Chapter Text
Some souls get to pick their parents before they incarnate into this world. It is the spirit’s conviction made universally transcendental, a love so driven turns into flesh and the rest becomes family history.
Other souls aren’t so lucky. Their lifetimes are spent wondering why.
“Come on, Mari. Everyone’s waiting for you.”
Jin stands by the doorway, watching his sister through the panel of her mirror. She sits in front of her vanity, where wooden roses are carved into its white moldings. Over two decades before you were born in Sendai, here lived your mother with the rest of her family in the garden suburbs of Denenchofu.
“Do you think we’ll have to take these family photos even when otou-sama will be old and gray?” her brother asks.
She pinches an earring and fastens it between her pierced lobes. “Like when we grow up and have our own children?”
“Naturally.”
She rises from the cushioned velvet, the mirrored reflection copying her one-to-one. Everything she wears was once Saionji Sayuri’s: the pearl necklace, the matching bracelet, the boat-neck satin dress that cinches at the waistline— remainders of the mother, archived and later inherited by the only daughter.
“I suppose so,” she responds, albeit with eyes trained at herself and no one else. “There might come a day when I disappear from these dumb little family photos, though.”
Jin raises a brow, high above the aviator rims of his glasses. “What, joking about death are you?”
He scoffs, deep offense etched into his scowl. His tongue was sharp and words brash, but Mari knew she had etched out a soft spot in him. “Don’t be such a twit,” he follows with.
“There are fates worse than death, you know.”
He crosses his arms, black blazer sleeves folding through the motion. “Like what?”
She smiles at him through the mirror, close-lipped but eyes empty. “Like disappearing without a trace, perhaps.”
Mari has mail.
It bears no family sigils, no stamps in red or black ink. The envelope, once white, has been yellowed by ages of delay. It’s a letter that has spent its life waiting to be sent, attendant with the odd dips and dimples bearing signs of repeated— lingering— human touch.
Mari’s knees are weak. With each fleeting step she takes towards her husband’s home office, her pace is so ghost-like that the floorboards don’t register her passing by. The house is brimming with deafening silence.
Atsushi follows behind her, watching her weave through the hallways like an apparition summoned.
An open ballpoint pen grazes against the rigid tips of her fingers when she scrambles through the pull-out shelf of his creaky desk, feeling for the rusted letter opener that bears an engraving of the year you were born.
Mari stabs the mouth of the mail, cutting through the vintage residue of what glue once was.
Letter paper, folded twice.
Her nails insert between creases.
As of writing this letter, it has been four thousand and two hundred forty-nine days since I've abandoned you. By the time it reaches your grasp, I would have found you again. I do not know when that may be, but I write this letter with the firm conviction and ever blinder hope that I will eventually find an address, an office, a person to send this to.
There is a gaping hole where my heart used to be. At the heat of my anger, I kept asking you— what have you done, what have you done.
Now it mocks me: what have I done?
I leave your room right where you left it, because its mess is the last of you that I have with me.
Please come home, Mariko. I have already lost your mother. I cannot bear to lose my daughter, too.
“He came to the office today and we met for the first time,” Atsushi begins. Mari studies his face, hoping to pluck out any semblance of a bad impression. Nothing.
“He’s a stoic man,” he describes him, guessing—and successfully predicting— her line of thought. Atsushi resolves not feed into her dated perceptions. “Of course, there’s distance to be closed. Almost twenty years’ worth of. But the fact is, he came all this way to Sendai…” he trails, but never closes.
Atsushi digs for a single sheet of sticky note from his pocket, back adhesive lined with lint, and hands it to her.
Dec. 31, 8PM, home, it says in her father’s crude and hurried writing.
“He’s inviting our family to New Year’s Eve dinner. It’s a pity, he says, that it took this long before he formally sought us out, but the thirty-first is one of the rare times when everyone's schedules align."
He waits for Mari to supply a word or two. Silence.
"He didn't want to corner you into a one-on-one meeting even though months have already passed prior. He didn't want to scare you away.”
