Archive of Our Own

The oldest child only managed to survive for a week. She was born, tiny and pink, struggling to even draw breath to her lungs. She’d only been held by her mother once before she was rushed off toward the ICU, hooked into a dozen machines and monitors that only benefitted her by tracking her last breath.

The second child was born brain dead. For the short span of time he was alive he laid completely still in the bassinet, eyes staring glassily at the ceiling until his heart slowed to a stop. His mother had rested her hand on the edge of it, too weak to do much aside from attempting to cradle her son’s head as long as she could.

The third child was born after so much frantic preparation that the mother was nearly crowded out of her own hospital bed by nurses and doctors. They had been relieved initially when he had emerged yelling at the top of his lungs, something neither of the previous babies had been capable of. He’d screamed even as his mother had hugged his tiny, squalling face to her chest and murmured prayers that he’d live longer than his siblings. In a way he did, making it to two weeks before they’d discovered the hole in his heart.

The fourth child didn’t even live long enough to take a breath.

The fifth child was born crying, but alive. He blinked his large bright eyes under the shine of the fluorescent lights above him, and his mother had known in that moment that he was going to be the one to make it, even if the doctors and nurses hadn’t been optimistic. She tiredly presses a bloodstained kiss along with her last breath to his forehead.

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t bring any of you home. I love you, I love all of you.’

His father hadn’t even been present for the last birth, unwilling to see another one of his offspring die and unwittingly missing his wife’s final moments in the process. The child’s name had followed the trend of his four siblings before him, his father having given up on naming them anything meaningful after so many losses. He is born with a gravestone sitting in the family cemetery waiting for him, ready to be carved.

But then Yonji lives.

Yonji grows quickly into a cheerful giggling baby and then a curious toddler. His nannies have their hands full keeping him out of trouble climbing the furniture and getting too close to open windows or getting lost in the woods chasing butterflies. He finds a love for the outdoors, running through the fields, splashing through the nearby creek, and climbing trees in the woods. He screams and laughs and smiles like any other child, an endless ball of energy seemingly determined to make everyone around him grin as wide as he does.

For the first few years of his life he notices the house staff around him watching him closely. They look at him strangely, in a way he can’t quite comprehend, like they are waiting for something bad to happen to him. He wonders if it’s because he’s done something wrong, something bad, but they always laugh it off when he asks. There’s a tinge of sadness to it. He wonders if it has something to do with why his father never spends time with him, or even looks at him, or why no one likes to speak about his mother.

He’s four then, not even old enough to start school, but he’s long since known that his mother was ‘dead’. He’s still not fully sure what that means, but his nanny had patiently explained to him that sometimes people just… stop. They go still and quiet and they can’t do anything anymore. She’d faltered a bit in her explanation, not certain how to approach the topic with him, but he’d understood what she’d been trying to say.

One day when he’d been exploring the woods he’d found a baby bird that had fallen from its nest. It had look so strange amongst the dead leaves around it, a ball of gray-yellow fluff that had stuck out like a sore thumb next to its dreary surroundings. Yonji had scooped it up then, intent on returning it to its nest, but the chick had done nothing once he had done so.

It didn’t chirp as its panicked siblings had. It didn’t fluff up its feathers or try to scramble away from him like so many other birds he’d seen did. It had just…lain there. Still. Eyes closed and body crumpled. Yonji had frowned then, wondering if he’d somehow picked it up wrong or managed to hurt it without meaning to.

When he’d run to his nanny on the porch afterwards, eyes watering and voice wobbly that he’d somehow hurt an animal, she’d knelt down and hugged him.

“It was already gone, love,” she had said then.

“Gone?” Yonji asked.

“Do you remember when I told you what death was?” She asked.

Yoni’s face had screwed up. “It’s when people… stop moving?”

“Sort of,” she says, “They don’t eat or breathe or sleep. It’s the same with any living thing.”

“So the bird…” he’d said slowly, “Is like Mama?”

