from the desk.

He will tell himself it was for coffee. It was not for coffee.

He finds her exactly where he had known she would be.

She does not turn immediately when he slides the shoji sideways, and this too he knows - she has heard him, the way she always hears him, her small body already oriented toward his presence even with her face still lifted to the sky. She has been listening since she was old enough to listen, and what strikes him, as it always strikes him with a quality that borders on the physical, is that she is never afraid.

She hears him coming and she simply waits. She does not brace. She does not calculate the meaning of his approach in the way that the men beneath his command cannot entirely help, even the most seasoned of them, even the ones who have served under him long enough to know his moods - there is something in his arrival that still makes men unconsciously correct their posture, still makes them quiet their side conversations, still makes them aware of themselves in a way they are not aware of themselves otherwise.

His daughter hears him coming and she sits there in the snow-muted afternoon in her bundled coat, nose already pink with the cold, and she simply waits - easy, certain, the particular certainty of a child who has never once doubted what is walking toward her.

He does not know what he did to deserve that certainty.

He steps out onto the engawa and lowers himself to sit beside her, and the cold is the cold - he acknowledges it and it does not move him, because he is warm in the way he is always warm, and also because she is here, and she is a small furnace of a person who generates more heat in her giggling than most adults manage in an entire afternoon.

She turns to him.

He sees the glint in her eyes before she moves.

He recognizes it. God help him, he recognizes it - it is Miharu's glint, the precise one, the one that arrives a half-second before something happens that Hanzo will not entirely be prepared for despite the warning, because his wife has been deploying that look at him for years and the result is always the same: she gets there first, she always gets there first, and he is left somewhere between undone and grateful for it. That his daughter has inherited it exactly is either the universe's grace or its particular sense of humor. He has not decided. Some evenings, watching the two of them across the dinner table, he suspects both.

She reaches up to him.

He lowers himself. Leans in. Enough for their foreheads to touch - and here, here is the thing that Senior Commander Hasashi does not do in the briefing rooms, the thing that does not exist in the commendations in the offices he rarely visits, the thing that his subordinates who respect him and his superiors who rely on him and his enemies who have learned to be wary of him would not recognize: he leans his forehead against his daughter's forehead in the falling snow and yields. Completely. Unconditionally. The way he does not yield anywhere else, the way the man who runs Alpha through Charlie with a composure that lesser men mistake for coldness - he yields to a five-year-old in a winter coat, and it does not cost him anything, it gives him everything, and the fog of their breath mingles in the cold air between them.

She bumps her nose to his nose.

Once. Twice. The small deliberate motion of it.

Bunny kiss, Papa.

She does not say it. She does not need to say it. He knows this word for this gesture the way he knows her footsteps above him on the floor when he is working late, the way he knows the particular timbre of her crying versus her dreaming, the way he knows the exact spot on his shoulder where her head fits when she has fallen asleep against him. He knows her the way the maps of him were redrawn when she arrived. He had not been told that would happen. Perhaps he should have anticipated it - he is a man whose profession is anticipation, whose value to his country is in large part his capacity to see what is coming before it arrives.

He had not seen her coming.

Not like this.

Not the way a small person could simply step into a man and rearrange him.

The laugh comes out low and warm and it lives in the cold air between them and he does not call it back.

His fingers - the same fingers that were typing reports an hour ago, that have signed off on formation drills and disciplinary reviews, that have known the weight of consequence and command, that have rested on the shoulder of a young officer during the worst debrief of that officer's career and communicated in that single point of contact what needed to be communicated - those same fingers find the tops of her ears.

He rubs them gently.

The pads of his fingertips working slow circles into the cold-bitten skin there - deliberate, warm, the same focus he brings to everything redirected entirely into this, into warming these small pink ears, into the fact that she has been sitting out here long enough to get cold and he is warm enough for both of them and this is, at its simplest, a problem he can solve.

Her nose.

He looks at her nose.

The corners of his eyes crease.

"You have become," he says, and his voice is low and unhurried, the weight of the afternoon's work still somewhere in the register of it but softer now, much softer - worn down to something that does not exist in any recording of Senior Commander Hasashi issuing orders, that would not survive transcription into any document his superiors have ever read, the particular tone that is only hers, that Miharu recognized the first time she heard him use it with an infant Hinokari and had gone very still in the doorway and said nothing for a long moment — "a strawberry, Kari."

He says it plainly. His face composed. His eyes giving him entirely away.

"Here." His broad thumb comes to rest against the tip of her nose. One point of warmth. Gentle in the way large things are gentle when they understand their own size. "Your nose has decided it would like to become fruit."

He says this to a five-year-old in the snow with the gravity of a man delivering tactical intelligence.

The laugh is still living in his chest, warm, unhurried, unwilling to leave - the snow is still falling, soft and rare and uncommitted to staying, and the world outside this garden does not know this man, the man with the warm hands and the crinkled eyes and the laugh that comes without the half-second, and the engawa holds them both and the cold presses gently at its edges and does not get in.

It does not need to know him.

It does not need this.

Only she does.

Only she gets it. 💥||

[yeoumopi]

The giggle is not performance. It is never has been. This is the laughter of a five-year-old, who has found herself amazed at the snow, rare and elusive and not always permitted by the corridor where their home and it does not permit her father also to armour against it. This is what she gives him - raw, unedited, and it is her mother's and it is also entirely hers. She is coming to him, with her forehead meeting his, nose cold and bumping with his, and she finds he is warm and he is lowering himself to her because this is what Papa does.

And her father is responding to her. This is her way of reaching out, the joy of a little girl who has learned about the world, about how it proves her right about her quiet opinions and that forward has always been the direction. Forward, right now, is towards Papa, who has returned from his run and now finds her at the engawa in her winter jacket with her nose and ears pinked with the cold.

