Chapter Text
A loud crashing from behind him makes Akon wince. When he turns to see the source of the commotion, at first all he sees is a pile of equipment that looks like it appeared from nowhere— but then a small hand emerges from the pile, and Nemuri emerges, gasping like she’s just come up for air after being underwater for too long.
Mayuri, following close behind, lets out a derisive snort and clicks his tongue.
“I told you that you wouldn’t be able to carry it all in one trip, daft girl.” He reaches down and grabs Nemuri by the back of her shihakusho, pulling her free from a jumbled pile of glass and metal, the purpose of which Akon doesn’t even want to begin to theorize about.
He’s pretty smart, but the day he starts to think he’s capable of understanding what’s going through his Captain’s mind is the day he carries himself off to the 4th to get his head examined. Not that anyone would ever want to know what’s going through Mayuri’s mind; that’s just asking for the kind of trauma that turns your hair white.
“My apologies, Mayuri-sama!” Nemuri says, at a louder volume than she needs to, making Mayuri wince as he drops her back to her feet. Like a cat, she lands on them perfectly. “I’ll clean up the mess right away!”
“See that you do,” he murmurs, and drifts in Akon’s direction as Nemuri starts to sort through everything she just dropped.
Most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference just from looking at him, but Akon can tell that Mayuri looks tired. For most people in his position, that wouldn’t exactly be surprising— running both a squad and a research and development institute at the same time would be enough to drain anyone— but Akon has known Mayuri for a long time, and he’s never known work to slow him down.
More likely, it’s the stress of raising a child. Hachigou Nemuri has a lot more energy than her predecessor did, even at the same age. Instead of following around after Mayuri or Akon in an obedient daze the way Nemu often would, Nemuri behaves much more like Akon would expect a ‘normal’ child her age would— not that he has much experience in that regard.
It doesn’t stop her from running around on Mayuri’s heels like an excitable puppy chasing after her master, though. If anything, Nemuri is even more attached at the hip to Mayuri than Nemu had been at the same age.
While Mayuri takes his place next to him at the work bench and goes around adjusting things to his satisfaction, Akon looks over at Nemuri, dutifully picking up everything she’s dropped and reassembling it to the best of her abilities.
“I told her not to carry everything at once,” Mayuri mutters, and in his usual fashion, Akon has a hard time telling if he’s actually talking to him or if he’s just muttering to himself. “You would think obedience wouldn’t be such a hard thing to ask.”
“She’s young. It won’t be long before she figures it out,” Akon says, regardless of whether Mayuri was talking to him or not. “And it won’t be long before she’s big enough that it won’t be a problem anymore. I bet you’ll even miss these days.”
Mayuri rolls his eyes, and turns to focus on his work. Akon keeps watching Nemuri as she cleans up after herself.
It brings to mind the days he would spend watching over Nemu— no, back then she had still been Nanago Nemuri, still more of a developmental project than a person. She had been so quiet, so reserved, that there were days he would spend completely absorbed in whatever he was working on and wouldn’t even realize that hours had passed, because she had been completely silent in the background the entire time. She would spend the hours drawing with crayons and scraps of paper the research and development team would give her, or staring intently at a book as she tried to learn how to read.
As she had gotten older, she had started to develop more of an interest in what they were doing. Though her personality was docile, her interests and tastes were so much like Captain Mayuri’s that no one was surprised when she took an interest in science and especially in the work they did there. It was then that she started offering to help, carrying things or helping set up experiments.
Akon remembers those days fondly. Looking at Nemuri can’t help bring back those memories.
“What exactly are you staring at?” Mayuri asks, raising an eyebrow at him (impressive enough for a man who doesn’t have eyebrows), and Akon can’t stop himself from smiling fondly as she shakes his head.
“Just thinking about when Nemu was her age, that’s all.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Akon watches as Mayuri’s shoulders tense. His busy hands pause in their work, turning into a pair of balled fists that sit on the workbench.
As much as he’s the person who knows Mayuri the best, having been with the captain since he had freed him from the Maggot’s Nest when Akon was just a child, there are moments when Akon slips up and forgets that Mayuri isn’t nearly as unaffected as he gives the impression of being.
