Dad's chair was too big.
It was hard and cold, made of leather and not soft, but she should have been happy that she got to sit in it. She should have been happy that dad had trusted her enough to sit in his chair and help him with his work. He trusted her to be all alone in his office, too, which was more than he trusted anyone else. He had to attend to something, he had said, and Sho got bored and left. She was all alone in dad's chair in his office at his computer answering correspondence of great important.
Which was meant that she was in his email telling people that dad would get back to them if it wasn't something important and clicking the star if it was.
This was dad's work email, he had said, which meant that she had to be professional. He trusted her to sort through his work emails and to tell him what was important and what wasn't. Also she had to tell some people that dad would get back to them which was a lot, actually, more than anyone else was allowed to do. Dad trusted her judgement above everyone else's, he said, and he knew that she would not mess anything up.
It was a lot.
A new email. Some of the Awakened wanted to throw dad a belated birthday party. That wasn't important even though birthday parties were fun. Well she figured that they would be fun, she'd never had a real birthday party before, but that was ok. It made sense, though, that dad wouldn't have wanted a birthday party, belated or otherwise. He hated things like that, things with a lot of people and noise and stuff, and also he said that she was to tell the Awakened that he would not be there unless it was an important work thing. There. That was easy. That was easy and she was fine and she was doing a good job and she needed to do a good job or dad would be mad and when he got mad he would have punished her or maybe even Sho, probably even Sho, and then Sho would have been hurt and that would have been bad and it would have been all her fault and-
Things were floating around her.
She reached behind herself and held her braids down. Her headband had floated off of her head. She held on to her braids, if she let them go then they would float away, and she did not want that to happen. She cared more about her braids than her headband…though she liked that headband. Even though it seemed like dad didn't…and he was already upset that she wore it and if she messed up then he would be even more upset now…and….AND she had lost control of her powers….and it was so hard and-
-another email.
Mob closed the laptop a little too hard. She knew that if she messed up dad would be mad at her…and she was losing control…so she needed a break. Just a short one. She took some deep breaths and tried her best to conceal her feelings. Conceal, don't feel. Power is nothing without control. All of those other things that dad had been telling her for her entire life. She needed….she needed….her eyes landed on her strawberry milk.
She needed milk.
Not plain milk, no, and not strawberry milk either. She needed….she needed Minegishi to share…but they were busy and they didn't share with her that often. They kept on saying that they were trying not to ruin her life and stuff but she didn't see how something that made her feel good could ruin her life. She liked to drink that stuff even if it tasted like burning. It made her powers calm down. They didn't listen, it was like they were asleep, and that was what she needed. She needed her powers to just calm down and….and she needed to get back to work because dad had trusted her to do this for him and she needed to make her dad proud. To make him happy.
That was the most important thing, how dad felt.
Which meant that she had to stop feeling. She had to stop feeling and just…just get rid of everything that she was feeling. There was just so…much. The weight of it. The weight of what dad wanted her to do. He had never asked her to help like this before…but now he did. Her birthday was so close and he said that she was old enough to help him out more…and that meant that she would have more and more to do…and then there would be so many chances for her to mess up…
And dad had been kind of upset lately…more so than normal.
She leaned back in his chair and almost tipped over. In trying to correct herself she ended up sprawled out on the ground next to his desk. She could feel the carpet against her legs. At least she had been all alone and nobody could see how her dress had come up high enough to show her underwear. She sat up and fixed her dress.
Her headband was on the ground next to her.
There. She had stopped using her powers. All it had taken was her falling down on the ground. That was…not good. She was still worried, and now her hair was trying to float again, and she had no idea what she was supposed to do…what she could do. Well she knew what she could do. In sitting up she could see the cabinets on the other side of the room. Sho said that the stuff in those bottles was not juice or cola and it tasted like burning. He also said that he spat it out the second he drank it, which was good because she did not want him to do what she had done, and Mob knew what that meant when something tasted like burning.
She wondered if it would count as stealing.
Or borrowing without asking and never returning. She wondered if it would have been ok if she were to…but dad never said that she could. Also she was a kid and kids were not supposed to drink that stuff. Well normal kids were not supposed to drink that stuff. She was not a normal kid. She didn't go to school and ate whatever she wanted to and didn't have a bedtime and helped her dad with his very important work…so she was not a normal kid. Also family could not steal from family. Food and drinks were communal property. Dad had said so. That wasn't what dad had meant by drinks, maybe, but it was a liquid and it could be drunk. Dad said that if the food was there in their living space then it was for everyone…which was why Sho should not have hit her because she accidentally drank his soda and also she was not supposed to hide food and milk in their room when she didn't want Sho to find and drink it.