She’d sighed and hugged him tighter. “Yes, baby.”

“It won’t come back?”

“No.”

“That’s…” Yonji had felt a deep wave of some sort of emotion he couldn’t put a name to. “Sad. I don’t want them to be dead.”

“I don’t want them to be either,” she’d sighed, letting him go. “But we don’t get to choose when we die. It just happens.”

“Can someone stop being dead?” Yonji asked.

“No, baby,” She’d ruffled his hair then. “When you die you can’t come back.”

The idea of ‘death’ makes Yonji sad for a while, but eventually he forgets about it in the way that kids do. He has more important things to worry about, like finding interesting bugs or seeing how high he can go on the old tire swing one of the kind groundskeepers had hung up for him. For nearly a year he’s able to get by without thinking too much about death, that is until his father drags him out on his birthday to see his mother’s gravestone.

He asks at lunch later that day about the headstones that stand next to his mother’s grave. He’d noticed them when he’d visited his mother, four flat marble slabs that had lain in the grass in small, even spaces. Yonji had glanced over them eyes wide as he read the names carved into them.

Reiju Vinsmoke. Ichiji Vinsmoke. Niji Vinsmoke. Sanji Vinsmoke.

There was an uneven rectangular patch of shorter grass next to Sanji’s on the end, like something had once stood there but had been moved. He’d walked over toward the graves while his father had been distracted and traced his fingers over the names one letter at a time. The echoes of his nanny teaching him how to count ran through his head.

Zero, one, two, three…

“Yonji,” he mutters, staring at the blank plot next to Sanji’s. His brow had furrowed. Then did that mean… were these his…?

“Yonji,” his father had snapped. Yonji had jolted away from Sanji’s grave then, hurrying back to his father’s side. This was the one time of year his father actually deigned to acknowledge his presence. He wasn’t going to waste it.

Yonji spends the rest of the time in the cemetery sneaking glances at the four other graves, half formed questions swirling through his head. He wonders about them later that night as he’s soaking in the bathtub and later still when he climbs under the covers. He wonders about them as he wakes up the next morning and tugs on his clothes. He wonders about them as he sits at the breakfast table and sees his father disappear into his office like he does every day.

“Miss Époni?” Yonji finally asks as his nanny lays out his lunch on the picnic blanket.

“Yes, honey?” She smiles as she hands him a ham and cheese sandwich. “Don’t forget to eat your fruit today.”

“Uh huh,” Yonji nods agreeable, “Who are Reiju, Ichiji, Niji, and Sanji?” He marvels at how the color seems to immediately drain from his nanny’s face, turning her skin pale and papery.

“W-Where did you-?” She sputters, glancing behind them in the direction of the cemetery. She sighs then. “Did you see their graves yesterday?”

“Mhm,” Yonji says around a bite of sandwich.

“I suppose I should have known you would ask eventually,” Époni says. She settles back down on the blanket next to Yonji and draws him close.

She tells him then about all his siblings, the four children who never lived long enough for Yonji to ever meet. She tells him about the oldest girl, tiny and pink, the next who was so silent they hadn’t even known he’d slipped away until the heart monitors announced it, the boy that had screamed and wailed nearly every second he’d been alive, and the boy who had been so weak he hadn’t even been able to draw a breath. Époni seems pained to tell him about the other children, voice shaking and eyes watering at the edges, but Yonji is captivated by her words.

He’d had four siblings. Sure, he’d never known them, but he hadn’t been born into this family alone. He had people related to him other than the man who locked himself in his office for hours every day and refused to look at him with anything other than disappointment. He had a whole family, even if they were buried in the dirt.

When Époni finishes her story she dabs at her eyes. “I hope I didn’t upset you too much, little one.”

Yonji beams at her. “Nope!”