He is laughing too. Which is rare as the snow that comes to visit their home, and it is unguarded, unadorned, and as raw and real and she is five and has no language for it but knows it true, because she is his daughter. And this is what she files quietly, that Papa rarely laughs but she takes this laughter of his in anyway because this is earned, and it is for her, and she did not give him a chance to armour against it because she has already arrived and she is waiting for him patiently.

She had been waiting for him patiently, while Mama is preparing to teach today - Mama is not in the hospital but she must speak and teach the other student doctors, whom Hinokari knows are smart and they know things but also don't know things and that is why they learn from Mama.

She waited at the engawa because this is where she knows her father will find her. She waited at the engawa, because the snow has come and visited and it has decided it wanted to play with her, and she is more than happy to indulge, more than curious to find out what quiet truths it will tell her, the beauty of it from the mundane, the shape of it which she will commit to memory, how it lands on her and somehow lasts, which will tell her a lot about most things - they come and go and some stay. She'd watched her own breath fog in the air, and for a moment she'd pretended she is a dragon, a little one, because Papa is like a fire, and she is a little fire too; she'd done this and then moved on to the next thing, with the length of the attention span most five-year-olds possess. She checked the snow for fox tracks, because Mama had once mentioned that foxes sometimes visit in the winter, and she wants to tell her she'd found one.

She'd pressed her hands on the cold wood of the engawa, acquainting herself with it before she'd sat to admire the falling snow.

She had noted her father arrive earlier, and she has quietly acknowledged his arrival but has not spoken about it yet, because she also understands that Papa has to work and he is in his study and Mama had already made coffee for him before she'd left; and Hinokari stays in the engawa this entire time.

Papa's hands are warm, this Hinokari notes. They have always been warm, and she leans into them because this is what she knows at five. Papa's warmth is the safest thing she knows, next to Mama's. They find the frost-bitten top of her ears, slow and affectionate, deliberate and always intentional, which is a big word she learns at this tender age, but knows what it means. The hands are unhurried and she does not know yet that she'd been outside far longer than she realizes, with her pink ears and pink nose, and Papa is sharing his warmth with her.

Then.

Papa's eyes - the corners of them crease.

Another giggle. When her father's thumb finds her nose, she goes still again. Because Papa is looking at her, and he has told her she looks like a strawberry, pink and brightly red, and he is saying this to her with the composed face that she knows the commander puts on, except there is this crease at the corners of his eyes, which means, Papa means it but he is also not too serious.

She shakes her head, very seriously, and speaks her thoughts, with the same conviction, the same gravity he has delivered tactical intelligence to her and she is now giving him her version of it: "No, Papa. I would like not to be a strawberry. I want to be like the foxes that visit. Mama said they visit sometimes."

She tucks herself closer, cheek pressed against his chest, the crown of her head resting just on his collarbone, the way she always does when she wants him close. The snow continues to fall around them, slow and soft and muting, and the cold is indifferently beautiful. Hinokari breathes the scent of winter, chilly and then there is Papa's warmth, and the faint trace of coffee that Mama made earlier.

The engawa holds them both.

It will continue to hold them. And here, the world feels simple. Quiet and simple. Because Papa is finally here, and she is held.

[sasorikigai]

The fire titan's daughter is fifteen. She is at the stables, quietly tending to the horses - one of which her mother rides frequently. She brushes the stallion, murmurs softly the way a girl would tend to smaller creatures, and gently checks its hooves. She has been at this for a few minutes, just long enough for her father to find her there.

She does not turn, not immediately.

But she does, and when she does, those dark eyes that she possesses that are his, find him.

For a moment there is silence between them, then she breaks it. She always breaks the quiet between them. Not to fill, but she must speak.

"Papa, are you still occupied with your duties?"

The question lands before it is released, like an arrow drawn from a bow.

At fifteen, she does not shy away from asking her father things, because she already knows he will give her nothing but truth.

It had been a while since they have ridden together. This is what her mother has allowed her ever since she has been running - running towards him, her father, who is the Shirai Ryu's grandmaster, who the fire titan, who is her mother's husband.

The stallion's tail swishes languidly, indifferent to the silence that beholds father and daughter, and indifferent to the smell of the stables - earthy, warm, and familiar the way wood and hay have always been.

And in her eyes, comes a glint. Acknowledgment, and perhaps hidden mischief, which she has inherited and has made it entirely hers.

Random Inbox Shenanigans || @yeoumopi || always accepting!

▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥|| The weight of his armor settles differently when she looks at him.

Hanzo Hasashi, Fire Titan, Grandmaster, the man who has burned and been unmade and made again - stands at the threshold of the stable, and he is simply father.

The ember-light beneath his skin dims, the way a forge-fire banks itself to something gentler without losing its heat. He does not announce himself. He never needs to. She had known, the way she has always known, the way Miharu's blood in her veins has made her sharp and perceptive as a fox lifting its nose to a wind carrying secrets. He watches her a moment longer - the careful, deliberate motion of her hands against the stallion's flank, the murmured softness of her voice, the way she checks the hooves with a thoroughness that is entirely his, repurposed into tenderness that is entirely hers.

She is fifteen, he thinks, and the thought does to him what the Netherrealm behemoth could not.

He steps inside.

The hay-dust and warm animal musk of the stable close around him, ancient and unhurried, indifferent to what he is beyond these walls. Here there is only the creak of wood, the slow breath of horses, and his daughter's dark eyes - his eyes, cast in her face - finding him at last.

The silence sits between them the way silence only can between two people who know each other in the marrow.

