Late and early were relative terms.
To some people eleven sixteen at night was early. To others it was late. To those who spent more time in the air than on the ground early and late meant nothing. Suzuki had seen outran the sun so many times that, eventually, day and night meant nothing. His own internal clock was so confused that he had given up on it completely. Usually he just went to bed when Masami did and woke up when she did as well. It didn't matter if he was tired or wide awake. Night was for sleeping and day was for being productive.
He should have been asleep.
But he couldn't.
Masami had gone to sleep ages ago. He had joined her. He had even put on pajamas like she liked. Sleeping fully dressed was odd to her. To him having a separate set of clothing for sleeping was odd and always had been. He had always preferred to sleep in his day clothes…do he could not recall ever putting up the fuss that Boy did when it was time to change clothes. Daughter was so much easier to deal with. Masami was adept at dealing with both of the children, though, and the bedtime ritual hadn't taken very much time at all. The children were getting older, she had said, and needed her to do less and less for them. They dressed themselves and could be trusted to brush their own teeth and all of the other things necessary to complete the bedtime ritual.
The children were asleep.
But he was not. He should have been asleep. Usually falling asleep was not so difficult after he had been back in Japan for a while…but he had his own bedtime ritual to complete. Well his ritual was watching Masami complete hers. First she removed her makeup and then she brushed out her hair and changed into her sleeping clothes and then covered herself in lotions and potions of all sorts before laying down next to him. While laying down she'd talk to him or ask him to hold her…and he did enjoy those times…and he needed those times to sleep…
She had just laid down, turned her back to him, and went to sleep.
Well he wasn't sure if she had truly been asleep. Her breathing was wrong but she had not responded to him when he tried to speak to her. She may have been ill again….no…Daughter said that she had been much better lately. Well Daughter had confirmed that Son said that she had been much better. She wasn't sleeping all day anymore…which was an improvement…but she was still acting very much out of the ordinary.
Had something changed?
He had been away for far too long. He hadn't intended to be out of Japan for as long as he had. He usually came back after four to six weeks but that had been…too long. Too many upstart espers thinking that they could take all that he had built. Too many idiots thinking that they could win, that they had even the smallest iota of a chance of taking him on, too many idiots taking up far too much of his time. Time that he should have been spending here, with Masami. Her presence was always enjoyable. Even when she was making no sense her presence was enjoyable.
He had chosen her, after all.
Everyone else in life he had wound up with. He was gathering the world's espers. There were so few of them that he could not just pick and choose who he associated with. He took everyone who was loyal…and obviously he was not the best at vetting his followers…he'd have to do something about that. Later. Much later. Right now he had no intention of leaving Japan unless it was absolutely necessary.
He was tired.
But he couldn't sleep.
Which was how he found himself in his current predicament. Sitting on his living room sofa watching a documentary about ancient China in English. His favorite genre was documentary. He liked to learn things, to be productive. He used to like other things, when he was the children's age, but now it was mostly documentary. Maybe some of Masami's historical dramas…not that he had been invited to watch television with her lately.
Masami had been leaving him alone since he got back.
Which was good in the sense that he had been getting a lot of work done but was not good in the sense that…that he…he had…missed her. He hates himself for feeling that way. He's weak when he feels that way. He shouldn't need anyone else. He should be complete on his own. He should not lay there in bed looking over at his wife's back and wishing that she would turn around and prattle on about the house or the children or something like that. He didn't care what.
He did not get lonely.
And he had no reason to miss Masami. She was right there in their bedroom. He could have gotten up off that couch, woke her up, and demanded that she go back to normal…even though she would not have responded well to that at all…but he had the right to ask whatever he wanted of her…but she was not a servant that he could command. She was his wife and there was the assumption of partnership in that. He had chosen her as his wife and he could not behave that way towards her.
Even if he wanted to.
He was not afraid that she would leave. She would not and could not leave. Not that he was keeping her prisoner or anything like that…he just did not think that she had any reason to leave. He continued to provide for her and the children. That was his job and he did it well. He was never cruel to her, either, or even mildly unpleasant. He was always good to her, he listened to her when she spoke and held her when she asked for it and if she wanted to he would gladly have gone to bed with her…
It had been a while.