Atsushi recalls the apologetic knit to the patriarch’s brows. And then his voice softens. “Everyone’s all gray and grown now,” he quotes her father verbatim. “So he hopes you could consider this.”
Her husband leans by the doorway. “And so do I. I hope you consider this, too.”
The floorboards creak under your weight when you dip into the stillness of your home. It’s a few minutes past eleven o’clock and the television in your parents’ room buzzes stronger as you climb up the stairs.
You creep into their quarters to find only your dad, lying half-asleep to the lulls of the late-night news.
“Dad,” you wake him, “I’m home.”
He jolts upright, voice groggy to your entry. “[F/N]? Where’ve you been the whole day?”
“Where’s mom?” you ask, dodging the question.
“She’s downstairs,” and then he proceeds to rub the bridge of his nose. “You have to talk to her.”
“I know,” is your knee-jerk response. “I have to apologize to her.”
“Well yes,” his brows pinch, “but I need you to talk to her as well. It’s about your grandfather.”
The next breath you take is shallow. “Why?”
“He’s invited us to meet the rest of the Saionji family tomorrow.”
Regression, as coined by the infamous Sigmund Freud, is a type of defense mechanism employed by individuals to cope with anxiety-inducing circumstances. It is regression because, as the word itself states, an individual reverts back to behavior typical of the earlier stages of development in order to bring a sense of familiarity in an otherwise stressful situation.
Whenever your dad comes home from a workday much heavier than the others, he blasts Detective Conan on blu-ray and masks it as background noise. And each time exam season rolls around, you eat through tubs of vanilla ice cream as comfort food to the arduous task of revising.
Your mother, on the other hand, clams up. So you know exactly where to find her when you depart downstairs.
Your feet are cold to the touch of tiles. The sliding door closes behind you and you find Mari at the opposite end of this cramped hallway of a laundry room, face icy and impossible to read.
You lean against the wood, feeling the frigid atmosphere before launching a conversation into the air. She loads a basket of laundry into the washer and you feel odd at the sight— it’s the dead of night, after all.
The mechanical whirr, the tumbling to your stomach.
You find your voice. “Mom,” it says, sinking to the drones of the machine.
Her face remains to only show her side profile, eyes downcast on the half-empty detergent bottle. She tears a refill at the mouth and pours into the gaping bottleneck.
“Mom,” you say, louder this time. “I’m sorry."
She pauses and the blue liquid thins its waterfall.
“I’m sorry…” you waver, “... that I snuck out.”
She lends you the slightest angle to her periphery, her wordless invite to an explanation.
You nitpick a cuticle to avoid her gaze. “I went to Tokyo. I know it’s not the best time to announce it, but,” you glance at the floor before glancing back at her, “I, I have a boyfriend now. So I just, uh, spent the day at his place.”
Silence.
She closes the cap to the detergent bottle and slams it back on the shelf.
“You think you can just up and take the train to god-knows-where without telling anyone? You have parents at home worrying themselves sick. We’ve called your phone multiple times, and you couldn’t even bother to answer?”
“But I got back home in one piece. That's what matters."
"It's not about you coming home safe and sound. It's about you just disappearing without a trace."
Her mouth pulls into a thin line, déjà vu knocking at the back of her head.
"You wouldn't understand what I'm talking about. You don't know what it's like to be a parent."
You pinch a cuticle hard enough for it to glare pink. "I’m really sorry, mom. I won’t do it again. I promise to tell you next time.”
She lets out a long, winding sigh of defeat and picks up the empty laundry basket.
“Get bathed and go to bed.”
“Mom,” you begin again, the refusal to release the grip on this conversation evident and frantic. “Dad told me.”
Her mouth thins into a line. You wait for the tiniest twitch to her face, hoping that she supplies you with something, anything. But out comes nothing.
“Are we going to meet them?”
Her silence makes your stomach churn.
“Mom…?”
She resumes the laundry.
“Mom—”
“Do you want to meet them?” she asks, avoiding your direction.
You’re quick to answer. “I-I think it’s time that we do,” you stutter.