So this was ok.
So it would have been ok for her to do what she was thinking of doing. So it was ok for her to get up off the ground, walk across the room, and open dad's glass cabinet. The one with all the pretty bottles in it. He had never told her that she wasn't allowed to touch those pretty bottles. She had always liked them. In most of his office he had pretty bottles full of dark liquids. He said that those were important for social stuff. Sometimes you had to follow social rules in order to benefit yourself, dad had said, which contradicted it when he told her that because they were powerful espers they didn't have to do anything that normal people wanted them to. She was not going to get into that with him, why he sometimes said things that contradicted other things, because then he would have been upset with her. He had been so upset lately…and if she asked him why he had this for social rules after he told them they were above social rules…
He would ask her why she was being like that and then she would have to explain that it had come to her when she was about to drink from the pretty bottles.
This did taste like burning. She took a drink from the one that was mostly full. It was heavy and she, actually, almost dropped it. That would have been bad. Dad had been so upset, before, about how messy things had been in there after Sho and the others had come back from the big food fight. If she made his office smell like this then he would have been upset with her…and he was already pretty upset. She didn't need him to be upset with her or Sho…and now she was worried about him being upset with them….she was worried again.
She took another drink.
It tasted less like burning when she mixed it with something. She wasn't about to go and try to pour this heavy bottle into her milk bottle. Even with her powers she could have made a mess. Also Minegishi said that the clear ones were the best for mixing. Dark colored ones were good for mixing with dark things like cola but clear ones could be mixed with everything. Then they told her to mix the clear stuff into a cup of coffee for them. Then they told her that they were trying really hard not to ruin her life. Then they shared with her….
Adults could be so confusing sometimes.
Life could be so confusing sometimes. Things like why it was ok for adults to do something but not kids. Normal kids. The rules were different for her because she wasn't a normal kid. But still, why did adults have so many different rules for themselves and kids and why did they have to contradict themselves, too. She wanted to ask dad that, he knew everything, but she knew better. She knew not to upset him any more than he already was. It didn't seem fair, though, that everyone always had to worry about upsetting him.
Thinking like that would do her no good.
So what if it was unfair? A lot of things weren't fair. Cats would never know how soft their fur was, boys never got to wear dresses, girls had to have long hair that got knots in it all the times, and moms sometimes ran away and never came back. There were a lot of things in life that were not fair and the best to do, it seemed, was to fix the things that you could and just try your best to work with the things that you couldn't fix. She couldn't fix dad, couldn't make him less upset all the time, but she could at least do her best to make him happy and to help him out as best as she could.
And also not lose control of her powers or get upset. Dad hated that more than anything else in the whole, wide, world.
She put the heavy, pretty, bottle back where it belonged. She reached over to straightened it out so it matched the rest of them. There, that way dad wouldn't notice. She would maybe get in trouble if he noticed. Maybe. Probably. She couldn't be sure. She couldn't be sure of a lot of things…and also the floor felt a little bit uneven.
Too much.
Right. Too much. That had been too much and now she had to…she had to get back to what she had been doing. If dad came in and saw that she wasn't working anymore he would ask her what happened, well he would tell her to explain like he always did, and then she would have to explain and then he would be mad at her…madder than he had been when he left, though he had said that it wasn't at her, but she wasn't about to go and make him all mad at her.
She got back to work.
She walked across the floor, it felt uneven even though she knew that it wasn't, and climbed back into dad's chair. The wheels made it sort of hard, also it was set up for someone as tall as him not someone as short as her, but she climbed up. She could have used her powers to get up there but they weren't listening. Good. That was good. If they weren't listening she could pretend like they weren't even there. Sometimes she even wished…but that was not the thing to wish for. She had powers and they were hers and she couldn't just wish them away.
Dad would not have loved her anymore if she didn't have her powers.
The realization comes to her as she sits in his chair. She can see the whole office from there. The view was better than the view from the floor. She only got a view from up there because she had her powers. Because she was dad's Daughter. Because she was the Prodigy. Dad hadn't loved Sho very much before he got all of his powers. Even before he went through the awakening thing, the awful awakening thing, he'd had powers but they weren't good enough and dad had barely loved him. If she woke up tomorrow just a normal kid with no powers then dad…dad would not have loved her anymore. She wouldn't have gotten to see the view from up or down or anywhere. She would have been all alone.