Which was just plain odd for her. Usually she wanted to on the first night or so when he came back. This time she hadn't even given him any indication that she desired him in that way…which was odd…and also left a pain behind his ribs that he could not identify. Sex was and was not a need. He was not an adolescent, he could control himself now. He had a son already so there was no real need to him to act in such a way, his genes had been passed down already and she did not want to bear him another child anyway, but there was the pair bonding aspect that he missed…
Which made no sense because as a married couple they were already part of a bonded pair.
He never initiated, anyway. He was better than that. He was complete on his own. He was…he had to be. If he was not complete on his own then what was he? Nothing. He was nothing. He could not allow himself to be nothing. He was Suzuki Touichirou and he was not nothing. No one. He was someone. He was-
Tired.
And alone.
Human contact was a need. Maybe him needing someone…it was a quirk of psychology. Humans were social animals after all. There was a saying, it's lonely at the top, and it was. The only person in this world who he allowed to be his equal was being…distant…and it pained him. It pained him but he could not admit that it pained him. What would she think of him, then, if he were to be so weak? She would have wanted nothing to do with him. She hadn't married a weak man. She had married Suzuki Touichirou, the future lord and master of the world.
He missed her.
He exorcised that emotion. He should have been fine being alone. He was whining about nothing. He should have been fine. He was not one of the children. He could stand to be alone. The children could not stand to be alone. They became frightened when they were separated as if they had not been living in this house for their entire lives. The Castle, as they called it. The Fortress would have fit better, or the Mansions, or The Three Mansions Strung Together to Make a Home Worthy of His Family. The children were so strange in the way they saw things. Saw things and named things. They had found a 'Treasure Room' which from what he could gather was one of the storage rooms. He had thought that he would have had more children by now, or that this could have served as something of a base…but no, it was still just the four members of the Suzuki family…
As it had always been.
He so wished for another child.
A female child. Girl children were so much easier to deal with than boy children. Quiet, obedient, capable, and if he had a daughter, a blood daughter, then he could have been one hundred percent sure that the next generation could have been secured. Also he would have had another polite, neat, obedient, and above all else quiet child. Also Daughter could have had a friend. One not made of plastic, of course, but one that she could interact with who was not her brother…or one of the children in her class. He did not want her, or Boy, mixing with non esper children…or any common children honestly. But they did not have the luxury of being surrounded by their true peers…and neither had he in his youth…and that was such a pity.
Such a pity.
He so wished that he could have given them more siblings. Female siblings. Boy was…boy was like three children all in one sometimes. He'd rather have had a house full of Daughters than of Sons…but the whole thing was a moot point. Masami wanted to stop at two children and that was the way that it was going to be. He was not a cruel man, not to her anyway, and he would never make her do anything that she did not want to do. So they were stuck at two children…and only two. He had been looking for others, Masami did not want to make any more with him, and he had turned up with nothing. Children…they so rarely awakened….
And when they did it was never anything close to what Daughter was capable of.
She was a gift, Daughter, a blessing sent to him. A blessing that was meant for him and him alone. A gift from fate that further cemented it in his mind that he was the one true ruler of this world. Why else would something so perfect have been given to him? A child as powerful as he had been at her age…a child who eclipsed his own flesh and blood son…
He was grateful for her.
"Daughter. I know you're there." said Suzuki. He could see her aura. She was standing there, just out of sight. She tended to hover near him. He allowed this. Her presence was unobtrusive.
"Hi dad." Said Daughter. She came, slowly, out from behind the corner. She watched him as she stepped forward. She still kept a respectable distance, though, she did not jump on him like son did. Well, like he used to.
"You're awake?" he asked. He knew that she was awake, he had eyes, but he wanted her to explain why. She nodded but said nothing else. She held her hair down. A nervous gesture. Her hair was not braided so strands of it began to float. Another nervous gesture.
"I couldn't sleep. That's why I'm awake right now." Said Daughter. He watched her and waited for her to say more. She said nothing. She hated wasting time. Hers and his. He really didn't need any more information. She could not sleep. Perhaps she had something weighing on her, too…but the thought was absurd. She was a seven year old girl. What could she have possibly had to weigh on her?