She side-steps towards the dryer and withdraws a pile of clothing. “Even if you and your father are strangers to them?”
You bite your lip. “Nevermind if we are. We want to do this for you.”
Your voice washes out.
It feels like hours before Mari speaks up again.
“[F/N], do you know that not everyone who survived World War II returned home?"
She turns to you and surveys the expression on your face. "And I’m not talking about death.”
Your brows knit.
“When the war ended, a handful of Japanese soldiers never left the countries they were deployed to. They spent years, decades in the wilderness, in jungles far-removed from civilization. They refused to believe that there was nothing to fight for anymore. In their heads, they had to hold on to their posts in Guam, Philippines, Indonesia, mistaking locals for spies and airplanes for warcraft bombers. The government would shell out a fortune trying to relocate them, coaxing them back to society. The war is over, they’d tell them. They wouldn’t listen. They would hold on to their guns and run back into the woods, waiting for an imaginary enemy to engage in combat.”
Mari folds a shirt and places it at the bottom of another basket. “Can you blame them, [F/N]? If they’ve spent the most pivotal years of their lives in attack mode, sent off to foreign territory as pawns to some ultimate end, can you blame them?”
You watch her face harden under the light, wordless at the next set of words to come.
“I know that meeting them is long overdue. Inevitable and overdue. So yes, we’ll go to Tokyo tomorrow,” she concedes, “but it’s just that… I don’t think I ever got out of my jungle.”
Natsuo woke up in the dead of the afternoon. It took approximately nine calls before he was successfully roused from sleep.
“Hello?”
“Natsuo.”
His face, still puffy from last night’s abusive amount of alcohol intake, is lined with sleep marks from cheek to cheek. “Nee-san,” he croaks.
“What time are you going tonight?”
“Tonight?”
He rubs his eyes and retracts his phone from his ear. “Oh yeah,” he mumbles, voice thawing out. “I dunno, lemme sober up first or something,” he slurs.
“Are you still drunk?”
“I think so.”
“I thought you went to a car meet. How did you drive home in one piece?”
He shrugs, expecting her to see it through the voice-only line. “Dunno. Actually, maybe I’ll find out later.” The scratch marks on his Miata will be the one to tell him.
“Aren’t you worried you might’ve done something stupid like run into a storefront again?”
Yawn. “No," he says without feeling as he rolls into bed. "Whatever the case, dad will handle the reparations, mom will handle the press.”
Akine’s silence admits tacit agreement. Natsuo was fifteen when he started gaining interest in cars. It’s only ever morphed into a dangerous hobby, warranting stern scolding from their patriarch of a grandfather on more occasions than the family would like to admit. Getting ticketed for driving under a fake license was the start of it. Then it was speeding. It came to a head when Natsuo rammed his brand new Nissan GT-R into a pachinko parlor at the break of dawn after an obviously intoxicated birthday spent with friends. Had his mother been some other woman, the Saionji family could not at all have bowed out of bad press on the afternoon news.
Natsuo, carefree as he was, had to strike a precarious balance between his two grandparents— the statesman whose family was constantly under the watchful light of the media, and the mogul who knew when to censor the news.
Akine clicks her tongue. “Anyway. Mom hasn’t called me today so you probably ran over a traffic cone the most, if anything at all.”
He hums through the covers.
“Let me know what time you’re going, okay. Drive by my apartment if I’m back before six.”
Unsurprisingly, it’s half past six when Natsuo wakes up again. When he checks his phone for the time, his body flushes with adrenaline before launching free from his duvet and rocketing towards the bathroom. The guy was convinced that shaving his head into a buzzcut altered the trajectory of his life; he no longer spent half-hours in front of the mirror styling his naturally wavy hair. On the flipside, though, his vanity begged for another outlet to release, and thus he was rerouted towards the path of inked needles. At current, he hides three tattoos that not even his sister knows about: a panel of The Great Wave of Kanagawa on his left bicep, and the numerical birthdates of his parents on his left and right Achilles heels. He resolves that his next tattoo should be inspired by Akine, but he doesn’t know what or where it might take form yet.