She breaks it. She always breaks it. Not from discomfort, but because she has never been afraid of what lives in the quiet - only unwilling to let it go unacknowledged. It is a courage that belongs to her alone.

"Papa, are you still occupied with your duties?"

The words find him cleanly. An arrow released from a bow that had been drawn long before she spoke.

His molten-gold eyes hold hers. A beat passes - one breath, two - in which Hanzo Hasashi does what generals and demons and the grinding machinery of war have never managed to make him do.

He softens.

"I am about to patrol the perimeter," he says, and his voice carries none of the thunder that shakes the earth when he commands armies. It is low, deliberate, the particular register he has kept for her since the night she was first placed in his arms and he had understood, with the totality of a man who has lost everything, what it meant to be given something irreplaceable. He moves further into the stable, coming to stand at the stallion's opposite side, one broad hand settling upon the animal's neck with a quietness that knows its own strength. "The outer edges of our territory require my eyes today. There are - " a pause, measured, weighing, "- discrepancies. Things that must be seen and named before they become something worse."

He looks at her across the stallion's back.

In her eyes he sees it - the glint, the inheritance of Miharu's clever mischief worn in a way that has become wholly, irreducibly Hinokari, and something in his chest moves the way tectonic stone moves: slow, foundational, with the deep inevitability of a mountain's shift.

He rounds the stallion's head.

He stands before her fully now, and the ember-cracks along his skin pulse once - not with rage or power, but with something the flames have no proper name for, the way a hearthfire does not rage but simply persists, warm and unyielding through the long dark of winter.

"You have tended him well." It is not a small thing, the way he says it. He does not deal in small observations. He looks from the stallion to her, and his gaze carries the same gravity it carries when he surveys the horizon for threat - only now it surveys his daughter, and finds in her something that quiets every war inside him. "Your mother will be pleased."

Another beat.

"Come with me."

Not a command. Not quite an invitation. Something between - the language they have always spoken. He reaches out and settles one hand briefly upon her shoulder, the gauntlet cool against her, the heat of him beneath it steady as a coal held deep.

"You are old enough to see the world beyond these walls as it is," he says. "Not its worst. But its truth. The shape of what we guard against - the imbalance, the fractures where darkness finds its way through - these are not things I wish to shield you from forever." His thumb presses, once, against her shoulder before he withdraws his hand. "You are Shirai Ryu. You are mine." The words carry the full architecture of what he means by that: not possession, but lineage, legacy, the passing of a torch that burns not with vengeance now but with something harder and more enduring.

His molten gaze holds hers, patient as a man who has stood at the edge of annihilation and waited.

"We ride together. You will observe, and you will ask what you wish to ask." A pause, and then - quiet, almost private, the way only she ever draws it from him - the faintest deepening at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. Something older and warmer than a smile. "I have missed your questions, Hinokari." ▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥||

[yeoumopi]

Her eyes find him. They always do. She looks for him in places he does not exist physically, and those dark eyes that are once his, and now hers, have always searched for him until she finds him where he exists.

He is Papa. He has always been Papa, and then her mother's husband, and the grandmaster and fire titan. All facets of him that coexist simultaneously, and the role of father still surpasses all that he is.

He steps inside. She knows this by the sound of his steps, her ears always attuned to him ever since she'd been a babe, ever since she'd been two days old, and he is holding her in his arms and she'd slept soundly because her body has learned to recognize his warmth, which is what lies on the surface of the fire beneath his skin, beneath those lined coals - still burning, burning, burning - and she still attends to the roan stallion, her mother's horse which had been a wedding gift and has been the horse that she is permitted to ride.

She breaks the silence, with the unwillingness to let it go unacknowledged.

His amber eyes, molten gold, find hers.

The smile is an acknowledgment. A quiet one that needs no further words, because silence has been the language that exists between them. Hinokari recognizes the low, particular register of him, the one he only uses in their home, and then he stops across her, the horse in between them, and for a moment his words are simply an invitation - which she will not hesitate to accept only when he is not preoccupied with his duties, because she understands that he is the clan's grandmaster and there are things that must be taken care of before one indulges in anything that resembles leisure.

He tells her what he has planned for the afternoon. That he intends to patrol the perimeter, which is a boundary she has not crossed ever.

She is fifteen and she still is not learned about the world outside of the perimeter of the compound, outside of their territory. He speaks like the grandmaster, but the cadence is her father's.

The glint in her eyes has not disappeared.

"The patrol is important." She says this as if it were mere a simple fact than something with significance. As if it were a given.

She feels his eyes across the stallion's back. She continues brushing its back, her hand light in its pats, gentle and almost affectionate. This is her mother's horse after all.

You have tended him well. Your mother will be pleased, he remarks when he rounds its head; the stallion, she suspects, has felt her father's fire, through the ember-cracks along his skin pulsing, like banked fires that remain burning but not flaring and destroying. It is the same fire she has discovered, a combination of his and her mother's which is entirely hers, and the horse seems to have felt that her father's fire is similar to hers.

"He has been quite restless, Mama said so." This is acknowledgment too. She has always spoken about things because it must be acknowledged, and she refuses to leave some things unacknowledged and the silence is not uncomfortable but that the acknowledgment is necessary.

Come with me. The invitation. The thing she has been waiting for. The glint in her eyes has not shifted. She'd been waiting, the same patience she'd learned and exhibited all fifteen years and counting, and he tells her is old enough to accompany him. It is not you’re coming with me, not would you like to come, not i need you to accompany me. It is the invitation that carries no expectation, no pressure. Just her father reaching out to her.

Her mother once forbade her about riding unsupervised. She understood. She'd also been put through some studies, and she'd stopped asking. But beneath the daughter who is poised to be her father's heir apparent, she still longs to be invited.