"Join me." Said Suzuki. It was an order, not a request. Her presence was unobtrusive. Calming, too. If they were both awake then there was no reason not to watch television together. She loved television. She and Son watched for hours and hours and hours.
"Yes, dad." Said Daughter. She walked, slowly, to the sofa and sat beside him. The light cast by the television caught on the sparkling things on her nightgown. It was a blue one with that character she liked on the front. The princess or queen or whatever with the cryo-kinetic abilities. She had a fascination with royalty, it seemed, since all the clothing she owned bore the image of a princess or queen. It made sense.
She was a princess after all.
"What show is this?" asked Daughter as she tucked her knees up under her nightgown. She must have been cold. She was hugging her knees to her chest. He didn't feel hot and cold, not like most people, but he had when he had been her age. She must not have learned that trick yet. He reached behind them with his powers and draped the sofa blanket over her. Masami used this a lot, it must have been warm. He made a mental note to have the heating system looked at.
"A documentary about China. Do you speak English yet?" asked Suzuki. He pulled the blanket close around her with his powers. It would do him no good to have her fall ill.
"Thank you…and no, I don't know English. Well I kind of know but not well enough to understand what they're talking about." Said Daughter. Well now that was a pity. English had been his mother tongue as much as Japanese when he had been her age. Well he had only been half Japanese after all. He and Masami spoke English but they so rarely spoke it. They should have spoken it more around the children. Language learning only got more difficult as one aged.
"Here. You can read, yes?" asked Suzuki as he put on the subtitles for her. She nodded.
"Yes. I have the best reading scores in my class. Mom taught me." Said Daughter
"And your other scholastic achievements?" asked Suzuki. He had always been at the top of his class without even trying. School had been such a slough. He could have accomplished so much more had he not been kept in that child warehouse for so long.
"I'm good at everything but math." Said Daughter. Well you couldn't win them all. She was not his child, after all, so she could only be expected to take after him to a certain degree. He had expected better of her though….but that was neither here nor there. What did she need that child prison for? She would go on to do great things with her abilities. Her powers, those were what mattered most in this life.
"You'll learn eventually." Said Suzuki simply. His eyes were on the television, as were hers, but his aura's attention was fully on her. She was pulling her aura in close. She drew it in as she drew in her knees. She was exorcising some sort of strong emotion. Good. She had been taught well. He wondered, though, what it could have been that had her so troubled.
She was a seven year old girl. What could have possibly been on her mind?
"Were you good at math, dad, when you went to school?" asked Daughter. Her question came after a while. Longer than should have been when one had a conversation. Well he thought so, anyway, he was not well versed in the art of conversation.
"I excelled in all subjects. Why do you ask?" asked Suzuki. It felt nice, her taking an interest in him, but she must have had a reason why. He was her father, well he was the man that was raising her, and he supposed that he was her measuring stick for what was and was not normal. That must have been it. She was comparing herself to him in order to see if she was normal. Children were like that.
He had been like that.
He rapidly came to the conclusion, when he was a child, that there was no one else like him in the world. He was different. Then he had come to the conclusion that being different was not a bad thing at all. He was different but in a good way. It didn't matter that he was lonely when he could hold the whole world in the palm of his hand.
"I just wanted to know what you were like when you were my age." Said Daughter
"I don't have many clear memories of being your age." Said Suzuki speaking the truth. The memories became more clear around the ages of seven and eight but he did not have the running record of his youth the Masami had. It made sense considering the fact that nothing eventful had happened to him in his youth. Not until middle school, anyway.
"None at all?" asked Daughter. She was interested in who he was as a person…and it was nice. He was so sick and tired of dealing with cultists and sycophants. Daughter was not one of them. She was at a curious age, that was all. She was trying to see herself in him. He wondered what she would find. There was the argument, nature vs nurture, and he was curious to see which won out with Daughter. She knew herself as his daughter, as Suzuki Shigeko, and her birth family must have been little more than distant memories…if even that.
He wondered who she would become when she came of age.