The topic of Nemu is one that doesn’t come up often. After the end of the war with the Quincies, there had been too much cleanup to do, and too many casualties for people to concern themselves with one or another. Though the research and development institution felt the absence of their squad’s lieutenant in the wake of the battle, they were just as busy as the rest of the squads, if not more so.
Through the cleanup, Mayuri had seemed completely unaffected by the loss of Nemu. That didn’t shock most of the members of the SRDI or Squad 12. It would have been more shocking if he had made a big deal out of it. Shinigami aren’t known for being the most emotionally available people out there— one of the side effects of being in a job long enough to see a good number of your comrades and friends get killed— and Captain Kurotsuchi, a man known for turning his own soldiers into test subjects and living bombs, has a reputation for being especially heartless.
Akon had never really bought it. Even if Mayuri wanted to deny to himself that he was shaken up by Nemu’s death, Akon had always known that the captain was far more attached to their seventh Nemuri than he would ever admit out loud or even to himself. Still, their relationship has never been the sort where they would go prying into each other’s emotional lives; leaving the issue alone had seemed like the wisest thing to do, especially after the Captain, no longer burdened by the weight of having to deal with the massive amounts of soul imbalances and other issues plaguing Soul Society after their war, had thrown himself back into the Nemuri Project with renewed vigour.
The way he’s watched the captain take to the role of father once again had managed to convince him that maybe he had actually moved on from that incident, at least enough that he would be able to hear Nemu’s name without reacting strangely.
Akon really should know better by now.
The moment comes and goes quickly, with Mayuri snorting with derision as he goes back to what he was doing a moment ago.
“Sentimental nonsense,” he mutters. This time, Akon knows that he was meant to hear it. “Don’t you have work that you should be doing?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then get to it and stop bothering me.”
Ever used to Mayuri’s poor attitude, Akon doesn’t let it bother him. He’d been meaning to check on the results of one of his fellow researchers as it pertained to his own project anyway, and decides that it’s for the best to give the captain some space after his little slip-up.
His path takes him past where Nemuri is nearly done reconstructing the strange contraption he doesn’t want to even begin to guess the use of. Instinctively, he reaches out towards her, and gives her a pat on the head.
“Keep up the good work,” he tells her, and he sees the girl light up, so much more expressive than her previous counterpart.
“Thank you, lieutenant!” she says at a volume that she really does need to learn how to turn down a little, but hey, she’s young.
She still has plenty of time to learn.
Akon decides to leave Mayuri and Nemuri to whatever their endeavour is and actually do his job as his captain had suggested, but as soon as he steps into the hall, he lets out a deep sigh.
“Some things really never change, do they?”
To say Mayuri is married to his work would be an understatement. His work— if it can even be called that— is the end all and be all reason for his existence.
Not his work as a member of the Gotei 13, no. That is just an unfortunate sacrifice he has to make in the interest of receiving constant funding and materials for his projects. Making a few useful toys and tossing anything their way that might help them to fight Hollows is a small price to pay for the relative freedom he’s allowed to pursue whatever passions might infect him from one moment to the next, even if it means having to put up with his fellow captains more often than he would like.
Mayuri’s personal quarters, while conforming to the same general layout as that of any other captain’s private rooms, feels more like an extension of his lab space. In truth, he had hardly ever used his rooms after a certain point, much preferring to spend as much of his time in the labs as possible, and finding his office more than comfortable enough for the few times that his body simply could not keep up with the demands he was making of it and he needed to either sleep or crash and burn somewhat spectacularly.
That was when his ever-present child had been a fully-grown adult who also had little to no need for sleep, and could go days at a time while keeping up with him without a singular word of complaint. Now, with the eighth in his long line of Nemuris in the picture, he has to be cognisant of her need for rest and a place to do so peacefully.
He recalls what Akon had said to him earlier in the day about ‘missing’ this time, and snorts derisively, even though his current lieutenant and long time friend isn’t around to hear him.
Does he see me as some sort of sentimental idiot? Why would I ever want to look back on a time when I had made less progress?
The notes spread out on the table in front of him are a jumbled mess of disconnected thoughts that keep getting interrupted by thoughts like that, and looking at the words, he hardly knows where they begin and where they end. Of course, something like that is common for someone like him— it’s like a jigsaw puzzle that his brain will have to put together the next day when he actually gets to start on his work instead of just writing down the continuous vomit of thoughts that his brain is churning out at any given moment.