And perhaps, now that she is older - old enough to see the world beyond the walls - she will learn. She will finally take her place at the table - her father's table. Not simply because she is his flesh and blood, but she has earned it in her fifteen years of existence and she has learned a lot in those fifteen years, and she will learn more truths about the world around her, the world outside the compound, the things she will eventually learn.

The hand on her shoulder is not a simple gesture. It is the quiet beginning of a quiet handing of a torch, which is the legacy she inherits, which is the lineage, and the torch no longer burns with vengeance but burns with something that protects, creates and remembers. Something enduring. Something that matters.

She is still. For a breath she is still.

Then, she fully turns to him.

The glint on her eyes is sharper now, brighter. A quiet resolve he will know before it has fully developed.

"Let me saddle him," she says. The roan stallion, the one that belongs to her mother, is already half-prepared.

And when he steps back to allow her room, which he will, he will recognize that this is her answer, her resolve, formed with her own terms.

She moves with practiced ease: the cinch tightened, reins checked, and her hands smoothen the stallion's mane with a gentleness that mirrors her mother's. She climbs up the stallion with a little struggle, but swings into it regardless with a confidence of someone who has waited her entire life to be told she is old enough.

When she settles, she sits up with the confidence of the young that he knows - has known; he'd been young once and she has that confidence that stems from the assurance she has received from her parents ever since she'd learned to ask questions.

"I'm ready, Papa."

[sasorikigai]

▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥|| He watches her saddle the stallion. He does not move to help. This, too, is love - the withheld hand, the deliberate restraint of a man who could lift the earth on its axis and chooses instead to stand at the edge of her capability and let her find it herself. The cinch tightens. The reins fall through her fingers with a sureness that is not borrowed from lessons but grown, quietly, the way all true competences grow - unwitnessed, incremental, and suddenly undeniable.

She has been doing this while I was not looking, he thinks, and the thought burns in him the way only truths do.

He turns then and walks the length of the stable to where 不知火 waits.

Shiranui. The name had come to him not from ceremony but from the nature of the animal itself - shiranui, the ghostly fires that drift above dark water in the dead of night, the lights that fishermen see hovering over the Ariake Sea and cannot explain, that vanish when approached and reappear at distance, that belong to no source anyone living has been able to name.

There is no more honest name for a black stallion that swallows light rather than reflecting it - whose coat in certain angles seems less a surface than an aperture, an opening in the visible world through which something older and more feral looks out. Sixteen hands at the shoulder. The largest of the Shirai Ryu's stock by a full hand-span. The most difficult. There had been three men and one woman - all of them accomplished riders, all of them proud - who had attempted to mount him in the first year and been, each of them, firmly, wordlessly, and with no particular malice, refused.

The name fits in another register, too - one Hanzo has never spoken aloud. Shiranui are fires that cannot be held. That appear and disappear at their own insistence. That are real, documented, seen by many, and yet resist every explanation the rational world tries to press upon them.

He had named the animal on the third morning of the first week, standing in this same stable at this same hour, watching the black coat absorb the early light and give nothing back, and had thought: yes. That is what you are.

不知火 knows who Hanzo is.

The stallion does not startle when the ember-cracks pulse beneath his master's gauntlets. It does not skitter from the heat that radiates faintly off Hanzo's skin, the low-banked radiance of a an ascended Titan who is perpetually, quietly burning. It simply turns its great head, once, and regards him with the dark, enormous patience of an animal that has decided, through some calculus older than domestication, that this particular fire is the one fire it was made to recognize.

Hanzo runs one hand along the stallion's jaw. A single pass. Unhurried.

The tack comes on without drama. Shiranui submits to it the way stone submits to a river - not weakly, but because the force in question is one it has long since recognized as belonging to the same order as itself. The bridle. The saddle, built for a man whose mass has been altered by divinity and something older than bone. He tightens the girth with the quiet efficiency of someone who has saddled horses in the dark, in the rain, in the aftermath of battle when his hands were not entirely his own. Every gesture arrives exactly where it is needed.

He mounts.

不知火 shifts once beneath him - not in protest but in recognition, the body of the animal reorganizing itself around the particular weight and warmth of the man who rides it, the way a room changes when a fire is lit within it. The stallion's ears rotate forward. Its breath comes long and even. Something in the animal's posture lifts - not nervousness but attentiveness, the readiness of a creature that knows when it is about to go somewhere worth going.

Hanzo settles. His back straightens. The ember-lines along his forearms pulse once, a deep amber thread brightening and banking, brightening and banking, the rhythm of a man returning to himself after long occupation by duty.

He looks at her.

Hinokari, on her mother's roan, sitting up now with the particular confidence of fifteen - that age when a person has become certain enough of their body to wear it like an intention rather than an accident. She has her mother's blood running clever and warm beneath her skin. She has his eyes, which have seen the Netherrealm and did not look away. She has, it seems, her own hands, which are neither his nor her mother's but a third thing entirely, and they hold the reins the way a girl holds something she has waited a long time to hold and refused to betray that waiting.

I'm ready, Papa.

The words find him cleanly.

Something shifts, low and tectonic, behind his sternum - in the country of him where the fire does not rage but simply persists, where the ember-light is not vengeance and is not grief and is not the howling need that once ate his bones from the inside, but is instead something that has no name in the language of war, only in the language of the thing she calls him.

Papa.

He does not smile. He is not built for the architecture of smiles, not entirely, though Miharu has pulled them from him the way a woman pulls a long-buried root from earth - with effort and steadiness and the patience of someone who understood the root was there before anyone else believed it. But the corner of his mouth deepens. One degree. The molten-gold eyes warm by some quality that has nothing to do with temperature.

He turns 不知火 toward the open stable door.

