At some point during the night Daughter had turned into an octopus.

The time on the alarm clock said five fifteen in the morning. He didn't have to be awake until six. He had two options. He could either close his eyes and go back to sleep for the next forty five minutes or he could get up early and leave the warmth and comfort of his bed. Normally he would have chosen the first option…but this was not normal. This was not normal by a long shot.

Daughter was holding onto him.

She was asleep. He watched her face and he watched her aura. She was still asleep and he never would have expected her to be anything other than asleep. She was tired. She had a right to be tired, it was five in the morning, and they had been up late marathon watching that NHK series about Japanese life and culture. It was always useful to see which of Japan's cultural exports were most profitable. It was also always interesting to see what fascinated the foreigners. He may have carried on a bit too late into the night. He was still feeling tired.

But he could not go back to sleep.

She was clinging to his side. That was what had woken him up, the warmth. The warmth and the fact that his side was pinned down under her weight. Not that he couldn't have moved her easily, she was only ten years old, and it would have been so easy to move her…but he wasn't going to. Not when she was this deeply asleep. She was smaller and she needed her sleep. If he moved her she would have woken up and he did not want that.

Which left him at an impasse.

He tried to move his arm away. Slowly, very slowly, so as not to jostle her…but that just made her cling to him harder. Her head was resting near to him and her his left arm was wrapped in her arms. This was his fault. He had been so tired when he went to sleep that he had forgotten to turn his back to her. He had slept on his stomach and now she was clinging to him. This was…this was new and also not new. She used to do this when she had been a small child. Cling to him like this. But she was in no way a small child anymore. She was clinging to him for comfort…and she should not have needed comfort.

She should not have needed him or anyone.

But she did need him and….and there were such conflicting feelings there. She needed him and he was her father. His job was to protect and provide for her. He could do that. His job was also to teach her how to become an adult. She could not be clinging to anyone like this when she was an adult. She shouldn't have needed anyone…not even him…when she became an adult.

He doesn't know how to feel about that.

Her place is by his side. She will stay in her place. Every day he wrestles with this. He needs her by his side and he should not need anyone. Every single day he has this exact same thought. Then the versions of himself in his mind fight it out. There is one version of him who says that she is making them weak. The other version says that they have every right to keep her by their side because she is their Daughter. She is not their Daughter by blood but she is their Daughter. Masami is gone, he will never have another child, and Baby does not count because Baby is not his and Baby can't be his because he is married to Masami and-

"Sho…stop it. I'm sleepy." Said Daughter. She stirred a bit and he hopes and worries that she is waking up. But she is not. She simply wraps her arms more tightly around and sighs. Her eyes move a bit but stay closed. Her breathing ever so slowly gets back to normal. His breathing stops entirely. He does not allow himself to move or breathe or even to think. Not until he is sure, positive, that she is back asleep. He knows that he should wake her. He knows that he is a very busy man and his time is precious. He knows that the logical thing to do in this situation is to wake her up and tell her to sleep in her own bed.

But that would also be logical.

She is ten years old. He is over four times her age. He needs less sleep than her. She needs all the sleep that she can get. She has been sleep deprived lately. Her brother's doing. She had mistook him for Son after all. She had been up too late and now she needed her sleep and if he woke her than it would affect her health. That would be bad. Especially since they were without Fukuda. He was loathe to spare Fukuda, especially when terrible things could happen to Daughter at any time of the day or night, but it was necessary in order to do something about the useless crop of Awakened he had gotten.

Since Fukuda was gone now it would have been downright irresponsible to wake Daughter up.

So he let her sleep. He let her sleep all wrapped around him like an octopus. Why did women do this? Masami had been fond of clinging to him in her sleep. He had never turned his back to her. It wasn't the most comfortable way to sleep and also she took it badly. Night after night since that first night, no, afternoon. Since the first time they shared a bed. She had clung to him, then, and fallen asleep. He had not been very annoyed then, no, because in that moment he had realized that he was holding the most perfect woman in the entire world and he was never, ever, going to let her go.

His feelings for his Daughter were nothing like his feelings for his wife.