From the other room, he can hear Nemuri bumbling about. She’s probably playing with the massive pile of toys that she’s been spoiled half to death with. His fellow captains, his subordinates in the SRDI, and even some of the people from the living world who seem to think they have any reason to stick their nose into his business have been spoiling Nemuri since day one, and though he at first had tried to put a stop to it, it had quickly become too much of a chore to bother with.
Nemuri is a far more spirited child than her predecessor had been, and at least this way she has an outlet for the energy that he’ll be able to put to good use as she gets older— but which gets in the way more often than not right now.
He snorts again as he remembers the incident in the lab from earlier in the day. Nemuri had insisted that she could carry all of the equipment he needed in one trip, and wouldn’t drop any of it. She had been so insistent that he had given in to her and let her try, expecting her to fail almost immediately.
To the girl’s credit, she had made it almost all the way to their destination before she had dropped everything and had been force to reassemble it all, but a failure was still a failure, no matter how close it came to being a success. At least he hoped it would serve as a teaching moment for her.
Mayuri looks back at the pages spread out in front of him. He taps the bottom of his brush against his lap table in frustration, trying to steer his thoughts away from Nemuri and back to the issue at hand that he had been trying to solve.
The other room goes nearly silent, Nemuri’s little footprints disappearing. Mayuri looks over his shoulder and narrows his eyes at the wall separating the main room from the bedroom where he had banished the girl, telling her to keep out of his hair while he was trying to get his work done, and where she had gleefully retreated with all of her toys.
More silence. Mayuri feels his suspicions growing that the girl is getting into something that she shouldn’t be; children are rarely quiet for long unless they’re getting into trouble. Still, when he debates between getting up to check on her and taking advantage of the prolonged silence to be rid of the distraction, his work wins out in the end— just as it always does.
He has no idea how much time passes before he hears the door between the living space and the bedroom open, and a pair of small feet padding across the tatami floor towards him. All he knows is that it’s gotten darker in the interim.
“Mayuri-sama… What is this?”
Nemuri’s volume is much lower than it usually is, which he’s thankful for it nothing else, in spite of her interrupting him. He turns to see what she’s offering him, wondering if he had left an experiment lying around that he had forgotten about and she had stumbled upon it— but freezes as soon as he sees what she’s holding in her hand.
The red choker in her hand is all too familiar to him, after all.
Mayuri’s hand moves faster than his brain, an impressive enough feat on its own, and snatches the choker from Nemuri’s hands.
“Where did you find that?” he hisses, and Nemuri looks at him with big, wide eyes. There’s no fear in her expression, simply confusion, even though Mayuri can feel his face contorting into a terrifying snarl.
He thought he had gotten rid of all of Nemu’s things after she had fallen in battle to that infernal hand, except things that might prove useful in the future. There was no reason to keep any of it around, after all. He doesn’t believe in clinging to sentimentality, and what reason would there be for him to keep her old clothes?
This trinket must have gotten lost in the bottom of a closer or the back of a drawer, and Nemuri must have unearthed it while digging in places she wasn’t meant to. Mayuri scowls at her.
“Can I have it?” Nemuri asks, still looking at him with wide eyes and completely ignoring the question he had asked her. The audacity catches him off guard, and he doesn’t even scold her for failing to answer his question because he’s that thrown.
“No, you may not have it,” he snaps at her. “Did I give you permission to go through my things? What made you think you could snoop, hm?”
Nemuri still doesn’t answer his questions, but at least this time she has the good sense to look guilty, staring down at her feet with her hands folded behind her back and scraping her foot against the tatami.
With a sigh, Mayuri shakes his head. There’s a moment where he debates just destroying the infernal trinket and removing any temptation the girl might have to dig through his things in the future, but after a moment of hesitation, he decides against it.
Instead he walks over to the simple cabinet where he keeps a mixture of sensitive documents and a myriad of his personal writings behind strict lock and key, tosses the damned thing into one of the drawers, and quite firmly locks it up— even giving it a rattle to ensure that the lock is secure, in spite of having made it himself and knowing full well that it would be.
“No more of that nonsense,” he mutters, and turns back to see Nemu now standing with her little fists tightly clasping the front of her robe as she stares down at the floor.