Morning light falls across the threshold in a long blade, pale gold and indifferent to what it illuminates - father, daughter, two horses, the whole weight of what passes between them unspoken, which is to say: everything. The hay smells of warmth and animal patience. The compound beyond waits in its ordinary particularity, fences and training grounds and the distant voices of his clan beginning their morning, unaware that something is being given here that cannot be taken back - the first ride outward, the first boundary crossed together, the first acknowledgment that she is old enough for truth and he is capable of being the one who carries her toward it.

Two ghostly fires, then, moving toward the light. One black as the Ariake midnight that named him. One roan, red-warm, bearing the girl who is the reason the fires no longer burn only for vengeance.

He does not look back at her. He does not need to.

He knows the sound of her horse's gait already, the specific rhythm of the roan's hoof-falls, the cadence of a mount ridden by a girl who is careful and certain in equal measure. He knows this the way he knows the sound of his own heartbeat - not because he listens for it, but because his body has learned, across fifteen years of her existence, what her presence sounds like, and filed it somewhere below thought in the place where the most important things are kept.

She sat up straight, he thinks, and does not say. She held the reins correctly. She did not flinch.

不知火 carries him through the threshold into the morning light, and Hanzo Hasashi - Fire Titan, Grandmaster, the man who has burned the Netherrealm and refused to stay dead - does not allow his daughter to see the way his jaw sets, once, with the particular tightness of a man doing the labor of not letting pride show on his face, because she is fifteen and she is watching, and he will give her every truth he possesses except this one:

that she has already exceeded every measure he once thought to set for her. That the name Shiranui belongs to the horse, but the phenomenon - the fire that appears where no fire should be, that cannot be caught or explained, that simply is and demands to be witnessed - has ridden beside him all along, and her name is Hinokari, and the ride has not yet begun. ▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥||

[yeoumopi]

She does not ask him for help. She'd seen her mother saddle the stallion far too many times, and she'd seen him do the same with his. She'd been ten, when she'd started asking about the horse, which terrified her at first glance with how tall it is compared to her little frame, and her mother had lifted her onto it and they'd ridden on the trail when her mother is not fulfilling her duties, and sometimes she'd cling onto her father if he'd been the one taking her on the trails - never outside the perimeter of the compound.

Until now.

She is eleven when she first tried to help her mother saddle the roan stallion. Her mother named it 陽炎.

Kagerou. The name had been fitting, and her mother had given the stallion which is suited for its red-warm coat, as fitting as the animal's mistress, whom Miharu had cared for because Hanzo had realized her quiet affinity with creatures great and small with her fox wisdom and nature.

The way she mounted the stallion is fluid, the kind that has not simply learned by proximity, not simply observed, but in the trying, in the multiple attempts of doing, of the wanting to be worthy to be part of this - earned, invited, later welcomed. And when she finally sat up on the saddle, her gaze finds her father, who turns and makes his way to his horse. Shiranui.

She has not yet understood the full weight of the name, and Shiranui has the temperament that she'd noted similar to her father, and Kagerou had been similar to her mother's - two different horses from the entire herd. Kagerou is a little smaller, lighter. Shiranui had been larger, with a temperament that had refused even the most accomplished riders of the clan.

Not even her mother had been able to approach the elusive horse. Not without struggle.

She watches her father's horse submit to her father's saddling, the mounting and the horse shifts in recognition, the way Kagerou recognizes her. The great stallion's dark coat shifts like a whisp of smoke and it is blackness has not returned any light at all, and Hinokari has watched her father move around the creature, unhurried, steady, surely, from her vantage point, the same way he has always steadied her.

She has never been able to approach Shiranui. Not alone. Rarely when her father had been present.

But today, she'd watched her Papa swing into the saddle with the ease of someone who has earned the stallion's sacred trust. The fire-titan and the ghostly-fire-tempered horse - the sight of it is something she takes in and stores it in her memory the way she has remembered every thing that matters.

Kagerou shifts beneath her, responding to her anticipation. Hinokari steadies him with a gentle pat, the same way her mother had taught her. She leans forward for a moment, whispering assurance to the roan stallion, red-warm in contrast to Shiranui, whose coat is resembles the darkest night.

Her father's eyes find her. She knows he is reading her, the same way she is reading him. There is something beneath the expression he does not show, and she sits up with the confidence of fifteen - proud, intentional, certain. She is her mother's daughter, and the streak of white hair - the fox's blessing - is the physical proof of the blood running beneath her skin, which is her mother's. She has his eyes, the kind that has never looked away at the difficult things that most fifteen-year-olds her age would have looked away and retreated. Her hands hold the reins with wanting, with patience, with the knowing that she has finally earned this, the way things arrive to her, which is the same way she arrives at things and the two are similar but not exactly the same but share one thing: earned.

She does not miss the way his molten-gold eyes warm as they find her. She does not miss the way the corner of his mouth deepens - she has known this. Papa does not smile, not in the open. She suspects, her mother has a way of doing it, the pulling of a smile from her father, which is not the same as the way she smiles, but the almost-smile is the closest thing to it.

And that almost-smile is enough.

Morning light finds its way into the stables, the stable doors opening wide to allow the passage of four - father, daughter, two horses. The summed presence of all four of them which is weighted, significant, and she crosses the threshold with her father, with Kagerou, with Shiranui - the boundary that she has never been permitted to cross, and now crosses because she is old enough, and he is here to witness her crossing of it.

She and Kagerou follow behind him and Shiranui. Her eyes look ahead - forward, forward, always forward.

Two fires, ghostly, bright. Moving toward the light. One black, one roan.

The morning light greets them, and she feels the sun touch her face, and in the same light she sees her father illuminated by it, golden rays gently caressing his face too, which is similar in architecture as hers.