It becomes a fixation after that. Yonji spends his days dreaming about his mother and four other siblings. What would that have been like if they’d had the chance to grow up? Would they have looked like him? Would they have played with him? Yonji had seen other children in the neighborhood playing with their own siblings - running down the streets, tossing balls back and forth, and climbing trees together. He used to watch them enviously, wishing he had other kids in his own family to play with.

But now he knows he did! Or he could have, if death hadn’t taken them.

He goes out to the cemetery more often now without his father or nanny accompanying him, and he spends hours sitting next to the gravestones. He traces the letters of each one slowly and repetitively, and he tells them all about his day and the adventures he’s gone on. There’s never any response from the warm stone under his fingertips, but he feels better just talking to them.

Eventually he starts to think about what they might have been like. He doodles them with his crayons when he’s drawing.

Reiju, he’d been told, had been the oldest and was born a bright pink color. He gives her bright pink hair and wears the crayon down to the nub making big swooping swirls on the ends. He surrounds her with the pink butterflies that like to flit around the flowers and graves in the cemetery and gives her a pretty pink dress. She looks like she’d be a quiet but responsible older sister. He wishes she was there to look out for him.

He uses red for Ichiji and draws him with the blank expression he remembers Époni describing. He looks like he’s frowning on the paper no matter how much Yonji tries to fix his mouth. Eventually he gives up and draws the other with spiky red hair like the characters in the cartoons his nanny lets him watch on the weekends. Yonji’s sure Ichiji wouldn’t be as unfriendly as he’s drawn him. Maybe he’d like the cartoons that Yonji likes, or he’d be smart enough to know the names all the bugs Yonji sees outside.

Niji is drawn in blue, loud and angry. Every time Yonji tries to draw him, he’s jumping and yelling like he can’t sit still. Yonji thinks it’d probably be fun to climb trees with him or race him to the creek. He imagines sunlit afternoons where they splash around in the water and see who can skip rocks out the farthest.

Sanji… he’s not really sure how to draw Sanji. A tiny wilting boy, shrinking away from his siblings. It’s almost like he doesn’t want to even stay on the same page, crowded in at the corners. Yonji tries to draw him bigger, draw him happier, but not even using his yellow crayon makes Sanji look brighter. He’ll just have to protect him then, Yonji decides, and he draws his own green figure holding the smaller’s hand.

His mother-

Yonji draws his mother in the background of all the pictures smiling at her children, basing her appearance on the few photographs of her there still are around the house. From the many stories of her he’s gotten from Époni it sounds like his mother was always smiling. He thinks it looks right on her face, along with the wavy golden hair and bright blue eyes. Just looking at her makes Yonji wonder what it might have been like to grow up with her in his life.

He realizes later that he’d never drawn his father in any of his pictures. He picks up his crayons, ready to fix them, only to frown and realize there’s no space for his father left on the paper. He shrugs. Well, it’s not like his father came out of the office enough to be in them anyway.

Yonji draws his family more and more, and he ignores the concerned looks Époni sends him. She’s tried to gently talk to him once or twice about how his mother and siblings have long since passed on, but Yonji just says that he knows and keeps drawing them. In the end Époni gives up and writes it off as some sort of quirk he’ll hopefully grow out of. She does try and keep him from going to the cemetery as often, which means Yonji just sneaks out in the later hours when his nanny is distracted with cooking dinner.

The graves never change from one visit to the next, but Yonji likes to think that they feel different when he goes out there alone. He can almost imagine his mother and siblings with him as he sits amongst the headstones and speaks to them. He tells them more and more about his life and thinks that they might be listening.

One day he sighs and says, “I wish you all could have been here instead of Father. He just sits in his office all the time and doesn’t talk to me.”

The graves, of course, remain silent. Eventually Yonji stands up and dusts off his shorts before heading back inside.

The groundskeeper notices it first. He’s finishing up his shift, putting his tools back in the garden shed, when he hears what sounds like a high pitched crying noise. He pauses and strains his ears, but the crying doesn’t stop. He glances at the sky to see it’s rapidly darkening to a burnt orange and resolves to check out the noise before it becomes too dark to see.