A smaller Masami?
A smaller him?
Or someone entirely new?
"I remember…I remember being very small and sitting cross legged in front of the television. I remember that I enjoyed collecting laser disks, a physical media storage format that went extinct long before your time, and I remember that I touched one and it shattered….I also remember painstakingly coloring in my manga because I could not stand anything in black and white." Said Suzuki as he searched for some memories. He had been a different person, then. They said that if you were given a boy at seven you would also have the man he would become…and he wondered how much he had changed. He had put aside his childish obsessions; Speed Racer, The Galaxy Express, and all the rest. He had been a bit of a loner…aside from Masami he had never had a single friend in the world…and he had been filled with ambition. His ambitions at seven were to pilot an outer space train, a race car, or a giant robot…his ambitions had gotten far more realistic as time went on….
Was he the same man at forty one as he had been at seven?
And would she be the same woman at…whenever it was that little girls became women…as she had been at seven?
"Oh. I do stuff like that too. I like to collect my movies on disks because that way I can still have them if the internet goes out…and I like to watch TV real close even though it messes with my eyes…and I don't like how manga is in black and white, either. I don't color in my mangas, though, because I get them from the school library. I would if I could though…so I guess that we have stuff in common." Said Daughter
"We do." Said Suzuki. He hadn't known that about her. There was a person there, finally, instead of a collections of needs. She was getting older. He had been aware of the days passing by, he had been there for her birthday celebration after all, but it was hard to reconcile the child sitting next to him with the toddler he had met half a decade ago. What a difference a few years could make.
"Do you like….cats?" asked Daughter
"I enjoy their function as mouse catchers but if you're trying to ask for a pet in some roundabout way the answer is, was, and always shall be a resounding 'no'." said Suzuki. The children had been forever hounding him for a pet. He would never say 'yes' to such a request. He did not like animals in the house plain and simple. Besides, he would have thought that the children would have had their fill of animals at the animal prison where Masami wasted so much of her time.
"I wasn't asking for a pet, I know that we can't have one. I just wanted to know if you liked them…because I like them…and I just wanted to know if we had that in common." Said Daughter. Well that was alright then. She wasn't like son. She knew that 'no' meant 'no' not 'ask me again in ten minutes'.
"Good. You at least know the meaning of the word 'no'." said Suzuki. There was more silence. Her hair was still trying to float away. He wondered why she didn't just tie it back. He said nothing, of course, because one did not criticize a woman's appearance.
"Do you like….do you like candy?" asked Daughter
"No. I cannot stand sweet foods." Said Suzuki. How the children could put so much sugar in their bodies was beyond him. He had tried their sweets, once, and had to immediately brush his teeth afterwards. Such an unpleasant, cloying, sweetness….
"Oh. Do you like…milk?" asked Daughter
"I find it tolerable. Normal milk only, of course, not that strawberry concoction you drink. How you and Boy can stand it I do not know." Said Suzuki
"We like sweet things…but we're different people from you." Said Daughter
"Yes. Yes you are." Said Suzuki. He wondered how much Son would end up taking after him. Right now he just saw a lot of Masami…and not the good parts of her. That child was a trial…such a trial…
"But we also came from you." Said Daughter
"Yes you did." Said Suzuki. He was not going to tell her the truth of her parentage. Ever. Masami was right. She had wanted to keep it a secret and Suzuki, initially, had not understood. That was why Masami was the smartest person on this planet second only to him. Daughter did not need anything or anyone else tugging on her loyalties. She was a Suzuki now by law if not by blood. She did not need to go searching, later on, for the family who abandoned her. She was his now and that was what mattered most of all.
"Are we like you? Am I like you?" asked Daughter
"I see myself in the both of you. I see physical self in Son and my temperament in you, Daughter." Said Suzuki. She really was a lot like him…and he wondered why. He was out of step with the rest of the world, there was no point in deluding himself, and so was she. He wondered if whatever had gone pear shaped in his social development had something to do with his immense power level. Daughter certainly furthered that theory.
But without more espers it would be impossible to know.