Part of her wonders what her father is thinking. But her eyes remain on him, and she sees his back, sees the way his jaw sets, faintly but unmistakable, and still she wonders what exactly he is thinking because what he thinks often remains unsaid and the clicking of the horse's feet sets the rhythm of their ride, the volume of their silence, which is already loud, before they have begun, and she sits with the same confidence she knows she has earned, and is capable of doing now, which is the riding, which is the carrying of the truth he has not yet given her until now.

She nudges Kagerou a little more, forward; she does not need to name aloud, because forward has always been the direction she has headed towards ever since she could walk, and for the first time she rides toward the world outside the walls, with its truths waiting for her, and she is not simply riding behind her father, but beside him, exactly where she is supposed to be.

Hinokari immediately feels the shift the moment they cross the gates. The world between the inner wall and the outer wall, is its own kind of temperature. It is quiet, but not empty. The air is different. The wind moves as if a cold front has been trying to infiltrate the warmth that acts like a barrier at the perimeter. There is no familiar echo of the compound's stone, and the trees breathe in a different rhythm she has not heard until now.

Shiranui slows. Her father shifted his weight, and her body mirrors the quite signaling. Her eyes find his, and they follow where they look out to, inch by careful inch, panoramic in the scaling of treelines ahead. Not tense. Perhaps wary. Entirely aware.

And she stills.

The way she has stilled because she is absorbing, internalizing the world around her, which is not as red as the maple leaves in the compound's gardens, not as ember bright as the lantern lights dancing at night. The morning light illuminates the horizon ahead:

The land ahead is vast. It rolls into the hills she has never known to exist, with unfamiliar shapes and long shadows. There are no birds flying nor singing. Above them, a single hawk, or a vulture. A bird she has not seen before.

She notes the broken branches from the trees, a disturbed patch of the earth. Perhaps a shift in the treeline.

She lets the silence blanket them for another breath, then she asks, her voice low: "Papa, you slowed. Is this the discrepancies you mentioned about?"

[sasorikigai]

The fire titan's daughter is fifteen. She is at the stables, quietly tending to the horses - one of which her mother rides frequently. She brushes the stallion, murmurs softly the way a girl would tend to smaller creatures, and gently checks its hooves. She has been at this for a few minutes, just long enough for her father to find her there.

She does not turn, not immediately.

But she does, and when she does, those dark eyes that she possesses that are his, find him.

For a moment there is silence between them, then she breaks it. She always breaks the quiet between them. Not to fill, but she must speak.

"Papa, are you still occupied with your duties?"

The question lands before it is released, like an arrow drawn from a bow.

At fifteen, she does not shy away from asking her father things, because she already knows he will give her nothing but truth.

It had been a while since they have ridden together. This is what her mother has allowed her ever since she has been running - running towards him, her father, who is the Shirai Ryu's grandmaster, who the fire titan, who is her mother's husband.

The stallion's tail swishes languidly, indifferent to the silence that beholds father and daughter, and indifferent to the smell of the stables - earthy, warm, and familiar the way wood and hay have always been.

And in her eyes, comes a glint. Acknowledgment, and perhaps hidden mischief, which she has inherited and has made it entirely hers.

Random Inbox Shenanigans || @yeoumopi || always accepting!

▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥|| The weight of his armor settles differently when she looks at him.

Hanzo Hasashi, Fire Titan, Grandmaster, the man who has burned and been unmade and made again - stands at the threshold of the stable, and he is simply father.

The ember-light beneath his skin dims, the way a forge-fire banks itself to something gentler without losing its heat. He does not announce himself. He never needs to. She had known, the way she has always known, the way Miharu's blood in her veins has made her sharp and perceptive as a fox lifting its nose to a wind carrying secrets. He watches her a moment longer - the careful, deliberate motion of her hands against the stallion's flank, the murmured softness of her voice, the way she checks the hooves with a thoroughness that is entirely his, repurposed into tenderness that is entirely hers.

She is fifteen, he thinks, and the thought does to him what the Netherrealm behemoth could not.

He steps inside.

The hay-dust and warm animal musk of the stable close around him, ancient and unhurried, indifferent to what he is beyond these walls. Here there is only the creak of wood, the slow breath of horses, and his daughter's dark eyes - his eyes, cast in her face - finding him at last.

The silence sits between them the way silence only can between two people who know each other in the marrow.

She breaks it. She always breaks it. Not from discomfort, but because she has never been afraid of what lives in the quiet - only unwilling to let it go unacknowledged. It is a courage that belongs to her alone.

"Papa, are you still occupied with your duties?"

The words find him cleanly. An arrow released from a bow that had been drawn long before she spoke.

His molten-gold eyes hold hers. A beat passes - one breath, two - in which Hanzo Hasashi does what generals and demons and the grinding machinery of war have never managed to make him do.

He softens.

"I am about to patrol the perimeter," he says, and his voice carries none of the thunder that shakes the earth when he commands armies. It is low, deliberate, the particular register he has kept for her since the night she was first placed in his arms and he had understood, with the totality of a man who has lost everything, what it meant to be given something irreplaceable. He moves further into the stable, coming to stand at the stallion's opposite side, one broad hand settling upon the animal's neck with a quietness that knows its own strength. "The outer edges of our territory require my eyes today. There are - " a pause, measured, weighing, "- discrepancies. Things that must be seen and named before they become something worse."

He looks at her across the stallion's back.

In her eyes he sees it - the glint, the inheritance of Miharu's clever mischief worn in a way that has become wholly, irreducibly Hinokari, and something in his chest moves the way tectonic stone moves: slow, foundational, with the deep inevitability of a mountain's shift.

He rounds the stallion's head.