When she looks up at him, he doesn’t think he could ever find a face that better represents a pout if he spent his next ten-thousand years looking for one.
“Stop looking at me like that,” he commands, feeling snappish and raw, and having no desire to play the role of parent right now. “It’s well past dinner time. Hop to it.”
In spite of the way he says that, he knows he will end up making dinner for both of them, even while Nemuri insists on helping. He once again thinks about the way Akon had told him that he would miss this phase of the eighth Nemuri’s life once it passed, as though he’s some kind of sentimental parent, and snorts.
Why would he miss the part of his experiment’s life cycle where she is constantly causing him trouble and can’t even do any of the things her predecessor used to do for him? It’s purely ridiculous.
“Hm… For dinner, how goes grilled pike sound?” He’s talking mostly to himself, but out of the corner of his eye he can see Nemuri perk up as she follows him into the kitchen.
It’s incredibly rare to get a moment to breathe and take a break when you work for the SRDI, especially so when you’re also the lieutenant of squad 12. As few and far between as the moments may be, Akon has learned to appreciate them when he can get them.
He’s on his way outside for a smoke when he comes across Nemuri.
It seems like Mayuri has gotten tired of her running around at his heels and constantly trying to emulate him, because the girl has been banished to one of the hallways, where other members of the 12th are walking around her as they scurry about attending to their normal duties.
Akon wanders over to her, deciding that a smoke can wait.
“Hey there,” he says. “What are you up to, Nemuri?”
“Hm?” The girl looks up at him, blinking a few times. She had been so absorbed in her scribbling that she hasn’t even noticed someone walking up to her. She probably hasn’t even noticed all of the people walking around her, taking care not to step on her in spite of the fact that they’re all hurrying and she’s very much in the way. “Oh, hello Lieutenant Akon.”
Someone had given Nemuri a set of crayons and some random scrap paper, and Akon feels a surge of déjà vu. It feels like only yesterday that he was watching a young Nemu doing exactly the same thing, scribbling away in the corner, making sense of the world around her in the only way a child knew how.
With Nemu, they had used it as a way of monitoring her progression, both intellectually and developmentally. He had thought about bringing up the matter of doing the same with Nemuri to Mayuri— it had served them well last time and he saw no reason not to— but he hasn’t had the time, and since their last conversation about Nemuri and Nemu a few weeks ago, Akon has decided it’s for the best if he lets sleeping dogs lie.
Nemuri pushes herself up to her knees so she can better survey the drawings that she’s made, with a very serious look on her little face. Most of them are of what he would expect— basic child’s drawings. One of them looks like an orange cat, another one of them looks like a child’s best approximation of one of the buildings of the Seireitei, and a third…
Akon squints at the drawing. Something about it is bothering him, but he can’t quite put his finger on it. It’s a drawing of two simplistic but surprisingly detailed figures. The one on the left is definitely meant to be the captain— he thinks the artistic way Nemuri has represented his face paint by scribbling on his face with a black crayon is very impressive, and he’s definitely not trying to hold back a snort of laughter at the sight of it.
The one on the right, though? He thinks it’s supposed to be Nemuri, but…
“Akon!”
Before he can delve too deeply into that question, the captain sharply barking his name startles him out of it, and he looks over his own shoulder to see Mayuri standing there impatiently, tapping his foot.
“Hey there, captain. Need something?” So much for having a chance to take a break for once. Oh well. It’s probably for the best if he gets back to work, before he starts feeling too idle.
“Help me with this.”
Mayuri doesn’t offer him any other kind of explanation other than to jerk his head towards the door he’s standing in the doorway of, before he disappears back into the room.
Akon rises to his feet, offering Nemuri a ruffle of the hair as he follows Mayuri inside. He doesn’t even have to ask what he needs of him; as Mayuri returns to what he must have been doing just minutes before he walked up to Nemuri, Akon falls into his usual place beside him.
Normally Mayuri likes to work on his own or, in times past, with only Nemu acting as his assistant, knowing that she would be fully aware of his intentions and be able to follow his instructions to the latter, but he’s leaned on Akon a good amount in the past as well, and it’s an easy, silent rhythm for the two of them to fall into. It almost reminds Akon of the years when he had first joined up with the SRDI after Mayuri had taken him out of the Maggot’s Nest, when he had been Mayuri’s only (competent) lab assistant, especially once Kisuke Urahara had been branded a traitor and fled from the Soul Society.
