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Akira spends a long, lazy afternoon with Futaba playing video games in the attic, until Sojiro comes upstairs and reminds him he promised to help prep tomorrow's curry. Akira puts the controller down immediately, but Futaba lets out an exaggerated sigh.
“But we're not done hanging out yet!”
Sojiro gives her a look. It's still weird, seeing someone talk to Boss with anything less than absolute respect. It's even weirder seeing him clearly not really mind. “Then you can ‘hang out' while you chop vegetables. I need to go to the store anyway, so this guy could probably use a hand.”
“It could be fun,” Akira offers.
Futaba switches her glare from Sojiro to him. “You think cleaning is fun.”
Akira gives a shrug, wearing his best innocent expression. “It'll be just like Cooking Mama,” he tries instead.
Akira's kind of surprised that one worked. Futaba is now furiously peeling apples while he zests a lime. She's going so fast she's taking off big chunks of the fruit with the skin, nowhere near the neat thin slices Boss taught him to do, but telling her that will only get him teased for being an old man again.
Still, whatever her reasons, Akira’s touched she wanted to keep hanging out with him enough to acquiesce to food prep. He's honoured to be the one she trusts to help her go out into the world again, but the times they hang out at Leblanc or the Sakura residence might be his favourite. It just feels…warm, somehow, him in her space or her in his.
So Akira is smiling softly as he carefully runs the grater over the lime, until Futaba asks, “what are your parents like?”
There's a sickly swoop in his stomach and the grater goes still in his hand. He wants to ask why she’s asking but can hear how defensive and weird that would sound, and there’s no reason why this should be weird. “They're…I don't know. Far away.”
Akira wants to turn and look at her, try to figure out what's brought this on, but then she might look at him and he doesn't know what his face is doing right now.
“I know that, dummy!” Futaba says. “Do you guys talk a lot?”
Akira swallows, picking up the grater again and forcing himself to make even, controlled movements. “Can't you hack my phone records and find that out?”
“Sure, easily, but I don't.” She doesn't sound offended by the assumption, just matter of fact that it isn't true.
Akira believes her, and it disarms him enough that he tells the truth. “They haven't called me since I got to Tokyo.”
Futaba chops silently for a few moments, slower than she was before, and Akira wonders if he's being let off the hook. “Have you called them?”
Akira stares down at the vivid green standing out against the pale wood of the chopping board, at his own hands that he's painstakingly trained to be something better than clumsy. The lump in his throat isn't going away, and he's mad at himself for falling apart this much over a couple of simple questions. “No,” he answers, just about managing to keep his voice even. “Why - why the sudden interest?”
Futaba sighs, and he notices the absence of sound that means she’s stopped her furious chopping. “I don't know, just…you're so mixed into my family sometimes I forget you haven't always been there. And then I remember you have this whole other family somewhere.”
Each part of what she'd said cuts him off at the knees. Whole other family repeats in his head on loop. Like - like he had more than one. Like the foolish flare of hope in his chest when he'd lit sparklers with Futaba, Sojiro and Morgana hadn't been totally stupid after all.
"And I know it's not the same,” Futaba continues in a smaller voice, “but…there are so many things I'd say to my mom if I could. Aren't there things you want to say to them?”
Akira couldn't look up from his own hands if he'd wanted to. “I…there wouldn't be any point,” he says, hating the weakness in his voice.
“But there is stuff you want to say?” He can tell from the sound of her voice that she's turned to look at him, and he wishes she wouldn't; wishes, suddenly, that he were alone in the dust of the attic again, with no one caring what he thought about anything.
But now that she's asked, the words are coming in spite of himself. “I guess I just…I don't understand.” He clears his throat. “I don't…even if I had beat up that guy, for no good reason. Even if I had…”
Akira’s vision swims back into focus, and he realises he's pressed so hard with the grater that juice is spilling out over the board, muddling with the zest. Sojiro had asked him to do one thing and he was screwing it up. He grips tight to the grater, wanting to crush the lime in his hand, and instead sets them both carefully down on the counter.
“Even if I had done it,” he continues. “One mistake, I don't…that's all it took? One mistake and I'm not, not even their son anymore? I don't - don't understand how you exile your only child over one, one mistake.”
Alarm bells are sounding in his head. He shouldn't be saying this, shouldn't be opening this door that he had closed firmly on the train journey to Tokyo, watching condensation build on the windows and accepting that the place he’d called home for sixteen years didn’t want him anymore.