The shower stall was still steaming when he indiscriminately plucked out whatever dinner-friendly outfit his closet hung— sky blue pinstripe polo with the 'BOKE FLOWER' Kenzo crest, wool blend crewneck from Acne Studios, and his reliable Carhartt corduroys. No cap, no piercings, and no accessories today, lest his Aunt Akari (that is, Haruto’s mom) tells him off for ‘dressing like a girl.’ He grabs a vodka-smelling puffer lying on the floor on the way out.
While Natsuo wasn’t a watch guy like his cousin, cars were what grinded his gears. He alternates between five, although three are truly his by legal ownership: the neon orange Mustang, the matte black GT-R (heavily repaired and thereafter modded), and the laser blue Miata that he got as advance inheritance from Taizo.
He leaves home in the convertible, and his phone connects to bluetooth.
“Dad.”
The phone picks up the racket of surrounding chatter before Taizo speaks up.
“Aha,” he mocks, “you’re finally up. You were dead asleep when I left home today.”
“Are you and mom there already?”
The time reads quarter to seven.
“Not yet. I’m about to dip and pick up your mother downtown.”
“You at a function or something?”
“At a bōnenkai with friends," he half-lies. He fondles the thigh of the hostess on his lap. "Don’t worry, I haven’t drank. That much.”
Natsuo signals right. “Is Akine with mom?”
Click-click-click.
“No. I thought she was riding with you, kid.”
“Oh shit,” he mumbles.
Click.
“Right. I’ll see you at Denenchofu.”
Riiing.
Riiing.
Riii—
“Akine, you want a ride?”
“Ugh,” she exasperates. “I just got on a cab. You didn’t tell me what time you were gonna leave the house.”
“I know, I know,” he repeats. “Sorry, I overslept. I’ll see you in a bit.”
“Whatever. See you.”
There is a distinct, almost alien quality to Denenchofu.
Akine’s cab driver keeps speed at fifteen on the main road. The vehicle comes under the sparse umbrellas of the neighborhood’s emblematic tree-lined roads, skeletons of ginkgo trees left naked in the wake of winter. The powder of white clings onto its thin branches, remnants of snowfall marrying into the pale light of the last day of the year.
She passes by sprawling home after sprawling home, some still decorated with Christmas decor, others without in preparation for the new year’s welcoming. The architecture will flicker from block to block: neighboring concepts of Asian versus Western, absolute privacy of garden walls versus flashy displays of white executive cars.
She hated visiting her grandfather’s neighborhood. It was too quiet, too still. There wasn’t enough noise to keep her company. She and her brother once spent an entire month at the main Saionji house as elementary-aged children; their parents committed them to the monastic care of their grandfather in the summer of 1999 because they had flown out to supervise the early stages of their Atherton home’s construction.
She never sat still in that home. Her grandpa would nitpick on her every negligible oddity or inconsequential mannerism. From the way she passed food around the table (always left, never right) to the way she climbed the stairs (chin cannot be anywhere but parallel to the ground), Akine always wondered why it was always her and never her brother.
And thus, she spent most of her time outside home and exploring the neighborhood. When those long weeks finally concluded, she departed Denenchofu memorizing its every curve, bend, and slope. She knew the veins to this begrudgingly austere, utopian community like the back of her hand— this bakery sells the best baguettes, and that konbini never ran out of Häagen-Dazs. Although over a decade later the area can no longer be considered suburban in the strict sense, it persists as one of the country’s few bubbles removed from the industrial loom of skyscrapers and high-rises.
The cab comes under a veil of street light, parked in front of a corner lot surrounded by dense shrubbery. The only visible piece of architecture that can be seen is the tall, iron-wrought gate. To the right of its stone slab pillars is a built-in mailbox and a weathered plaque with the Kanji for “Saionji” engraved into it.
“Is this correct, madam?”
“Yes, just here is fine.”
She pays her fare and departs from the vehicle, manspreading her knees apart in blatant protest to the way she was trained by her grandfather to ‘gracefully exit a car.’