He follows the sound to the small cemetery, wondering if it’s being made by an injured animal or, god forbid, some horribly lost neighborhood child. When he arrives at the cemetery he sees… nothing. He glances around peeking over the headstones and walking towards the edges to see if it might be coming from something in the woods, but they appear equally empty.

The sounds don’t stop though.

If anything they get louder as he gets closer to the graves. The hairs on the back of his neck stand on end as he peers down at the four marble slabs. He could swear the sound is coming from deep within the dirt. Then, just as he’s nearly standing on top of them, the noise stops.

He swallows hard, waiting for a few long minutes with his heart in his throat, but they don’t start up again. Perhaps his daughter was right and his hearing really was going in his old age. Tinnitus, maybe, or some kind of auditory hallucination. He’d have to speak with his doctor he thinks, walking out of the cemetery and back toward his car.

Despite his rationalizations he can’t help but shoot the tiny graveyard a nervous look over his shoulder in the rearview mirror.

It doesn’t end there.

More crying is heard by more of the staff coming from the graveyard. The distant sound of a lullaby emanates from Yonji’s room long after he’s fallen asleep. The television flickers between channels without warning. The stove turns on when no one is watching. Tiny hand prints begin to show up on the wall though Yonji swears up and down that he didn’t make them.

One by one the house’s staff begin to leave. No amount of offered pay increases stop them as the strange phenomena pile up. Food disappears, mysterious stains show up on clothing and tablecloths, there’s the sound of children’s laughter and footsteps that echoes through the hallways. It’s enough to drive even loyal Époni, who had remained with the family for decades at that point, to take an extended leave to recover in her sister’s house in the countryside.

She’d knelt down next to Yonji the day she’d left and hugged him tight before making him promise to be a good boy in her absence. Yonji had promised and waved to her as her old car pulled out of the driveway.

And then it had just been him in his father.

His father hadn’t changed at all since the strange happenings had begun. He still locked himself away in his office in the mornings and didn’t come out until late in the evenings. If anything, he treated Yonji even more brusquely, not even looking at him when Yonji would call out to him. Yonji wonders if his father thinks he’s the reason all the strange things have been happening lately, if he blames him for it like he blames Yonji for his mother’s death.

The bright side is that now no one stops Yonji from going out to the graveyard and he can sit with his mother and siblings for as long as he pleases. He can still trace the letters of their headstones and tell them about his day. Only now sometimes he cries and whispers to them that he wishes they were here since the house is too big and too quiet and he doesn’t know how to cook like Époni did so he’s been eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for three days now and they’re starting to make his stomach hurt.

The graves still don’t respond, but Yonji feels better after crying all his tears out. He stands to leave once the chill of the evening begins to set in and he tells the graves he loves them as he always does before he heads back inside.

As he curls up in his bed to sleep that night he dreams about a home with a family that says they love him back.

The next morning Yonji wakes to the scent and sound of frying bacon. He jerks upright in bed, stomach growling. He hasn’t had bacon in days, mostly because he’d never been allowed to use the stove before and he’d never been able to reach the knobs. He clutches his stomach and swallows the saliva pooling in his mouth as he glances toward the door.

Had Époni returned from her vacation early?

Either way, Yonji was never one to look a gift horse in the mouth. He throws back his bed covers and races down the hall, a smile blossoming across his face. “Miss Époni, I-!”

He freezes in the doorway of the kitchen.

There, standing at the stove, is an unfamiliar woman with long blonde hair. She wears a bright blue dress and has one of his mother’s aprons, a white frilly one with embroidered flowers, tied around her waist. She turns at the sound of his voice and Yonji gapes as she smiles at him.

“Good morning, Yonji!” She says brightly, turning off the stove as she addresses him.

“I- Who are you?” Yonji asks, shrinking back from the woman.