“I just, I don't understand,” he says, and he wants desperately to stop talking but he can’t. “I don't understand. I don't-”
He sounds like a skipping CD, jumping and repeating. His mom had been dedicated to her CD collection, deeming vinyl expensive and pretentious and streaming music confusing and soulless. She'd played her favourites in the kitchen in the evenings, and Akira was never allowed to help cook but he'd sit on the wobbly chair in the corner that his dad was always promising to fix and he'd listen.
She might be playing her CDs right now and he'd never know. He might never set foot in that kitchen again.
Futaba takes hold of his arms and pulls him away from the counter, then drags him down into a hug. “I-I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” she says, small and panicked. He hugs her back, closes his eyes and tells himself it’s to keep the hair out of his eyes.
“I don't understand either,” Futaba says, very quiet.
Akira takes long, ragged breaths and tries to mentally go back to sitting on the lumpy couch upstairs, with Futaba complaining about the resolution of his shitty TV. Futaba doesn't let go, and eventually it gets easier to breathe and to think, though he can still feel that whirlpool of repeating thoughts waiting down below.
“I'm getting lime juice on your shirt,” Akira murmurs.
“Good! I'm powered by citrus.”
He huffs a laugh and opens his eyes to see Sojiro standing by the counter, shopping bags in his hands, watching them with an unreadable expression.
Akira pulls back, turns back the counter. He grabs some paper towels to mop up the lime juice, discreetly wipes one under his eyes as he does so. This is still salvageable.
“Look how good I did chopping!” Futaba exclaims, leading Sojiro over to her board. “I'm basically you now. Gimme the keys, old man.”
If Akira didn’t know to look for it, he might not have noticed the slightly brittle edge to her determinedly cheerful voice. If he didn’t know to look for it, he might not have noticed that she was directing attention away from Akira, giving him a chance to get himself together. Akira loves her more fiercely than he'll ever be able to put into words.
“Sure,” Sojiro replies, and Akira braces himself for his refusal to accept the misdirect. “I guess if Leblanc’s yours now, you can put all these groceries away by yourself?”
“Mmm, I think I'll delegate that to my staff.” Futaba shoves one of the bags at Akira.
Akira starts unpacking the bag, wishing he could check how red and puffy his face looks. “She runs a tight ship,” he says to Sojiro, because the longer they don't address each other the longer it'll just keep hanging there. Normal, he's being normal.
Sojiro hums in response. “She sure does.”
Akira sneaks one lightning fast look at Sojiro as he walks over to the fridge. He's stroking his beard, a crease between his brows like he's thinking something over, but he lets Futaba keep distracting him, lets the rest of the evening pass as they prep, cook and eat without bringing up what he'd seen, and Akira thinks maybe he's off the hook.
Akira is cleaning the countertops when Sojiro puts a bag in Futaba's arms. “I picked up some stuff for the house, too. Why don't you run it over there and I'll join you in a bit?”
“I can lock up, if you want to…” Akira trails off when he realises he's getting dangerously close to trying to kick Sojiro out of his own café.
There's a brief silence, and Akira thinks maybe some silent communication is happening between Futaba and Sojiro but is too afraid to actually look. He tries to put things in perspective, tries to remind the rising panic in his chest that Sojiro wasn't going to kick him out for crying all over his daughter. Probably.
“Go on ahead,” Sojiro says again. “This won't take long.”
Akira realises he's been scrubbing at the same patch of counter for at least 30 seconds, and forces himself to stop.
“G'night.” Futaba ruffles Akira’s hair vigorously before scampering over and out the door.
Akira can’t help but smile even through the pit of dread in his gut. “Night,” he murmurs, a little too late, and takes a fruitless moment to try and put his hair back in order before the weight of Boss’s stare against his back becomes too much.
Akira walks to the sink, rinses off the sponge and starts to work on the dishes.
“I can do those,” Sojiro says, even though he's never once said no to Akira taking care of the dishes before. Akira has seen him rubbing at the back of his neck, seen it get worse after hunching over the sink.
“It's fine,” Akira says. “I don't mind.” He doesn't know how to say that he needs something to do with his hands to keep his brain quiet - that sometimes he's so overwhelmed that he needs to watch one small concrete thing get better under the power of his own hands.
He still remembers Sojiro scolding him for his too-perfect answers, the suspicion they aroused that Akira was lying, pretending to be perfect. Akira is never sure what will trigger that suspicion again, so he elaborates as little as possible and hopes for the best.