He stands before her fully now, and the ember-cracks along his skin pulse once - not with rage or power, but with something the flames have no proper name for, the way a hearthfire does not rage but simply persists, warm and unyielding through the long dark of winter.

"You have tended him well." It is not a small thing, the way he says it. He does not deal in small observations. He looks from the stallion to her, and his gaze carries the same gravity it carries when he surveys the horizon for threat - only now it surveys his daughter, and finds in her something that quiets every war inside him. "Your mother will be pleased."

Another beat.

"Come with me."

Not a command. Not quite an invitation. Something between - the language they have always spoken. He reaches out and settles one hand briefly upon her shoulder, the gauntlet cool against her, the heat of him beneath it steady as a coal held deep.

"You are old enough to see the world beyond these walls as it is," he says. "Not its worst. But its truth. The shape of what we guard against - the imbalance, the fractures where darkness finds its way through - these are not things I wish to shield you from forever." His thumb presses, once, against her shoulder before he withdraws his hand. "You are Shirai Ryu. You are mine." The words carry the full architecture of what he means by that: not possession, but lineage, legacy, the passing of a torch that burns not with vengeance now but with something harder and more enduring.

His molten gaze holds hers, patient as a man who has stood at the edge of annihilation and waited.

"We ride together. You will observe, and you will ask what you wish to ask." A pause, and then - quiet, almost private, the way only she ever draws it from him - the faintest deepening at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. Something older and warmer than a smile. "I have missed your questions, Hinokari." ▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥||

[yeoumopi]

Her eyes find him. They always do. She looks for him in places he does not exist physically, and those dark eyes that are once his, and now hers, have always searched for him until she finds him where he exists.

He is Papa. He has always been Papa, and then her mother's husband, and the grandmaster and fire titan. All facets of him that coexist simultaneously, and the role of father still surpasses all that he is.

He steps inside. She knows this by the sound of his steps, her ears always attuned to him ever since she'd been a babe, ever since she'd been two days old, and he is holding her in his arms and she'd slept soundly because her body has learned to recognize his warmth, which is what lies on the surface of the fire beneath his skin, beneath those lined coals - still burning, burning, burning - and she still attends to the roan stallion, her mother's horse which had been a wedding gift and has been the horse that she is permitted to ride.

She breaks the silence, with the unwillingness to let it go unacknowledged.

His amber eyes, molten gold, find hers.

The smile is an acknowledgment. A quiet one that needs no further words, because silence has been the language that exists between them. Hinokari recognizes the low, particular register of him, the one he only uses in their home, and then he stops across her, the horse in between them, and for a moment his words are simply an invitation - which she will not hesitate to accept only when he is not preoccupied with his duties, because she understands that he is the clan's grandmaster and there are things that must be taken care of before one indulges in anything that resembles leisure.

He tells her what he has planned for the afternoon. That he intends to patrol the perimeter, which is a boundary she has not crossed ever.

She is fifteen and she still is not learned about the world outside of the perimeter of the compound, outside of their territory. He speaks like the grandmaster, but the cadence is her father's.

The glint in her eyes has not disappeared.

"The patrol is important." She says this as if it were mere a simple fact than something with significance. As if it were a given.

She feels his eyes across the stallion's back. She continues brushing its back, her hand light in its pats, gentle and almost affectionate. This is her mother's horse after all.

You have tended him well. Your mother will be pleased, he remarks when he rounds its head; the stallion, she suspects, has felt her father's fire, through the ember-cracks along his skin pulsing, like banked fires that remain burning but not flaring and destroying. It is the same fire she has discovered, a combination of his and her mother's which is entirely hers, and the horse seems to have felt that her father's fire is similar to hers.

"He has been quite restless, Mama said so." This is acknowledgment too. She has always spoken about things because it must be acknowledged, and she refuses to leave some things unacknowledged and the silence is not uncomfortable but that the acknowledgment is necessary.

Come with me. The invitation. The thing she has been waiting for. The glint in her eyes has not shifted. She'd been waiting, the same patience she'd learned and exhibited all fifteen years and counting, and he tells her is old enough to accompany him. It is not you’re coming with me, not would you like to come, not i need you to accompany me. It is the invitation that carries no expectation, no pressure. Just her father reaching out to her.

Her mother once forbade her about riding unsupervised. She understood. She'd also been put through some studies, and she'd stopped asking. But beneath the daughter who is poised to be her father's heir apparent, she still longs to be invited.

And perhaps, now that she is older - old enough to see the world beyond the walls - she will learn. She will finally take her place at the table - her father's table. Not simply because she is his flesh and blood, but she has earned it in her fifteen years of existence and she has learned a lot in those fifteen years, and she will learn more truths about the world around her, the world outside the compound, the things she will eventually learn.

The hand on her shoulder is not a simple gesture. It is the quiet beginning of a quiet handing of a torch, which is the legacy she inherits, which is the lineage, and the torch no longer burns with vengeance but burns with something that protects, creates and remembers. Something enduring. Something that matters.

She is still. For a breath she is still.

Then, she fully turns to him.

The glint on her eyes is sharper now, brighter. A quiet resolve he will know before it has fully developed.

"Let me saddle him," she says. The roan stallion, the one that belongs to her mother, is already half-prepared.

And when he steps back to allow her room, which he will, he will recognize that this is her answer, her resolve, formed with her own terms.

She moves with practiced ease: the cinch tightened, reins checked, and her hands smoothen the stallion's mane with a gentleness that mirrors her mother's. She climbs up the stallion with a little struggle, but swings into it regardless with a confidence of someone who has waited her entire life to be told she is old enough.

When she settles, she sits up with the confidence of the young that he knows - has known; he'd been young once and she has that confidence that stems from the assurance she has received from her parents ever since she'd learned to ask questions.