Her lips purse and her shining blue eyes turn sad. Strangely, Yonji feels the urge to apologize to her, even if he’s not sure what she’s doing in his house. “I’m your mother, sweetheart!”

“My Mama is dead,” Yonji says bluntly, because if there’s one thing he does know about his mother for sure it’s that she’s been buried in the cemetery and isn’t coming back.

The woman sighs. “No, dear, I’m not. I promise you I’m alive, see?”

And, well, she really does look like the pictures Yonji’s seen of her hanging on the walls and inside the photo albums Époni had given him. She has the same long blonde hair, same bright blue eyes, and same soft smile that for so long Yonji had wished had been aimed at him. She kneels down and offers a hand out to Yonji. Yonji takes a tentative step forward, closer and closer to the woman. She continues to wait patiently, smiling wider as he finally takes her hand.

She feels real, warm calloused skin under his fingers. It’s nothing like the cold marble stone he’s come to associate with his mother. She laughs and takes his hands in hers, tracing over his own fingers.

“…Mama?” He finally says.

She beams wider than before. “That’s right, sweetheart!”

“How…how are you alive?” Yonji asks, “Did Époni lie about you being dead?”

“Oh, no dear,” his mother sighs, “She was just… a little mistaken.”

“Oh,” Yonji says, and then perks up, “We should tell Father! He was so sad and angry since you died!” He turns toward his father’s office, but his mother stops him with a hand on his shoulder.

“I’ve already said hello to your father, sweetheart,” she says reassuringly, “All you need to worry about now is having breakfast.”

Yonji’s stomach growls again, as if on cue. “I’m hungry.”

She laughs, and it sounds exactly as Yonji had always imagined it. “Go sit down with your siblings and I’ll bring it to you.”

Yonji blinks. “Siblings…?”

He turns toward the table and gasps as he sees four other kids, three boys and one girl, sitting around the dining table. It’s a riot of color, each of them sporting hair as bright as Yonji’s own green strands, but different shades of red, pink, blue and yellow. The hair is different, but they all have the same shade of blue eyes and distinctive eyebrows as he does.

They all look over at him as stares back with trepidation, silently regarding each other, before the blue one breaks out into a grin. “Yonji’s the last one up!”

“As usual,” the pink haired girl comments.

“You shouldn’t sleep in too late,” the red haired one says, “It’s bad for you.”

“Sit down so we can eat!” The blue one says, gesturing impatiently to one of the empty chairs. 

“I don’t-“ Yonji pauses. “Reiju, Ichiji, Niji, and Sanji?”

“What, did you forget our names overnight or something?” Niji, it has to be Niji, laughs.

“But you- you’re all-“ his eyes dart toward the window. He can still see the neat row of headstones sitting outside.

“We’re like Mama,” The red one, Ichiji he thinks, says.

“You’re alive?” Yonji says in disbelief.

“And we’re hungry,” Niji complains.

The yellow one, Sanji, squirms in his seat. “He might be confused. I would be.”

“He can be confused after we eat,” Niji says.

They sound real, they look real. They’re sitting at the dining table as if they’d always done so, like they hadn’t just suddenly shown up in his life that morning. And strangely a small part of Yonji wants to believe that’s been the case, that he hasn’t lived his whole life alone with only his nanny and the house staff for company.

He could have a family.

Yonji glances up at his mother again, and she nods encouragingly at him. “Go ahead. I’ll have breakfast ready soon.” She stands back up and turns back to the stove, turning the burner back on.

Yonji turns back to the table, looking at all his siblings(?). He takes a step toward the table, feeling as if he were in a dream. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s dreamed of something like this, of eating with the family he’d only heard stories about.

Was this all real?

“Finally!” Niji sighs as Yonji boosts himself into a chair between Ichiji and Sanji.

“You need to learn patience,” Reiju says primly, then scowls when Niji sticks his tongue out at her. “Mama, Niji’s being mean again!”