She was ten and his Daughter. That would have been wrong on too many levels. When he looked at her he did not feel the same cocktail of love and pain, desire and satiation, wistfulness and terror, that he had felt when he held Masami for the first time. No, holding her brought out….protectiveness. Yes, that was the dominant emotion. Nothing was going to harm her, not while he was around. Nothing would even have the chance to. If he could he would have built her a walled in city, no, one with a dome. The same one he would have built her mother…that he should have built her mother…because then, maybe, she would not have been able to so easily leave…

Daughter is not Masami.

He feels protective over her and that is totally normal. He is supposed to want to keep her near him at all times. He is supposed to want her to spend the rest of her life by his side. He is supposed to want to retire to a nice, clean, orderly domed city with her and live out his golden years helping Daughter to raise her children and just being able to relax. He's her father and this is the way that a father is supposed to want to feel, he's supposed to want to keep his Daughter by his side at all times, because that is how he will ensure her safety.

Son is fine on his own.

Son is off in Seasoning City…a truly loathsome place….learning on the job as it were. Fukuda would be an excellent teacher. His oldest and most loyal follower, keeper of many a secret, and also occasional over stepper. Suzuki trusted Fukuda as much as he could possibly trust another human being. He trusted that Fukuda would keep Son safe, away from Baby, and out of trouble. There were so many things in Seasoning City that he had left behind…and so many things that Fukuda had left behind, too. That place was in both of their pasts and Son…maybe he should not have let Son go…but then that would have been admitting that he held some irrational feelings towards that city. It was a collection of walls and roads and people and cars and business and commerce and also the sight of the Seventh Division HQ.

Son would be fine.

Suzuki knew that his Son would always be fine. He was not as sensitive as his sister….or as unstable. She was still very unstable. He could see it as she slept. Her aura, the color of it, the feel of it, all of it. It was moving and churning and swirling and…and that display was worrying. His own powers were under lock and key. His aura was still. Even in sleep he tried to keep is aura still. Her control was really much better when she was awake. Her aura had this sort of sleepy quality to it when she was awake. Hazy, too, sometimes. He wondered about it, sometimes, how she forced it to be that way. For her whole life he had been teaching her to keep her aura still.

It was odd.

But it had been that way for years. He chocked it up to differences between them as two individuals. He was himself and she was herself. No two people in this world were alike. She wasn't even his blood, not really, though not a day went by that he didn't wish that she were. Not that he didn't care for her, he did, but it would have just been…different…if she had been his blood child. Different in some minute but glaring way. His Daughter…she was his Daughter. She was Suzuki Shigeko. She was his and he…he cared for her so much…

She stirred again.

He stopped breathing, stopped moving, and stopped thinking once again. He had no idea what he would do if she were to wake up. Feign sleep? No, she was perfectly capable of sensing when he was awake. Tell her to go to her own bed? No, if he was up then it would make sense for her to be up. He could take her to work with him. She was a good message runner even though he had other people for that. She had made quite the impression on the people during her time ruling in his absence and her presence was good for moral. It had dipped very low since he had gotten rid of the rolling chairs but those morons had forced his hand so he felt nothing even approximating guilt. He felt, however, that he didn't need anyone getting any ideas about anything. Daughter was a good distraction. Everyone loved her so much.

Good.

She deserved to be beloved by all. She was his Daughter. She deserved to have the whole world kiss the very ground she walked on…no. She would never need to walk. Ever. After he came into power he would have a palanquin made for her and her feet would never have to touch the ground again. She would be treated like the royalty that she was. She was a Princess. She was his Daughter and he would rule the world someday and that made her a Princess. Not that she would ever succeed him, he had a blood Son for that, but…but if something were to happen to Son then she would have no choice but to be his successor. Then she would be a Queen. The Queen of the world. She would have her rightful place as Queen of the world. He would give her the world and she was right to ask it. He knew that she wanted it. That was why she had jumped at the chance to take over in his absence. She wanted power and she'd had a taste of it and he knew that she wanted more. She already had so many of the Awakened on her side…if she ever got the idea in her head that it was time for a regime change it would be very difficult to stop her. She had the Awakened, weak on their own but useful in their great numbers, and she had her little entourage as well. Technically his entourage. Her idea, though, to collect the most powerful espers that Claw had to offer.

His most powerful espers.

They were at the ultimate heights of power, the three she had collected. He had the three…four. The four most powerful espers in his personal entourage. Daughter, Shibata, Minegishi, and Shimazaki. He was curious who she would choose next. He was curious as to why she was collecting such powerful espers in the first place…if there was even a reason. She may have just desired companionship with people who may have been able to come close to being her equals. She was at that age when social relationships became more important.