“Alright,” Sojiro says. “I'll make us some coffee then.”
He sounds…awkward, Akira thinks. Like he doesn't entirely know what he's trying to do either. It makes Akira want to give him an out. “You don't…have to be nice to me, just because…” Akira stares at the soap bubbles, the gloss on the water, the rust on the taps. Stay here, don't drift, keep talking. “It wasn't a big deal.”
Sojiro sighs, and Akira hears the rustle of a bag of beans coming down from the shelf. Maybe Boss likes to have something to do with his hands, too. “You shouldn't be so quick to tell people to stop bein’ nice to you.”
Akira doesn't know what to say to that, so he shrugs minutely and keeps scrubbing. He'd surrounded himself with kind people in the last few months, but they were working towards something together, were partners in thievery, and that made it easier to understand, somehow. Outside of that…he could understand hostility, and he could understand people wanting things from him. Kindness from someone who wasn't a teammate, when he isn’t sure what they’re getting out of it…he doesn't know what Sojiro is getting out of this.
The familiar scratchy whirr of the bean grinder starts up, and Akira feels his shoulders relax a little despite himself. The sounds of Leblanc - the way the old heater rumbles and clicks as it starts up, the lazy bubbling of simmering curry on the stove, the murmur of customers chatting from down below on weekend mornings when he sleeps in late - it frightens him sometimes, how attached he is to these things that can never really belong to him.
“Listen,” Sojiro says. “I'm not good at this stuff, but there are things I've been meaning to say to you.”
Akira's grip tightens on the dish in his hand, and with effort he moves it over to rest in line with the others on the drying rack. He wants to tell Sojiro again that he doesn't have to do whatever this is - beg him, really - but he holds his tongue, tries to brace himself.
“It's a conversation, kid, not a firing squad,” Sojiro says, and the sound of his irritation is comforting too.
“Okay,” Akira says, forcing his shoulders back down. “Okay, I'm listening.” He wonders if Sojiro will make him stop what he’s doing and come over before he talks; his parents would never let him get away with having a difficult conversation unless he was looking them in the eye, said the world wouldn’t give him breaks like that so they wouldn’t either. He thought they were probably right about that, but mostly it meant he tried to avoid having difficult conversations with them at all.
Mugs clink behind him, then the sound of the water starting to boil. Akira scrubs hard at the tines of a fork and tries to narrow his brain down to just that.
“When you first came here, I know I was pretty tough on you.”
“You were honest.” Akira had been bracing himself for a guardian’s false politeness, their poor attempts to hide their resentment of him. The fact that Sojiro had worn his so openly had mostly been a relief. And the rest - the silent rage roiling in his gut ever since his arrest, the cold flashes of it surging through his chest - there was no use in dwelling on it. Before Arsène, rage had never gotten him anywhere good, no matter how righteous.
“To a fault, maybe.” He can hear the tiredness in Sojiro’s voice, can picture him taking off his glasses and rubbing at his eyes. Akira wants to interject and disagree again, but Sojiro doesn’t let him. “Look, I fell out with my folks when I was around your age. A little older.”
It’s so surprising that Akira forgets some of his fear. It’s strange to think that Sojiro was ever as young as him. “What happened?”
“A lot. I’m not gonna get into the whole thing, but…I blamed a lot of my own mistakes on them.”
Akira tenses up again, because he thinks he can see where this is going now. Sojiro seems to sense what he’s thinking and continues. “I don’t mean…look, I was a stupid, arrogant kid, and for a long time I had it in my head that if they’d been tougher on me, laid down the law more, then I wouldn’t have screwed up so much.”
Akira realises he’s been watching the water flow away without actually doing anything for a while now. He picks up one of the last mugs. “That’s…I can’t imagine you like that.”
“You thought I’d always been old, huh?” Sojiro says, and Akira smiles sheepishly because it’s true. “I’m not trying to…I’m telling you this for two reasons. The first is that when you first got here, I thought the best thing I could do was be strict, keep you on the straight and narrow.”
“I never minded-” Akira tries to interject.
“Maybe you should have.”
Akira has no idea what to make of that.
“Hell,” Sojiro continues. “I bet you came here expecting a room in someone’s home, and then I put you in that attic-”
“I expected way worse than this,” Akira says, and turns to look at Sojiro in spite of himself, then wishes he hadn’t. Sojiro looks…sad, he thinks, though he doesn’t understand why. Akira quickly looks back at the sink. He’s run out of dishes to do, so he turns off the water and picks up a cloth to start drying. “What’s the second reason?” Akira asks through the lump in his throat.
