"Daddy! Tell me a story! A story! Please, Daddy?" Ikuto grinned down at his daughter who was tucked into his side on the bench they had to the side of their kitchen. They watched Amu, his wife and her mother, pull out cookies from the oven and put a new batch in before he answered the girl's request. This was their tradition, after all, and he liked to do it right, which meant waiting until his wife had taken all of the cookies off of the cookie sheet to cool so she could properly interject when she saw fit. In the tradition, Ikuto would tell the girl a story about her parents as Amu pulled something sweet out of the oven and they waited for it to cool enough for their daughter to eat some. It happened every Saturday afternoon.
While Amu set about putting the last batch onto the last cookie sheet, Ikuto looked at their daughter. It still amazed him how a little girl could look entirely like his wife and entirely like him at the same time. Observing this, he chuckled and swooped the girl up into his arms.
"Well, your mother actually won't remember this story, since she was too young, although I have told it to her enough times; she could probably give you a pretty accurate narrative."
The girl blinked. "Ack-your-aye-tie-vee nerd-a-tie-vee?"
He chuckled again. "Accurate narrative. She could probably tell you the story as well as I can."
"Ohh! But, Daddy, you tell me the stories; Mommy makes sure you tell them the right way! 'Member?"
Ikuto shook his head and beamed at the young girl, then ruffled her hair. "This is the story of how I met your mother."
Hearing his mother and another woman's voice comparing boys and girls, Ikuto turned briefly to face his mother, knowing she was talking about him and his sister, Utau. She smiled gently at him, and motioned for him to approach, continuing her conversation with the woman. The woman was young, and had a disproportionately large stomach, Ikuto observed. Ikuto walked up to his mother, who ran her fingers through his hair, then handed him a brand new orange—green?—stick of chalk.
The woman, one of their neighbors in the apartment complex they had moved into earlier in the week, mentioned to Ikuto that the girl who she pointed out as the one playing with Utau, would soon be a big sister to either a little girl or a little boy, and that she was going to find out within the week which of the two the child would be.
Ikuto looked at the little girl with mild amazement since she didn't seem to care at all, and Ikuto hadn't been sold on Utau until a few months after she was born, then asked if the girl's mother had had to eat a watermelon seed like his mother had had to in order to get his sister inside her belly. She grinned knowingly at his mother, and then his mother, blushing with embarrassment, sent him off.
Obliging, he walked in the direction of his little sister. Ikuto watched as his sister threw a ball to the girl who his mother's new friend had pointed out, her struggle to catch it, drop it, and then run towards the ball which was rolling in his general direction. He picked it up and walked it to the girl. She beamed at him as he handed it to her. "Thank you! I'm Hinamori Amu! You are?"
"Tsukiyomi Ikuto." He gestured towards his sister. "Utau's older brother."
"Nice to meet you! Well, I'm going to go play with Utau-chan some more! Bye-bye Ikuto-nii-san!"
As she walked away, he blinked, and then smiled softly to himself. So that's what his father had meant when he said Utau was adorable: so cute, you instantly adored her. Ikuto had struggled with the word before. His father had called Utau adorable, and when he asked what the word meant, he said it meant cute. When Ikuto asked why his father didn't just say cute, he had said that sometimes, cute just didn't cut it. Shaking his head at his gooey father, but understanding how he had felt, he remembered the chalk in his hand, and walked off of the grass and onto the sidewalk.
He set about working on his masterpiece: a cat playing a violin. His favorite animal meets his favorite activity. As he was finishing the outline for the cat, wishing for a better color then the orange-meets-green his mother had given him, the ball rolled by him again, quickly followed by Amu's chubby legs. Ikuto, on instinct, stood and grabbed the girl out of the street quickly as a car swerved by, honking as it passed. Due to the quickness of the motion, Ikuto had then fallen onto his bottom, pulling Amu, ball in hand, down with him.
All was quiet for a moment, until both women shrieked their respective children's names and darted to the two. Ikuto blinked and looked down at Amu, who blinked and looked up at him. Their eyes met, and then they were torn apart by their mothers, who first inspected their own child before swapping children to inspect.
"That's how I met your mother." His daughter grinned at him. "You know, you're adorable, just like your mother."
"Daddy, how old was mommy?" He shook his head, mildly shocked. Of course she wasn't interested in his compliment, nor was she interested in the fact that her mother was almost flattened like a pancake by a car. Who would be?
He then looked into the young girl's large, honey brown eyes, and did what any father would do. He lied. "She was twenty three, honey."
"Ikuto!" Ikuto was honestly concerned when she hadn't spoken up earlier during the story, nor when he called her adorable a second time after the story was over, but since he hadn't lied before during the story, and she could just pretend to not hear the compliment as their daughter had, he guessed that it made sense that Amu was just now speaking up.
"Yes, Tsukiyomi-sama?" he asked hesitantly.
"Don't lie to our daughter!" she waved a dough covered rubber scrapper at him from the other side of the kitchen. After he sighed to give up, she turned, done with the last of the cookie dough, and began to wash dishes.
"Fine, fine. Let's see… I was eight or nine years old, so… three? Four? I couldn't tell you. Pretty young, though."
"Did you know you were gonna marry Mommy right away?"
He grinned and looked at his wife. She wasn't facing the two, but he could tell she was blushing. "On some level, yeah." She stiffened and bent towards the sink, suddenly scrubbing the aforementioned rubber scrapper with much more zeal then it likely necessitated.
Feeling accomplished, Ikuto began to attack his daughter's face with kisses, content to leave her his share of the cookies once she gave him his share of kisses.