"Oh." Said Daughter. And then there was some silence. He wondered if she was out of questions. Children that age were always asking questions in an attempt to try and puzzle out the world around them. Even now in this information age they'd found themselves in. He'd have to get her a phone so she could look up some answers on her own. How heredity worked. That seemed to be the running theme of her questions.
"Hey Dad?" asked Daughter. She was attempting to exorcise more emotions now. He wondered why. For a brief moment he thinks that she's going to confess to some crime. But that's absurd. Daughter was not a malevolent being nor was she an agent of chaos like Son was. Daughter was…unstable…but she would never have knowingly acted against him.
"Daughter?" asked Suzuki. More of her hair began to rise up into the air and the images on the television screen began to go to pixels and he readied himself to lecture her, again, about her lack of control when she managed to find whatever words it was that she had been looking for.
"Do you like me?" asked Daughter. What kind of a question was that?
"Of course I do. Do you think that I would have kept you around if I did not like you?" asked Suzuki. She was a child and acted as a child did. She could not, and he could not believe this, perform a simple act of reasoning. He did not keep things that he did not care for. Therefore he must have cared for her.
"You…you'd get rid of me?" asked Daughter
"If you ever acted against me, yes, but you do not. You are obedient, intelligent, and I find your presence to be unobtrusive. Of course I like you." Said Suzuki. A question so stupid could only have come from the mouth of a child. He could not wait until she grew up.
"Ok…and Sho, too?" asked Daughter
"What about your brother?" asked Suzuki
"Do you like him, too?" asked Daughter. He needed to think about that one. Boy was an agent of chaos molded into the form of a six year old. He was loud and boisterous and annoying….but he was also his son. His only son. A mixture of him and Masami…and he could never have disliked Masami…so he could never have disliked their son.
"Yes." said Suzuki after a moment's thought.
"And….and would you get rid of him, too?" asked Daughter. This required less thought.
"If he were to ever betray me…but I know that neither of my children would ever be capable of such treason." Said Suzuki. Not like the morons he had not vetted properly….no matter, no matter, that was neither here nor there….
"We would never betray you dad. We love you." Said Daughter. He reached over with his aura and smoothed down her hair. He drank up some of that excessive energy, too, while he was at it. She calmed down, it seemed. Good.
"I know you do. I know." Said Suzuki. Love. Such an imprecise word…but they were only children and their vocabularies were still limited. It wasn't a bad word, anyway, because it carried a sense of loyalty with it. Something that had been in short supply lately.
"Um…Dad?" asked Daughter. He exorcised his own emotions, there. He made a mental note that she became talkative at night. Active, like a bat or something. Perhaps children were nocturnal. Perhaps that was why Son kicked up such a fuss come bedtime. He wondered what her latest line of inquiry would be…and he was tempted to order her a phone or a new tablet or something so she could look her questions about heredity and family structures up on her own because it was late and he was tired.
"Yes, Daughter." Said Suzuki keeping his aura and his voice level. He was tempted to order her to go back to bed…but then he would be alone. He does not like that prospect at all. He would rather play twenty questions with her all night than be alone again…
"Do you…do you know how to play Chinese checkers?" asked Daughter
"Yes. Why?" asked Suzuki. He had enjoyed that game in his youth. He had played with his own parents…back then…before the…before he…he exorcises any and all emotions having to do with his late parents.
"Some of the other kids play Chinese checkers with their dads and…and I want to play with you…because you're my dad. I'm not very good but…but I would like us to play together because…because you're my dad." Said Daughter. A simple request and one he could honor. There are emotions there….memories…a cool marble in his hand. Sunlight hitting him in the eyes. Someone touches his head….someone congratulates him for winning….
He exorcises those emotions.
They have no place here.
"Do you have a board?" asked Suzuki. Daughter faced him, her eyes went wide, and her aura shone brightly. They'd work on control tomorrow…or rather during the daytime as the time had surely passed midnight by now…
"Yes." said Daughter
"Good. Go get it." Said Suzuki. He used his powers to clear off the coffee table. Daughter, thankfully, did as she was told and rushed off to her room. She came back just as quickly with a Chinese checker board clutched in her hands.
The time passed quickly after that.