And other sorts of relationships as well.

He wondered if she had started going through puberty yet. He wondered if it was an appropriate question to ask her. He wondered if he would even be able to physically get the words out to ask her that question. His attempts at prying into her romantic life had been an abysmal failure….but he stood y his actions. They were socially appropriate. Fukuda had said so and Fukuda had always had very good social skills. Shimazaki'd had it coming and he had not enjoyed hurting Daughter in that way he stood by his actions. A man that old should not have returned her feelings…and she should not have had feelings for a man like that. The age gap was bothersome enough but he may have been able to overlook it, had Daughter been a teenager or something, if Shimazaki had at least been tolerable to be around…and he hoped to God that men like Shimazaki were her type…

Not that he wanted her to even have a type.

The thought of her with a man is disturbing. Someone to come and take her away from him. Someone to distract her from her ambitions. Someone to take her away from Claw. Claw needed her. She was an integral part of it and it needed her. She was the master of the carrot. His tool had always been the stick. The people loved her. They followed him out of fear but they followed her out of love so between the two of them they could easily keep Claw from falling apart. He did not need some man ruining that for him. He did not need some man, some man who was in no way worthy of her, coming into their household and sweeping her off her feet and then…and then taking her away…from Claw….which needed her…

He wished that he could have just chosen someone for her.

The perfect person for her, her most perfect person, would have had to be someone powerful. A powerful esper but…but one without an ounce of ambition. One who wouldn't even dream of having anything to do with the running of Claw or the world. One who Daughter would find attractive. She had said, before, that she preferred tall men….pretty much everyone was taller than her…but she would grow up. So the man he chose for her would have to be tall, taller than average. He would also have to share in her interests. She liked films and manga and videogames…and dolls but he wasn't sure about a grown man who played with dolls…so no dolls. But he would have to share interests with her. He would also have to be able to give her children. Also he would have to be kind to her at all times. If this hypothetical man so much as looked at her wrong Suzuki would use his powers to flay him alive and the he would leave his body nailed to a tree as a warning to all of the other men who thought that they could be unkind to Daughter.

And if he ever left well then…there wouldn't be enough of him left to put on display.

If a man ever tried to leave his Daughter, if the thought ever entered his mind, then Suzuki would kill him. Not instantly, no, first he would be locked in a dark underground room. The room would dispense food, water, powerful electric shocks, blaring music, bright lights, and showers of ice water at random and arbitrary times. Also there would be rats. Small, sentient, verbal rats with a society comparable to that of humans. Also they would have little clothes on too just to be even more disturbing. The rats would come to see him as their God. At that point the food would be cut off and he would be forced to turn upon his disciples for sustenance. Either he would eat all of his disciples and go mad from the isolation or his disciples would eat him and there would be nothing left.

Or Suzuki could just do something simple like force feed him white sugar until his pancreas gave out and then left him to die a slow death without medical treatement….in a cage so he could be made an example out of.

He was getting himself all worked up over a man who didn't even exist yet. He didn't like having to worry about this but she forced his hand as it were. She was the one who had decided to dip her toes into the world of romantic love…and she had picked the worst person to do it with. If she had chosen someone sensible and loyal, like Fukuda…the thought is still disturbing but anyone is better than Shimazaki….then he would not have had to worry like this. Worry about her choosing the wrong man and ruining her life. Worry about her choosing the right man, to her, and then having her heart broken when he decided to leave her for no reason at all. Leaving a gaping wound within her that refused to heal. Haunting her day in and day out with the ghost of his presence. Making her feel useless, worthless, inadequate, and so many other useless things. Making her doubt herself…making her doubt her ability to provide and nurture and…and care for another human being…

Any man who dared to leave, to even think about leaving, his Daughter was going to pay with his life.

Nobody would ever leave his Daughter. Nobody would ever even think of causing her that kind of pain. Not while he was her father. Not while he was around. She would never be hurt in that way…that soul crushing way…which he still drew breathe. She was so small, there, tucked against him…and he would do anything to protect her and anything to keep her by his side where she belonged. Not that he needed her, no, but because she needed him. She needed him to keep her safe and he would.

Even if it meant her clinging to him like an octopus.