“Niji,” their mother reprimands, not looking away from the stove.

“I’m not! Reiju’s lying!”

“I’m not lying!”

“Yes, you are!”

“Am not!”

“Am too!”

“Am not-“

“Stop arguing,” Ichiji cuts in, “It’s annoying.” Reiju and Niji whirl on him.

“You’re annoying!” Reiju snaps.

“And boring!” Niji adds.

“Uh, um, guys,” Sanji tries to interject.

“See, you even made Sanji upset!” Reiju says.

“Guys-“

“I did not, it was you two arguing.”

“Guys-“

“It was not!”

“Are we starting this again?”

“Guys!” Sanji finally says, loud enough to get the table’s attention. The other three spin to look at him.

“What?!” Niji snaps, making Sanji wilt back in his chair.

“I-I just,” Sanji looks to Yonji for help.

Abruptly Yonji is reminded of when he’d drawn the other, a tiny yellow figure in the corner of all his pictures that he’d always wanted to protect.

“You’re all scaring Sanji by arguing,” Yonji says. “Stop it!”

His siblings all grumble but seem to actually listen to him.

“Well, now that that’s settled,” his mother’s voice says, “How about breakfast?”

A plate of pancakes and bacon smothered in syrup descends in front of Yonji. The golden pancakes are sprinkled with chocolate chips and topped with whipped cream and sliced bananas. The bacon is perfectly crispy, just the way he always likes it.

His eyes widen at the spread, shining and perfect like something out of the ads he always saw on TV. He looks up at his mother with wide eyes. “You’re better at cooking than Époni!”

She laughs. “Thank you, dear. I’ve gotten a little rusty, so I hope it all tastes good!”

“It will!” Yonji’s sure of it, picking up his fork and taking his first bite with gusto.

It tastes just as amazing as he imagined, the pancakes fluffy and sweet and the bacon crunchy and flavorful. He devours his first pancake so fast he nearly chokes on it, coughing a few times until Sanji pounds him on the back.

“Slow down,” Reiju says from across the table.

He looks up at her sheepishly. “Sorry.”

“She’s right, you don’t want to choke,” his mother adds.

“That’d be a stupid way to die,” Niji laughs. “Death by pancake!”

Ichiji snorts. “We’d have to put that on your tombstone.”

“Hey!” Yonji pouts.

Then he notices something strange. Instead of pancakes and bacon on the rest of his family’s plates, he see what looks like… meat. Uncooked meat. The kind of meat Époni had always warned him about eating because it could make him sick.

“You shouldn’t eat raw meat,” Yonji says, parroting his nanny’s words, “Époni told me it makes you feel sick.” He frowns. He definitely doesn’t want his mother and siblings to get sick, especially not since they just showed back up again.

“I’ve prepared it a special way so we won’t get sick,” his mother says, “Don’t worry, sweetheart.”

And there’s something off when she says that, something Yonji picks up on but can’t quite enunciate. It’s like for half a second the light in her eyes dims slightly. It sends an odd shiver down his spine.

“Can… I have some then?” He glances at Sanji’s plate.

His brother’s eyes widen. “N-no!” Sanji blurts, jerking his plate away. “I mean- you shouldn’t-“

“It’s special food for us,” Ichiji says smoothly, “You wouldn’t like this.”
Yonji pouts. “How would I know I don’t like it if I haven’t tried it?”

There’s an awkward silence around the table as his family (they are his family, right?) exchange glances. Yonji feels uncomfortably like there’s some kind of secret he’s not in on. Then again, maybe this whole scene is wrong. His family is supposed to be dead. They can’t be here. They shouldn’t be here. They-

“Hey!” Niji’s loud voice snaps Yonji out of his thoughts. He looks up to see the other’s panicked expression. “Whatever you were thinking, knock it off!”

Yonji jolts in his seat. “What I was thinking…?”

“Yeah, stop it!” Niji huffs.