"I'm ready, Papa."

[yeoumopi]

Hanzo’s most admirable & infuriating character / personality traits (from Hinokari’s POV, of course) :)

hinokari headcanons - @sasorikigai

She is fifteen and she finds her father talking to her mother in a soft cadence one Tuesday afternoon, and she'd just overheard him and she knows what that conversation entails - she had not meant to overhear them; she'd simply been passing by to get to the back engawa where she'd welcomed the rare snow permitted by the corridor between Osaka and Kyoto like a family friend, where she'd observed fox lanternlight's shadows dance in the night breeze that passes by and the primroses bloom in the night ambience in their stubborn persistence.

She knows that conversation. Has known since she'd been four, seven, eight, ten. She'd known that command has summoned her father because he does not run from responsibility, which is, as a commander, and later brigadier general, he is responsible for the thirty soldiers under his command, responsible for making the right decisions, and responsible for getting them home to their families. Bruised, broken but alive. Most importantly, alive.

This is the trait she admires about him - the unshakable sense of responsibility.

This is what makes him heroic. He is only a man, her mother would know, but to Hinokari, he is the man who becomes the blueprint of her, who later becomes the warrior-protector, the healer, the soldier he shapes her to be.

"Papa, sometimes I think you carry the entire army," she tells him at four years old, when she'd found him in her parents' room and her hands have moved in circles - it is not simply mimicry but what a four year old would do as she had seen her mother do, and it is the thing that undoes him that night, and Hinokari is trying so hard to make him feel better because at four years old she has understood that Papa's job is carrying the entire army on his shoulders and he is tired and he needs rest and he needs time to get back his strength so he can carry the entire army again.

It is a pillar of the architecture of her entire childhood.

Papa shows up. Always. In the performances she does not want to really be part of, but does anyway because she had known that Papa will be there and she will find him with those tiny, irrevocably bright eyes, dark in the way his are dark but she has inherited them too. In the sports competitions she'd chosen to be part of because she'd joined archery club and actually liked it, in swim practices that she'd never been really good at but she somehow liked the feeling of being in the water.

He is present. Steady.

This is his gift. This is how he loves, and Hinokari has learned and understood this at seven years old, when he'd been deployed for weeks, and he'd come home and she found him in the living room, sitting quietly and she'd sat next to him because she always finds him, and she had said nothing but burrowed her little frame in the space between his arm and his torso, which is the safest place she has always found and she fits in it like a lock fits specifically to its key and he lets her because this is how she learns how to love him in the silence, and he lets her because the missing is mutual.

This is also his most infuriating trait; Hinokari arrives at this fact at sixteen, just a year since he'd been promoted to brigadier general, and he'd explained to her after the ceremony the year prior what the promotion means and he'd told her with truthfulness and plainly that it means more decisions with less time which means more risks and she'd considered what that means for someone in his position, and though she is years before she finally understands what it means to be an operative, she takes away her father's answer that he still believes in it, which is not hope nor faith but the recognition of the importance of the work he does.

The frustration manifests at sixteen, where he'd been deployed again and he'd come home bruised and battered and she'd learned that her father nearly died on her mother's table, which is something that sixteen-year-olds don't always have the capacity to process. She'd processed this fact anyway and had stayed by his side while he recovered and Mama had other patients to tend to and she hates that he is consistent, present and steady but that he also has become the person everyone else depends on and he is always answering when duty calls him and he does not rest.

She'd admired his sense of responsibility. So deeply that she has shaped herself after him, which is also what he has made her into: a warrior of her own who matters the most but cannot openly worry about because worrying means liability and she cannot be the liability he cannot afford. And yet, the blueprint of him from which she is molded from, includes the self-sacrifice, the carrying of burdens even when she is burning, burning, burning in his image, and the body has begun to present its own accounting, which he later tells her is her own arrival, and she does not mean to snap at him but the burden, which she has inherited with his quiet strength, has become too much to carry.

He always shows up. For her, for her mother. For his soldiers. For when command requires him to be the commander and not the man whom she knows as Papa, as her mother's husband. For everyone. He never stops showing up. But it worries her, even more so when she'd been deployed with him the very first time, and he is already miles ahead of her and her squad had been the back up, the one who will breach the debris after her father's unit has breached and rescued civilians and her father is the last one out, the last one she must find - sometimes beneath the rubble, sometimes beneath something else - always under some collapsed structure and he still never stops showing up.

This is the shape of him - he is the commander, later brigadier general - the man who carries what others cannot, who leads men into the most dangerous and hostile environments, who answers every time duty requires him, who returns bruised and battered and yet still answers the next summons. The shape of him that becomes her: the daughter who watches, observes, internalizes. Quietly worries. Who admires him fiercely that it becomes its own ache, which is its own burden, and she also resents him for the same reason.

He never stops showing up.

She will not ask him to stop. She cannot.

And one day, years into her future, when she is twenty and in the years that come after that, when General Hasashi and Doctor Yamaguchi-Hasashi have long reached the end of their careers, which is retirement, she will eventually arrive at the fact that this is why she also has rarely learned how to stop either: because she is a Hasashi, and like every Hasashi before her, they have never stopped moving forward.

The blueprint she inherits is his, and it is as much as the same as the others that have come before her: the fire, the duty, the restlessness. The part of him that never rests, which has become her - in her burning, which has made her mythical already among her peers, and this is what will cost her and she will be paying it in installments now.

When she stands in the corridor past the engawa where she already knows that her father is leaving again, she will later arrive at this - that she admires him and at the same time finds him infuriating because this is her way of loving him - fiercely, intensely, that the burning begins to feel like bruises that never heal.

She knows this much: he always shows up.

And one day, she will too.