Maybe Mayuri is right about Akon being too sentimental. He finds himself thinking about the past a lot more often these days. Especially the days when it had been the three of them…
“So. Nemuri’s started drawing,” he says, in spite of knowing that Mayuri isn’t the biggest fan of chatter when there’s work to be done. Akon is probably one of the few people who could get away with it. He’s definitely the one able to cross the most boundaries when it comes to the captain, thanks to how long the two of them have known each other; most people wouldn’t even dare to try.
“Hn.” Mayuri makes a non-committal noise, pretending he’s too focused on what he’s doing to be paying attention to Akon’s comments, even if Akon can see the twitch in the corner of his eye that tells him otherwise.
“Want me to start drawing up a progression chart?”
In the days of old, in the days before Nemu had been born and immediately afterwards, you had never seen Mayuri more interested in a subject than in the Nemuri Project. He was willing to drop just about anything in favour of what had, at the time, been his lifelong dream— the creation of an artificial soul reaper virtually indistinguishable from the real thing aside from the fact that every facet of their physicality would be tweaked to exact specifications. Stronger, faster, more intelligent— every genome and every neuron honed to as close to perfection as they could get, although as Mayuri liked to remind everyone, perfection was a fool’s errand for a scientist.
Then Nanago had come along, the first instance to survive long enough to be a truly viable experiment. You couldn’t tell the difference between her and a normal soul child from the outside; she had learned at a pace far advanced from other children, mastering motor skills and language skills far faster than any child her own age had before, but from looks alone she could have been any child Mayuri had picked up at the side of the road.
But she wasn’t just any child. She was the culmination of decades of research and hard work, the kind of blood, sweat, and tears that most people would never find themselves able to devote to anything in their lives.
And she was the captain’s own flesh and blood— his child in every way that mattered, no matter what some people might have thought about that connection between them.
Now, Mayuri’s feigned indifference towards Nemuri’s progression tells Akon more than he probably needs to know. After all, if Mayuri truly were satisfied with the results of Nanago Nemuri, he never would have spent the time and effort needed to make and eighth iteration of the project… And if he has gone that far, why would he suddenly not care about such important results?
The artificial distance he keeps from Nemuri while also treating her far more tenderly than Akon ever saw him with Nemu is completely transparent to him, but Akon can’t just say that, unless he wants to find himself, at best, out of a job.
Considering this is Mayuri he’s talking to, he doesn’t think the best-case scenario is even in the picture.
“You know… The fact that she acts so child-like is a good thing,” Akon says, continuing his train of thought as though Mayuri hadn’t brushed him off a moment ago. “It gives us a good baseline to compare her to other children near her own age. And…”
Akon trails off, trying to weigh the pros and cons of bringing up the past yet again considering the response he got last time.
Mayuri looks at him out of the corner of his eye.
“‘And’?” Mayuri prompts him to finish his sentence, and Akon has two paths ahead of him.
He could take the hint, or he could go ahead with the thing that’s been on his mind all this time and get it off his chest, clear the air a bit, regardless of the consequences.
“It would give us a chance to compare how well she’s developing compared to Nemu.”
Taking a page out of Mayuri’s book, Akon focuses himself entirely on what he’s doing, looking carefully at measurement tools even though he’s not actually sure what he’s supposed to be doing, and waits for Mayuri’s response.
Mayuri takes a breath through his nose. He sounds annoyed.
“Do whatever you want,” he tells him. The message is clear for him to stop there, but Akon feels like if he doesn’t press the issue, then no one ever will.
It’s not easy being the only person Mayuri treats like a human being sometimes, but somebody has got to do it, he supposes.
“Isn’t the point of the Nemuri project to improve incrementally on each subsequent iteration, sir?” He turns to face Mayuri more directly now, the pretense of helping him with his work quickly discarded. “Shouldn’t we be taking as many detailed notes as we can? I feel like we’ve been neglecting that part of the Nemuri Project so far.”
“You seem to be intent on pushing your luck. You should choose your words carefully, Akon.”