Akine comes under the roof of the gate, smoothing her outfit out before anything else— maroon Valentino midi skirt, cloud-white blouse with ruched detailing from Isabel Marant, topped with a cream shearling jacket from Jacquemus.
"… and what, you expect me to do something about it?"
Her neck cranes to the sound. There's nobody else on the street but her.
"I expect you to be a parent for once, Issei! Why can't you just be the bigger man and talk to him?!"
"Me?" he spits out, "You're expecting me to be the parent? Akari, you left our son's upbringing to the hands of his aunts and nannies. You think you're on high enough ground to tell me this shit?"
A red-eyed security camera is hiding in a blind spot, and it watches Akine's long-nailed finger hover over the doorbell.
"Don't you fucking swear at me—"
"I'll swear at you all I want, you fucking married into this family! You deal with it!"
I can't listen to this.
She presses the doorbell and holds, one and two.
A beat of prolonged silence, and the camera goes from red to green.
“Oh, you’re finally here.”
Haruto is standing at the foot of the stone steps, awaiting Akine to close the gap between them. She lends him a prolonged stare, wondering if he heard his parents screaming bloody murder just seconds ago.
"What's wrong?"
She licks her lips, lashes fluttering away from his gaze. "That's just cashmere, isn't it? How are you not freezing with just that?"
“I stepped out once I heard the doorbell ring,” he explains. She releases tension she didn't know she was holding.
Haruto watches Akine climb up the steps, outdoor lamp illuminating a muted hue to her strawberry blonde hair. “Security almost didn’t recognize you at first.”
She shrugs. “As expected. I haven’t visited this place in a while.”
“You took a cab,” he states as a fact. “Natsuo couldn’t pick you up?”
“Natsuo didn’t pick me up. You know how he is.”
He chuckles under his breath. “Come. Let’s wait for Aunt Mariko and her family with the rest.”
The Saionji residence is one of modern Tokyo's best-kept secrets. It is a palatial estate hidden behind thickets of trees and shrubberies, having stood firm in its establishment four decades ago. It takes up the largest lot in the neighborhood— made even larger, after it was extended eight years ago following the buy-out of the neighboring lot. The parcel of land is divided into three main buildings: the main house constructed smack in the middle, the staff house that extends up to the back end of the walled premises, and the security lodge that hides behind the front garden’s manicured trees, strategically trimmed to distract the wide-eyed visitor.
Haruto opens the front door for Akine, a ten-foot-tall giant of African Blackwood that is fashioned into a revolving shaft at the hinges. Despite the unassuming front, the home interior had been architecturally reinterpreted to heed to the demands of mid-century modern. Prominent with accents of 70's weathered leather, animal fur hunted from game, and candelabra of polished brass, there drifts an old world familiarity that cuts through the otherwise sharp corners of designed precision. The smell of pine needles and lemon tea blasts through Akine’s olfactory senses, much to her dismay, but it is admittedly a scent that Haruto himself has secretly tried to replicate in his own apartment in Daikanyama.
There are three floors to the Saionji residence, not counting the underground parking that holds up to eight cars at a time. Its skeletal framework builds around the inner courtyard— the base of the home’s natural waterfall of daylight. At night, though, the reverse holds up: the home's illuminations creep into the hungry dim of the courtyard, light brimming from inside-out instead.
Akine steps into the towering foyer that cuts through those floors at once and she tilts her head to the overlooking balconies, anticipating the female voices that cascade down the genkan. “Sounds like the Ikebana Club is having another meeting,” she mutters.
The side of Haruto's lip pulls into a smirk. “It’s field day for the housewives,” he adds. The Ikebana Club is the nickname that Akine conjured (and later adopted by Haruto, among others) to refer to the three women that Saionji Tatsuya’s sons respectively married. The trio of in-laws took flower arrangement classes in the early 2000’s, initially as a concerted activity to bond to, before the hobby eventually morphed into a monthly meet-up to trade tidbits of mindless gossip, treatments offered by their dermatologists, and contact details to vouch-worthy personal shoppers.
