Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Sojiro!” Wakaba’s voice is ecstatic when she sees him entering the hospital room; his chest swells slightly in response. “Sojiro, look what I made!”

He laughs quietly as he walks over and sits in the chair beside her bed; “That sure is a baby.”

The little one sleeps peacefully, nuzzled against her mother’s chest; she makes little squeaking noises in her sleep, and Sojiro’s heart melts. “She’s adorable, Wakaba,” he sighs, and reaches over to put a hand on her head. “I think she looks like you, but that might just be me.”

“She doesn’t look like anyone right now. She’s a compressed lima bean,” is the response Wakaba gives, but the tone of her voice is nothing but affection and love; “she’s the sweetest little lima bean I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“What’s her name?”

“Isshiki Futaba.”

She looks like a Futaba, he thinks. He almost wants to ask to hold her, but he figures she’ll say no; the kid’s barely an hour old, after all. Sojiro can’t help but wonder how on Earth she’s still so wide awake and chipper after pushing a small human out of her.

“I’m glad you came to visit,” she tells him, her voice suddenly much more somber. It’s then that the realization hits him, that the room is completely empty except for them and the sleeping newborn. He’d always noticed that she was single despite being pregnant - there was no boyfriend in her life, no father in the picture. He knew that she had family, though; parents and a brother, neither of which she seemed to be terribly close to, but… to not be present to welcome a new member of the family?

Oh, god, he was the first person to think to come here and be with her.

“I’ll always visit when you need me, Wakaba.”

There’s a loud knocking at the door that wakes him up from a deep sleep. At first, he doesn’t recognize fully what wakes him up; he blinks several times and glances at his alarm clock. Three in the morning. He groans and turns over onto his side, fully prepared to blame this on a dream or something and fully forget about it by morning.

Then the knocking happens again - bam, bam, bam - and doesn’t stop, and he realizes that damn it, there’s actually somebody outside and he probably ought to actually see what whoever’s there wants.

He expects a particularly ambitious salesperson or a stubborn neighbor that really needs to borrow some flour. He doesn’t expect a very frazzled looking Isshiki Wakaba, staring at him with a terrified expression as the four year old on her shoulder blinks at him with watery and fatigued mauve eyes. The look on her face is almost enough to make him panic, but before he can even ask her what’s going on, she’s talking.

“Futaba had a stomachache when I put her to bed earlier, but I woke up because I heard her throwing up a lot, and her fever’s gone way up and she can’t even hold down water and she’s super lethargic and the clinic by our house is closed so I don’t know what to do-”

“Hey, hey, Wakaba, calm down,” Sojiro tells her, trying to keep his voice relaxed as he offers his arms out; she places Futaba in them with a little hesitation. The poor kid does feel really warm. “She probably isn’t too dehydrated if this just started tonight, and I don’t think we need to go to the emergency room. For now, just stay here for the night and we can take her to the doctor in the morning.”

Wakaba nods, and lurches forward to wrap her arms around him. Sojiro blinks, and holds her and Futaba as close as he can.

“Hey, Sojiro, can you promise me something?”

Her voice is so suddenly serious that it’s almost shocking. It’s not the first time she’s jumped from laughing hysterically one moment to talking about matters of life and death in the next, but it never fails to be startling… it doesn’t help how difficult it is to tell when she’s joking or not.

Three love confessions and “haha you fell for it”s stung but it’s fine.

“Yeah, sure, anything,” he says, though, not wanting to risk laughing it off just in case she’s being genuine. There’s no point in hurting her feelings.

“I think that, sometime soon… I might be killed. If anything happens to me, I need you to promise that you’ll recognize it wasn’t an accident. I need you to promise you’ll take care of Futaba.”

Her words make his blood run cold.

But she can’t be serious, can she? That’s… ridiculous. Wakaba, killed? He doesn’t think she has any enemies - none she’s vented to him about, anyway. She’s a scientist with dangerous information, but… no, this is the exact sort of thing she would say and then laugh at him for falling for.

So Sojiro lets out a laugh, slightly uneasy. She hesitates a moment, and then laughs too.

Still…

“You know I’d never let anything happen to you or Futaba, come on.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” she waves her hand and takes another sip of her wine.

He’s pretty sure that she was joking. But the look in her eyes is… a little distant. A little more serious than this kind of occasion usually would be. “Anyway… Shido, am I right?”

She’s gone. He can’t believe she’s gone.

Sojiro stands off to the side at her funeral, and watches as a relative - her younger brother, the person that the will apparently sent Futaba to - lead the kid off and out of the building. He’s not surprised that she’s being removed from the situation. She was in hysterics throughout a good portion of the service; he doesn’t blame her. Futaba and Wakaba were always close.

The promise he made to her comes to mind. He wonders why she would leave custody of her daughter to a relative she didn’t often talk to after making Sojiro promise to take care of her no matter what. But… if it was in the will, it must have been what she wanted.

At the end of the day, legally speaking, he’s just a family friend.

It’s not his place to speak up and take her daughter. Their flesh and blood.

Still… he’s going to miss her.

Futaba looks terrible.

The kid has lost weight in the months since her mother died. She has bruises on her pale skin, some of them clearly from sleeping on the cold floor at night and others looking more… suspicious. She recognized him when he entered the home of Wakaba’s brother, but she hasn’t said anything in the nearly forty five minutes he’s been visiting with them.

His life long attachment to the kid aside, his promise to her mother keeps running through his head. He told her that he would never let anything happen to Futaba. He promised that he would take care of her, should anything happen to the psientist. Wakaba’s gone - can’t protect her anymore.

Goddammit, whether she actually wanted Isshiki Youji to take care of Futaba after her death or not, there was no way Sojiro could just let this go. There was no way he could possibly leave this poor kid to live like an animal at her uncle’s house while he went back to running his new cafe like nothing happened. He wasn’t sure whether he could say Futaba was like a daughter to him, but… she was something to him, and he needed to protect her.

He pulls Youji aside at the hour mark and looks outside the room to make sure that Futaba isn’t watching. Then, he lets himself look as angry as he is as he faces Wakaba’s sorry excuse for a brother.

“I’m taking Futaba and you’re going to sign off your parental rights to me. I’ll give you any amount of money you want if that’s what it’ll take.” He’s furious; he’s not sure he’s never been so furious in his life. “That kid is a human being, Isshiki. That kid is… she’s all that’s left of her mother. Your sister. How could you leave her without food? How could you leave her to sleep on the ground? What the fuck else have you been doing to her to make her shut down like this?” It’s taking all his strength not to hit the damn bastard, who looks surprised that he’s even done anything wrong.

“It’s not like she’s my kid. My sister decided to kill herself and threw all the responsibility of feeding her on me. It’s not my fault if I forget sometimes. She won’t ask me for anything, so I didn’t know anything was wrong.” A pause. “A hundred thousand yen and she’s yours.”

Sojiro gives him the damn money and storms out, offering Futaba his hand.

“Come on, kid, I’m taking you home.”

Her eyes widen, but she grabs on, and he leads her out of there.