Chapter Text
3.
Honestly, if you had asked him what he wanted his kid to grow up to be, artist would not even rank.
Maybe a baseball player. Yatora and that kid Sumida had been shaping up to be a pretty promising battery once. But he’d already seen then that Yatora didn’t really have what it took to make baseball his life. Yatora had only really started baseball to make his dad happy.
He’s a good kid. Honest and sociable. He has been since he was little, making friends as easily as breathing sometimes. It’s easy to be a dad to a kid like Yatora. There was a bit in high school where they were a little worried, when he came home with dyed hair one night and pierced ears another. They trusted him to not get into too much trouble – he’s smart enough not to and he did his part in not letting them worry about him by keeping his grades up – but they knew what it made their son look like, what other people would think and assume about Yatora. He never really cared much about that himself, but he knew that it could make life a little harder for his boy.
He doesn’t have much ground to stand on about that though. He thinks sometimes about how much of Yatora’s independence and determination to succeed comes from the instability that he caused. If the company hadn’t gone under and their finances were more stable, would he have a more carefree kid?
Not that he can change any of that, and Yatora understood that too, which, if he thinks about it for too long, does break his heart a little. He never wants to think about how his kid might have cut out the cute and childish parts of himself to grow up faster and better support them, doesn’t want to know what his failures had cost his son. He watched him put on his shoes at the genkan, school bag under his arm, watched him stack all of the bones in his spine up straight on top of each other before walking out of the door every morning. And every time he wonders when his son’s back had become so broad.
He thinks about that back when he goes to see Yatora’s art at the museum. His son had won a prize. He sees those three people, the way his son’s hand had painted them with their backs to him, and he understands instantly what Yatora was saying.
“Huh,” he’d laughed shakily. “Our kid’s an artist.”
He’d pulled his wife close with an arm around her shoulders, squeezing. “Oh, Yakkun,” she sighed, tears in her eyes, so, so proud.
They had looked up together what prize he had won, and stopped by the bank on their way home to open up an account when they saw the little bit of money that Yatora would have received from it. It wasn’t enough to pay for his expenses for long, and they know well enough of how the adult world demands more and more money from everyone just to exist.
Their kid would never accept a handout. Yatora has a hard enough time asking for help from them as it is. So they watch their son leave the house in flashy clothes, smelling of expensive cologne, and hear him come back in the early hours of the morning, if at all. He hears his wife tidy their bathroom counter, mumbling about how many cosmetic and skincare products Yatora leaves lying around. A young adult with a paying job as he is, he still leaves his room a wreck. It’s a little reassuring, to be honest. Their kid’s still a kid who needs them.
“Aren’t you going to tell him?” he asks. They’ve been making deposits into the account for a couple of months at this point.
His wife shrugs and grins. “We can just tell him when he’s in trouble, right?” She reaches for the remote to find the recording of that art show she likes. This episode's on a painting they're calling the Blue Boy, by a painter he doesn't catch the name of. Gains-something? The boy's soft eyes, that bright hair, reminds him of his son's.
Yeah. They’ll be here to catch him when he falls.