He hears the sound of coffee being poured into mugs. “The second reason,” Sojiro says slowly, “is I want you to know you can be mad at your parents and it isn’t the end of the world.”
Akira…Akira has to keep thinking about Sojiro and his version of this story, because he’s not going to break down in front of another member of the Sakura family today. “You made up with them?” He hopes Sojiro will be kind enough not to comment on the crack in his voice.
“Yeah, kid,” Sojiro says, something gentle in his voice. “Well…to tell you the truth, things with my mom were never really the same. But I was close with my dad till the day he died.”
Akira can’t picture his parents living out the rest of their lives without things ever being right between them again, and he can’t picture them reconciling with him either. This rent between them has made everything after the end of his probation seem strange and impossible. He can’t imagine going home again in a few months, because in his mind his home is frozen in amber on the day before everything went wrong.
“Your coffee’s gettin’ cold,” Sojiro says, interrupting his reverie, and Akira obediently puts down the towel and comes over to the counter. Sojiro’s hatred of coffee on-the-go seemed to extend to drinking it anywhere but at the counter or at a table, so he knows better than to try and take the mug over to the sink so he can put the clean dishes away. He sits across the counter from Sojiro, picks up the mug and takes a sip.
“Blue Mountain?”
Sojiro nods. It’s perfect, but he’s sure Sojiro already knows that. Akira’s friends will sometimes tease him for not wanting to order coffee when they go to other cafés, saying the Boss has turned him into a coffee snob. Akira can’t really argue back without revealing that the real reason is a strange, embarrassing sense of loyalty.
“I’ll stop harping on at you soon,” Sojiro says, and Akira tries not to visibly wince because he’d thought maybe it was over. He’d honestly rather one-on-one battle the Reaper than keep having conversations about his feelings, and he knows that isn’t good but it is the truth. “But I’ve just gotta say…it was wrong of me to assume I knew what was best for you before I knew you.”
Akira can’t help but shake his head, trying to put his objection into words. “I…like it here,” he says lamely. “It’s been good. You don’t have to say sorry.”
Sojiro sighs and takes a long sip of his own coffee. “I like having you here too. You and that rabble you bring in.”
That’s…Akira knows Sojiro hasn’t seemed to mind his presence as much since they’d successfully stolen Futaba’s heart, but hearing him say it outright… I like having you here too. You're so mixed into my family sometimes I forget you haven't always been there.
“If you’re too stubborn to let me apologise, at least let me say what I should have said from the start: You’re welcome here. For as long as you need.”
It warms him up from the inside the same way the coffee does, even as some part of him doesn’t want to let himself believe it. As long as you need…it’s a light so bright he can’t bear to look directly at it. If he starts letting the thoughts in, of his things getting to stay in the attic past the end of his probation, those warm Leblanc sounds remaining part of his world, Futaba curled up next to him on the couch beating him at every video game he owns…He tucks the thought away, somewhere he can look at it later when it’s all less raw.
“Thank you,” Akira says quietly, and it’s so inadequate but it’s all he has.
Sojiro nods, clears his throat. It makes him feel a little better somehow, that Sojiro isn’t entirely comfortable having this kind of conversation either. (His parents had always seemed so poised, no matter the subject; he only heard worry in their voices when he’d get up late in the night and hear them murmuring to each other in the kitchen, too hushed to make out the words. He doesn’t know why they felt the need to hide that from him. He doesn’t know why he’s having all these thoughts now, when he’d successfully shut them away for so long.)
“Last thing, I promise,” Sojiro says. Akira expects to feel that familiar surge of worry, and is surprised to find it doesn’t come. “From one former rebellious kid to another…you’ve gotta find some way of letting that anger out. It’ll poison you otherwise.”
Akira mulls that over for a moment, eyes on the dregs at the bottom of his mug. He can’t tell Sojiro he gets his anger out by backflipping through palaces beating up shadows. And the thing is, if that was really true, if that was really getting all his anger out, Akira doesn’t think he’d have had the reaction he did to Futaba’s questions.
“I’m…not sure I know how,” Akira admits.
“Not yet,” Sojiro agrees. “But you’re smart, and you’ve got a lot of people in your corner. You’ll figure it out.”
Akira can’t remember the last time an adult expressed confidence in him. He searches Sojiro’s face for a lie but there’s nothing to be found. Maybe Sojiro’s right; maybe he has more people in his corner than he thought he did.