His mother sighs. “Yonji, I know this is probably hard for you to accept, but we really are alive and here. We just… need to eat special food to stay here. But the food we eat could make you sick, so we want to keep you safe. Do you understand?”

“I…” Yonji looks around uncertainly.

“You want us to be here, right?” Reiju prompts.

“Yes!” Yonji replies instantly, because above all he wants them to be here. “I do!”

He wants them to be here so desperately his heart aches at the thought of them leaving as suddenly as they came. It’s almost more painful to have this glimpse of the family he could have had and then lose it than to have never known it in the first place.

“Then you have to be okay with us being a little… different sometimes,” Ichiji says.

“Different?”

“Just in what we eat,” his mother says. “Everything else is the same. We’re all still your family.”

Yonji feels then like he’s sitting at a crossroads. On one hand he sees the family he’s always dreamt of. On the other is this underlying niggling doubt that something is wrong. Something is off with this picture, with these people who sit around him now. Maybe it’s how their skin is just a shade or two paler than it should be. Maybe it’s how their eyes are just a little too glassy to feel alive. Maybe it’s in how sometimes the sunlight catches them and they look a little too translucent.

But then…

Then what? He goes back to it just being him and his father? He goes back to being alone in his too big house? He goes back to talking to gravestones and coloring the family he wants in silence?

Yonji makes his decision.

“Okay.”

“Okay?” His mother asks.

“Yeah, you’re my family,” Yonji says, “I trust you.”

His mother smiles then. “Thank you, Yonji. I promise, we’ll all be there for you from now on.”

Yonji glances at the closed office door. “And Father? He’s okay with you all staying?”

His mother blinks. “Oh, I don’t think your Father will try and stop us. Actually, how would you like to move to the city, Yonji?”

Yonji’s eyes widen. “The city?”

“Yes, I’ve been thinking it would be best for all of us,” his mother says, “A fresh start for our new family! Of course, you’ll have more places to play and visit and you can make more friends. There’ll be stores, arcades, the aquarium and zoo, and,” she pauses, “All the food you can eat!”

“I…”

For the longest time Yonji’s only known his tiny neighborhood and the woods behind it. His father had been staunchly against trips to the city even when Yonji had begged for his nanny to just take him with her on a short shopping trip. As much as he’d dreamed of a family, he’d also dreamed about finally getting to leave his house and see what else the world had to offer.

“Won’t Father be mad?”

“Nope!” His mother says cheerfully, “I’ve already gotten him to agree, though he wants to stay here.”

And that sounds about right to Yonji. His father rarely left the study for as long as he’s known him. He’s not sure he’d want the man being around his siblings or mother anyway if he’d just end up looking at them with the same narrow-eyed disgust he always looked at Yonji with.

“It’s really okay?” He says, hope creeping into his voice.

“It’s really okay,” his mother says.

Yonji beams. “I want to go to the city!”

“Great!” She claps her hands, “The rest of you can help him pack after breakfast!”

“Aw, but I wanted to go outside!” Niji whines.

“You can do that later,” she says patiently.

“But Mooooooommmmm-“

“Niji,” Ichiji says, “Stop being a baby.”

“I’m not being a baby!”

“Yes, you are!” Reiju laughs, “A whiny, stinky little baby!”

“I am not!”

“Reiju, don’t call your brother stinky.”

“Sorry, Mama.”

Yonji beams as the table dissolves into chaos and goes back to eating his delicious breakfast. Even beyond having siblings to climb trees and go to the creek with, this sort of meal time is something he’d always wanted.

“Hey,” Sanji whispers to Yonji later when they’re putting their plates in the sink, “I’m glad you’re going to be our brother.”

Yonji blinks and then smiles. “Me too! I always wanted you all to be here! I thought… I thought I was going to have to be alone forever.”

Sanji smiles, small but genuine. “You don’t have to worry about losing us again. As long as you keep loving us, we’ll always be here for you.”