Akari Saionji, née Saji, became the Saionji family’s key to political backing in northern Japan. Before she cemented her role in society as former diplomatic attaché to the Japanese embassy in New Zealand, she was first and foremost known as the daughter of the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Draconian is the only way to describe her. Saionji Tatsuya could have absolutely directed this daughter-in-law’s influences to look into estranged Mari’s whereabouts in Sendai, but even he was aware that the yakuza’s connections reached crevices the government wouldn’t. He wasn’t proud of these unscrupulous friends, but they were necessary to keep. The self-serving Saji side of the family didn’t need to know the nitty-gritty details to recouping Mari back into the Saionji orbit, the same way the right hand didn’t need to know what was in the left hand.
“Akine, you finally made it,” she says dryly. The niece looks at her straight in the eye and the aunt's gaze falters wayward. So it was Akine who rang the doorbell. Did she hear us?
“Since when did you dye your gorgeous black hair for… this color?”
If Akari didn’t look so much like Shalom Harlow, Akine would’ve found her nothing but another middle-aged Asian aunt that had too much judgment and not enough self-introspection. She’s lucky she’s got the type of beauty that would intimidate most.
Haruto catches the enduring smile that his cousin plasters on. “Just a little over a month now. Did my mother not funnel that tidbit of information to the ladies at ikebana?”
“I’m sure she would have told us had we met up,” Naoko’s small voice interrupts, “but you know our schedules get hectic towards the latter half of the year.”
She shares a glance with Haruto.
Naoko Saionji, née Harada, is Jin’s wife. While she may not have mothered any children with her husband, taking care of Tatsuya’s three grandchildren was the closest thing to replicating parenthood. Naoko is arguably among the better aunts of the family— sensitive and considerate with a tinge of people-pleaser. Coming from a family rooted in the legal profession, it was only natural that Jin was set up to marry her. Just days after they married, Associate Justice Harada was appointed Chief Justice of the country’s ultimate judicial authority.
The Saionji family’s legal firm benefitted the most from this engineered marriage. Access to the Harada name, on its face, meant obtaining favorable ruling after favorable ruling. In the underbelly of it all, Tatsuya’s family elevated to a stature way above the law. Since Japan’s conviction rate ran at a whopping ninety-nine percent, it was necessary for the product of his blood, sweat, and tears, to sit cozy in the gray area of that one percent.
Naoko’s face is kind, her disposition timid. While her looks may lack the most luster among the three ladies, Tatsuya’s trust in her runs deep, sometimes even deeper than his own three boys. Favored as she is, however, a trace of pity hangs around her like a ghost that haunts her inability to conceive. Luckily, Hiyori— Taizo’s wife— bore two children instead of one.
“Tell me about it,” Hiyori adds. “I wait all year for my children to spend time with me during the holidays and what do I get? Conflicting schedules on top of conflicting schedules,” she drawls. “I don’t even remember the last time we took a family trip together.”
Hiyori Saionji, née Ishizaki, is the youngest among the wives. In fact, she just broke forty this year, tallying her at four years younger than Mari.
Working in public office taught Tatsuya two things: one, it is no different from staging an elaborate play, and two, the audience will always be bound to rain applause if the press calls for it first. Thus, Hiyori came into the picture: direct line to the country’s leading newspaper publication, and second cousin to the President of NHK, the country’s only nationwide public broadcaster.
Evidently, Taizo lucked out the most by wedding Hiyori. She puts the sought-after glimmer to that label of a 'trophy wife.' People find it incredulous, even offensive, for her to assert that she is, in fact, a mother of two grown children and not a fresh college graduate. While her stunning looks make Natsuo popular among his male friends, it does nothing but replay the same old joke on Akine: are you sure you’re not siblings?
Akine is oblivious to her mother’s whining. She obtains a lead that Natsuo might be in the kitchen rummaging through food, if not in the garage with their father and uncles. She leaves Haruto to entertain the three wives, because god knows she’d never do it.
He checks the hands on his Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso. “Aunt Mariko and her family will be coming any minute now,” he states.