That would be the worst thing ever, in her opinion, being all alone.
Dads could leave too. If moms could leave then dads could leave. Little brothers could leave, too, and they would once they grew up and inherited the world. Then she would be all on her own…or maybe not. Dad had told her, before, that she was never allowed to leave him. He was allowed to leave her, though, but if he didn't leave her then they could be together forever. That would be…something. She doesn't know. Would it be worse to be alone or with dad? That would be a problem for adult Mob to deal with. Nine, ten soon, Mob didn't have to worry about things like that.
She got back to work.
She opened dad's laptop…and then it did the booting up thing. Oh. She must have closed it too hard. Well it didn't matter, she knew his password, it was mom's birthday. It was always mom's birthday even though he said that mom was a traitor and that they weren't even supposed to so much as talk about her. That wasn't fair. Mob didn't think that it was fair…and she had drank enough that she could think that but not enough that she would say it out loud. Minegishi had said that there was a danger to drinking too much, you lost control of your mouth, and that you had to be careful when you drank. Mob knew that she had drank too much, the floor being uneven was a sign, but she couldn't even imagine telling dad what she really thought. No, that would not have been good at all. There was no point to it, anyway, because dad was the boss of her and everyone else and the entire world, soon, if everything went well.
There was no point in telling dad what she thought. It would just make him mad at her.
She sat back and watched his laptop do it's login thing. She and Sho had a laptop for videogames but she liked tablets better. Touch screens were just so much easier than pointing and clicking and stuff like that. She wondered why dad didn't just get a touch screen laptop. Or maybe it was just one of those things that he didn't care about. She didn't know. She would ask him later. Or not. It all depended on how he felt. She wished that he would just tell her what was wrong but, of course, he wouldn't. He never talked about how he was feeling. Sometimes it was like he didn't have any feelings at all, it seemed like, but she knew that he did. She watched his aura a lot and it did move. Even if he tried to stop it from moving, to stop himself from even feeling anything at all, because if he let himself feel things then he would lose control.
She wondered why he didn't just mix something into his tea or something like that.
She wondered a lot of things about dad. She had spent her whole life wondering things about dad. It didn't matter though, what she wondered, because even if she learned everything about him, read the book that was her dad, it wouldn't make a difference. He would still be unfair and mean, a lot of the time, and understanding why he was the way he was wouldn't make him stop being the way he was. He was who he was and that was just how it was so she just had to get back to work like how she had been before.
She went back to his emails.
She wouldn't snoop around. There was nothing for her to even snoop through. This was all work stuff. She didn't even know if he had anything worth looking through. Not that she did that, look through other people's things, that often. Minegishi said that it wasn't polite at all and one day she was going to end up finding things that she wished that she hadn't found. Kind of like the time she found what was left of their giant sandwich under Sho's bed. It had turned blue and then black and he was trying to see what other colors it would turn. Mob didn't care about what colors it was going to turn, it was gross, and she had to throw it away….that had not been a good fight. She doubted that dad had anything like that to hide from her, though, or that he had anything to hide at all.
She couldn't think of anything that dad had to hide from her.
She knew that there were things that she couldn't know about until she was older. Well Minegishi had a bunch of things that they wouldn't tell her until she was ten so she figured that dad, because he was an adult too, had some stuff that he wasn't planning on telling her until she got older. Adults were always saying that they would tell you things when you were older. Even mom had been like that. She wondered what mom had been waiting to tell her when she got older. It didn't matter, mom was never coming back, and she would never know. It didn't matter. She knew her parents. They wouldn't hide anything big from her…or at least dad wouldn't…because he trusted her. Also in a lot of ways only dad mattered. She only had him as a parent after all. She only had a dad and she had to do what he wanted her to do and she had to make him proud and she had to get back to work and-
-and she wasn't sure what she was looking at.
She had gone back to his email…but this one was different. A lot of these emails were…new? At first she thought that a bunch of people had suddenly decided that they had to talk to dad right then, right that second, but then she checked the dates. How had she missed these? She didn't even remember seeing these and….and then she checked the name at the top. This was and was not dad's email.
This wasn't work stuff.