Mayuri isn’t usually inclined to give warnings like that. Akon feels like he should be flattered. He also feels like maybe he should quit while he’s ahead, but a stubborn little voice in the back of his mind tells him to press on.
If he were in the habit of having good sense, he never would have ended up in the Maggot’s Nest, and he certainly wouldn’t be a member of the SRDI or Squad 12.
And in the end…
Someone needs to say it.
“It’s okay for you to miss her, Captain. You’re not the only one who does, and no one would think less of you for it.”
Akon already knows the words are a mistake by the time he finishes speaking them, and yet, he still feels the same way. They needed to be said, and there was never anyone else who was going to say them.
Mayuri stiffens up next to him. His shoulders almost form a perfectly straight line, and he stands up straighter than Akon has seen him do in a long time, with a permanent slouch being one of Mayuri’s defining features.
He expects to be barked at, told to mind his own business, maybe issued some kind of punishment for speaking out of turn on a subject that Mayuri has already dismissed out of pocket.
Instead, his captain doesn’t say a word. He simply turns and walks away, leaving behind his own experiment and Akon standing there at the work bench.
Akon follows him, naturally, though he keeps his distance. He doesn’t think the captain wants to be followed, but he wants to see for himself as he walks out of the room, passes Nemuri in the hall, and keeps walking.
Akon doesn’t even know where he’s going. Nemuri looks after him in confusion. He hadn’t told her to follow; he had just left her sitting there in the hallway with her crayons and her pictures.
That confusion quickly turns to upset, and Akon can see her little face pinching with it, so he quickly moves to do as much damage control as he thinks he’s able.
“Sorry, Nemuri,” he says, planting a hand on her head again. “Looks like I made the captain pretty mad.”
“You made him mad?” she asks, looking up at him, her curiosity once again winning out. “Did you say something rude?”
“Hm… Something like that.” Akon lets out a sigh and gives his head a shake. “I reminded him of something he would rather forget about. I’m sure he’ll be back soon.”
If he’s not, Nemuri will make her way to the captain’s quarters and spend her time playing alone, as he’s sure she does often. The captain might be surprised by her energy, but he thinks that’s mostly because his only point of comparison is Nemu.
Compared to most children, Nemuri is as docile as a lamb. Her voice is loud and she has no end to her enthusiasm for running around after the captain and trying to help, but she’s a well-behaved child and intelligent beyond her years.
In a lot of ways, Akon knows that she’s different from Nemu. But in even more ways he can see the similarities. It’s probably just because of the captain’s genes, but still.
It makes him happy, and makes his heart ache, in equal measure.
Nemuri doesn’t look entirely convinced, but she looks down at the scattered drawings on the floor as she gets to her feet. She gathers them up carefully, shoving her crayons into her pockets for safe keeping at the same time.
She starts to run off after Mayuri, and Akon does nothing to stop her. He doesn’t think Mayuri is in the mood to have Nemuri running around after him right now, but he can’t bring himself to keep the two of them apart, either.
After making it halfway down the hallway, Nemuri stops as though she’s forgotten something, then immediately turns around and scurries back over to him.
“Lieutenant Akon! This is for you.”
Fishing out one of the pictures she drew, Nemuri offers it to him. Of course Akon takes it from her, although he’s a little confused as to why it’s being offered to him instead of the captain.
Especially since it’s the drawing of the two of them standing together. Mayuri probably wouldn’t appreciate it, though, so Akon decides to keep it.
“Thanks—”
Akon doesn’t even get a chance to finish a simple thank you before Nemuri is already running off, scattering papers behind her as she goes, very intent on catching up with Mayuri before he gets too far away and she can’t find where he’s come. He shakes his head slightly, and is about to simply tuck the drawing away into his shihakusho when he remembers what he thought before about the drawing.
Holding it out, he takes another close look at it. The captain is still the captain, but the person standing next to him is…
Akon’s eyes widen as something finally clicks in his brain, but he tries to shake it off. No, it couldn’t be that… Could it?
Ah, well. Although he feels a little shaken, he folds up the drawing, tucks it away as he had originally planned, and decides to go back to work.
Even if it is exactly what he thinks it is, there’s nothing he can do about it.
Mayuri and Nemuri are going to have to figure that out for themselves.