He turns towards the wrap-around corner window that overlooks the idyllic Tama River. The ivory herons that usually dot its currents have migrated towards the east for the period of winter. “I feel quite nervous.”
“Of course you would be, Haruto,” Hiyori comforts. “Among you three kids, you remember her the most.”
Akari swirls the red in her glass, eyes latched on the whirlpools of the drink. “I’m more interested in Mariko’s daughter. I wonder if she’s worth hiding from us after all these years. What do you think will otou-sama want to do with her?”
Naoko’s brows knit.
“Oh, I hope he does something about Akine first,” Hiyori adds, “she’s already twenty-one and she’s wasting egg cells as the months go by. I was already a mother at her age.”
“On top of that, Hiyori, your son should really learn a thing or two from mine. All Natsuo does is play with his cars.”
“I know,” she cries, “he’s considering law in Japan, but I know his heart lies in America. I am convinced he found his element during his internship at Tesla earlier this year.”
“I mean, he’s free to do as he pleases, but who’s going to assume the firm when Haruto eventually steps into public office? You know government officials can’t practice privately at the same time.”
Naoko lets out a sigh.
“Shouldn’t we be more receptive to the fact that this is Mari’s homecoming after all these years?”
A beat of silence. Haruto watches them eyeing each other.
“Were you best friends with Mariko before her ejectment from the family or something?” Akari asks, voice tart to the reaction.
Naoko retreats into her shoulders. “Well no, but I feel as though we’re getting too ahead of ourselves. Otou-sama just announced his prognosis, didn’t he? Shouldn’t we focus on closing up these loose ends?”
“The issue with Hiyori’s children are loose ends. As long as otou-sama is around, his lifetime’s chess game to succession will continue to play, and the improvement of the Saionji lineage will remain the sole award. Isn’t that right, Hiyori?”
“I mean—”
“I don’t think that’s what Aunt Naoko meant, mother,” Haruto slips in. Their eyes dart to him. “I think she meant that, aside from grandfather, even Aunt Mariko deserves closure.”
Naoko’s face relaxes. She wordlessly nods.
The doorbell rings and all four pairs of eyes shoot to the direction of the foyer.
A ceiling light casts a shadow over Haruto’s downcast eyes. “At any cost, I’ll make sure that my cousins end up in places grandpa would have wanted them to be in.”
“Are you sure this is the right place?”
“I grew up in this house, [F/N]. This is the right place.”
The car drives some eight hundred meters down the road before it halts nose-first into a wide iron gate, positioned at the back of the lot. It drapes with overgrown shrubbery.
The vehicle’s cotton-gloved driver is silent, nothing notable about him aside from the fact that he stood outside the shinkansen station flashing stark-white paper with “MARIKO” handwritten on it. A private chauffeur, in sum, was sent to pick you and the family up. And now you are here, in the heart of Denenchofu.
“There’s a security camera,” your dad points at the tiny red light just underneath the roof. “Actually, I just spotted two... three more. Are we supposed to roll our windows d—”
The two panels of the gate retract into the walls, revealing a dim descent into the ground.
“Oh, this is new,” is all Mari says.
The driver pulls into an eight-car garage. You recognize Haruto’s Lexus, but that’s about it.
“Is this all otou-sama’s?” Mari channels to the reticent driver.
“Only the Jaguar, the Chrysler, and the Toyota, madam. The rest are the extended family’s.”
The uniformed man leads you to an elevator (a home elevator!) that goes up to three floors. He presses number one and promptly leaves the carriage to the three of you.
Atsushi nudges at Mari. “Hey. This is really…”
She scratches the nape of her neck. “The house has always had three floors. The elevator is what caught me off-guard.”
Dad hums. “Maybe your father's knees have gotten weak through the years?” he says without much thinking.
You watch mom’s face turn placid under the light, unbelieving to the idea of this strong man having weakness.
There is a blanket of silence before the elevator finally pings. Your Uncle Jin’s face is the first you see on the other side of the door.
He smiles gently, crow’s feet digging into the eyes behind his spectacles. “Come on, Mari. Everyone’s waiting for you.”