No internal memos, which were notes that went to everyone, and the emails called dad Suzuki-san, not Suzuki-sama. Not Mr. President. Not President Suzuki. Just Suzuki-san. That was what Fukuda called dad, and a few other upper echelon people, and it just seemed more…familiar. San instead of sama. She was Suzuki-san too. Sometimes Suzuki-sama, some Awakened called her that, but mostly it was Suzuki-san. She would have preferred Mob, just Mob, but the only person who was that close to her was Minegishi. Dad…as far as she had known dad didn't have anyone close to him, closer than her, close enough to talk to him like this…
Some of these just called him Suzuki, plain Suzuki, nothing but Suzuki.
Which was weird. So weird. The most weird…and now Mob was curious. She knew that she was not supposed to be in there looking at dad's private emails, and she knew that this must have been private, but she was also…curious. Like she needed to know even though she really should have just been minding her own business and stuff. She just…she had no idea who would be talking to him like that…or why….and she had no idea what she would do if she found out but…but she was still curious…
She opened the one on top.
It said that there was trouble in the Second Division. Some of the Awakened were upset because a bunch of them didn't make it through the awakening process and the division leader was worried about the lack of loyalty…and also how many recruits that they had lost in the process….but if people had gotten lost then they could have been found again. That was what lost meant. This was in English and Mob spoke very good English, dad had said so, and lost meant the same as missing. Not dead. No, because then…then she would have seen a dead person back at the Eighth Division on that Halloween when she had been eight…and she had not seen someone die and if that person had been dead then dad would have cared…so she had not seen someone die and here lost meant missing and not dead and-
And she would let dad answer that one.
She marked that one as unread, hopefully dad didn't realize that he could check and see what had been opened and what hadn't been even if she had marked them as unread, but he probably didn't know he could do that. He was bad at this kind of stuff, he even had trouble with her tablet even though it was so easy, it was probably because he was so old. He was forty two years old, which was a lot, and when he had been born there hadn't been any computers or tablets or anything. That was good. He wouldn't know that she had snooped through his things…
And she should stop now.
Any minute now she would stop. She could have stopped at any time. Exited out and figured out how to get into dad's work only one. She could have and she would have but then she saw, in the subject line, the kanji that made up mom's name. She hadn't seen those in so long….and she had to click on it. Part of her wanted to think that it was from mom. Part of her wanted it to be mom messaging dad telling him that she's sorry she ran away and that she was coming home and then that she would make sure that everything got back to normal…
Not normal.
The way that it had been before. It had been three years. What was normal, what counted as normal for the Suzuki family, had changed in three years. A lot had changed in three years. She and Sho were taller, Sho kept his hair cut shorter, she kept her bangs cut longer, dad drank more tea instead of coffee, they rarely went back to Japan, they had stopped going to school, nobody gave them baths, nobody read them to sleep, nobody held them and rubbed their backs when they got lonely or sad or scared or-
Did she even want mom to come back?
Of course she wanted her mom to come back! Her powers aren't working right. If they had been right then that would have been an explosion. At worst it was like someone had opened a window. A bunch of stuff moved, papers fluttered to the ground, but aside from that the office was intact. Good. That was good. She didn't know why she had even thought something like that. Of course she wanted her mom to come back. Mom was her mom. Mom loved her and Sho and dad and when she came back then things would go back to the way that they had always been and then they would go back to the Castle and everything would be better and…and she would explain why she had left them in the first place. She would explain where she had been all these years. She would…she would do a lot of explaining…because she had a lot of explaining to do.
Mother. Explain.
There were no explanations to be found in that email. None. It wasn't from mom. It was about mom. The email address that it had been sent from was just a string of numbers. It said that the search for Suzuki Masami was still not turning up anything. Dad was…still looking for mom. Even though he had said so many times that she was a traitor and that they weren't even supposed to talk about her or think about her…he was still looking for her. Not personally, obviously, but he had sent people out there to find mom even though he was always talking about how short staffed Claw was. That meant…she had no idea what that meant. That he wanted her back? That he was planning on punishing her when she did come back? That he cared? That he just cared that someone had betrayed him? Mob had no idea.
She couldn't ask, either.
She could just click the back button and then mark that email as unread. She knew that she should have stopped. She had just found something that she wished that she hadn't. Minegishi had been right, nothing good came from snooping through other people's things, and Mob knew that she needed to stop right that second…but she had already found something that she hadn't wanted to see…so maybe that had been it. Maybe there was nothing else in there that she wasn't supposed to see. Maybe the rest of it was just things that…that wouldn't make her upset.
The next one was from the Seventh Division.
This one was less upsetting. They thought that they'd found Hanazawa, the boy with the gold colored aura, but it had been a false alarm. The division leader, Ishiguro, said sorry a bunch of times. He said that he would swiftly punish his subordinates. He asked for some new Scars. He said that very few of them were working out…and that they kept on fighting with one another…but that was normal for Claw. In Claw it felt like, sometimes, that everyone was just two seconds away from beating each other up for no reason at all. Claw attracted the violent types, dad had said, and they had their uses. Mob didn't think that people had uses, uses were for things like apps and appliances, not people. In her opinion at least…which didn't even add up to a grain of rice for how much dad cared.
Dad loved her.
She decided that she would stop it. She would stop being a snoop and she would get back to what she had been doing. She had go to back to starring things that needed dad's attention and giving polite but firm responses to the Awakened who requested his presence for things that had nothing to do with work. That was what she was supposed to be doing, not this, and she was about to stop when she saw something that she could not ignore.
She knew those kanji.
Touichirou. That was dad's given name. Nobody called him Touichirou. Nobody but mom had ever called him that….that Mob had heard. His parents, of course, must have called him but his given name because they were the ones who had given it to him. This was not from his parents, though, because she doubted that his parents would have emailed him in Korean…and also they might not have even still been alive….and mom didn't speak Korean either. That was why she always put the Japanese subtitles on when she watched her Korean dramas…unless mom had learned Korean in the three years she had been gone for. Three years was enough time to learn a language.
Mob had learned some English, some Mandarin, and some Korean in three years.
She didn't know enough Korean to read this message. It takes her too long to realize that she's reading it the Japanese way, not the Korean way. She picks out some words. Dad's name is in kanji, which is very helpful, and also something about….running away? Disappearing? Something about it being important to come back to Korea. Bussan…it takes her a while to read that word. That's not Seoul. Seoul is where the Claw base is. She knows where they all are, the important ones anyway, and she knows that they had stayed at the one in Seoul last year. Why would someone be telling dad to come to Bussan when the base was in Seoul?
There were a lot more words that she could not read.
Responsibility came up a lot. That word…and also urgent. Something about not being able to do something, too. Needing help. Being ignored. Her Korean was not as good as she had thought that it was. Maybe it had been better when she had actually been living in Korea. She didn't know. All she knew was that this was a complicated language and that maybe, just maybe, she needed help….but who could she even ask? Not dad, obviously, because then she would have to explain. She was a little dizzy and sleepy but even in her state she knew that telling dad that she had been going through his private things was a mad idea.
Who else did she know that spoke Korean?
Minegishi spoke Korean! They spoke Japanese and Mandarin and Cantonese and Korean and Vietnamese and some Russian but the language that Mob needed them to translate was Korean. Mob gets her phone out of her pocket and is halfway through texting them when she realizes that this is a bad idea. So that was the whole 'drinking too much makes you stupid' thing that Minegishi had warned her about. Well they had been right. She had been about to do something so dumb. It was bad enough that Mob had gone through dad's private messages and stuff. It would have been even worse if she had brought another person into this. No, she was not going to involved them or anyone else.
She wished that Google was a better translator.
But it wasn't. She and Sho had played with the translator before and the things that it came up with here just…weird….sometimes. You couldn't trust a robot to do a human's job. Dad had said so. There were human translators in Claw but Mob was not going to involve someone else. She was not going to risk getting anyone else in trouble. She was already in enough trouble…or at least she would be if she got caught…
She decided not to get caught.
She marked the message that she had read as being unread and then she closed out of dad's email. His work but private work stuff and also people called him by his given name and stuff email. She closed his laptop too and sat back in his chair. She didn't care if he found her not working. Better he be a little bit mad at her for not working than very mad at her for reading things that she was not supposed to. Minegishi had been right, nothing good ever came of snooping, absolutely nothing. She wished that she hadn't read that, any of that, because now she had questions…and her head felt foggy enough that she almost wanted to answer them…
But she was not going to find dad and start demanding answers.
Because he would not have wanted to know, would have been mad at her if she told him, how she had even come into those questions in the first place. She should not have been going through his things and she should not have questioned him either. She just….she wanted to go to sleep. Or to rest. Or to just…be still for a while. To be still and not have to worry or think or…or anything.
Dad's chair was big and cold and hard but it would have been worse.