It's in your smile that family lies, my child.

+1


When she finally decided to broach the subject with her father, a few weeks after the Matthew-incident, he did not cry, but his eyes shone during the whole conversation.

"Dad. I can see you cry, you know. What is it? If this isn't okay with you, even just a little bit, I won't ask him, and we'll never speak of it again."

"No, no, sweetie, it definitely is okay with me, it's just that… Gimme a moment, will ya?"

Kaede folds her arms across her chest and watches him wipe his eyes with his sleeve. There's snot on his wrist now. Ew. She raises the tissue box without a word. He grabs two without even looking, mumbling something she chooses to understand as "so grown up, already".

Still, she rolls her eyes. It cannot be that much of a surprise, can it? The two of them have been together for five years now (than she knows of, at least. She's convinced it began way earlier than when they told her it did), and since she's been studying in Stern Bild, she's been spending more time with them than with her family in Oriental Town. She's got her room in their new and shared apartment on Silver Stage, their address as hers in every official document, and spends all the time she's not in the dorms or with her friends with them.

For all matters and purposes, she lives with them.

And slowly, gradually, they've all come to a new dynamic, one that she actually likes, one where she feels she belongs. Selfishly, it's also one she wants to keep. To secure, in some ways. And one she also wants people to recognize for what it is. For what it's become.

"I'm not trying to replace Mom."

The smile Kotetsu manages is wobbly.

"I know that, honey. Neither am I. Tomoe's irreplaceable."

She loves that, even after twelve years, her mother's memory didn't stray away from them. She used to fear the day she'd disappear for good, but her pictures were never pushed away from the shelves, her name never left her father's lips, and even now, even after falling in love again, he speaks of her with fondness, pride and this spark of sadness that Kaede knows is indissociable from grief and loss. She's sure a part of him still loves her, and will love her come hell or high water.

It's making her happy, in a way. Making her feel like what their parents had was strong enough to survive death.

Because Tomoe never became a sore spot, a taboo, a subject anyone needed to walk on eggshells about.

She doesn't haunt them, she inhabits them.

She's a presence, not a ghost.

And Kaede loves her still, too.

"It's just that… Grandma's not getting younger", she admits. "You're doing one of the most dangerous jobs there can be. And I… I'm scared of losing you, I am, and I… I would like to have someone to depend on, if there ever was any necessity. Not that I'd wish to, but it's… If it ever comes to that. And for all the rest."

"You can depend on Bunny, sweetie. Whatever the circumstances."

"I know that. And I do. But if you… If something happened to you, and I were still under eighteen… And even after that, it would… What I am trying to say is that, under the eyes of the law, he's… he's not entitled to help me. He's not my parent, not my guardian."

Kotetsu hums. She does not know what it means, and chooses to point him the snot-stain on his sleeve instead. He wipes it with his tissue, and continues, as if nothing happened: "I have to be candid with you here sweetheart, we talked about it once or twice. A few times. In those 'what if something happened to me', 'what place do you want to take in her life?' type of talks. And he kind of… always imagined taking you in. Or at least giving you the option. But I'm not sure the idea of a legal guardianship ever crossed his mind."

"He does act like my second dad, though." She hesitates a moment, then playfully adds: "He's just the cool one."

"Hey! I'm the cool dad! I'm your original dad, I'm the blueprint! Therefore, I'm the coolest!"

She smiles. There couldn't be two more different people than Kotetsu and Barnaby when it comes to parenting. But in the end, she does feel loved, guided, and protected, in two very distinct ways. Is there something else you need, in a parent? her therapist had asked when she told her about her decision. I don't know, she had answered, honest and somehow taken aback by the question. And the very same night, formed a solid "no" in her mind. No, that's all I need. That's all I want. They're not perfect, far from it, but they're hers.

"But… Daddy, I also want you to know that there's no risk of you being replaced."

That earns her a crushing wild-hug, from which she manages to extract herself only after two way-too-long minutes. When she does, Kotetsu looks serious. It's a rare enough look on his face that she takes advantage of it and adds:

"I don't want to impose myself on him, either."

Her father gives her this look he has sometimes, between impressed, grieved and proud. She suspects it's when she does or says something her mother would have phrased or done in the exact same way.

"You won't. You definitely won't, sweetie."

She grabs her mug, drinks some of her cocoa, more to occupy her hands than anything else.

"Do you plan on explaining your reasons to Bunny then? With… like… a slideshow and everything?"

She frowns and squints at him. The seriousness never lasts long, she should be used to it by now. Still, it's frustrating.

"Are you ever going to let me live it down? It happened once, and it was necessary to prove him that the treetop course was way better than the waterpark."

"Sure, sure."

She glares. He raises his hands in front of him, palms to her. It's a peace offering, but she's not taking it.

"And Barnaby liked it."

"That he did. Threatens me on a daily basis to draw inspiration from it to make me some diagrams about damage fees."

She laughs, but refuses to let him change the subject.

"It's simple enough this time", she admits, slowly, "I love him, Dad."

Kotetsu smiles and raises a hand to ruffle her hair. He manages to ruin her ponytail but she cannot find the heart to push him away, overwhelmed by the tenderness he puts in the gesture. His eyes have begun to shine again.

"I know the feeling, kid. And I'm glad you do. I have to say, it was one of my biggest fears, that you two wouldn't connect, that you'd reject him."

"Dad", she says, with this tone she uses when he's being particularly obtuse. "He's BBJ. How could I ever reject him?"

"You damn well know he's not perfect! And sometimes far from the whole 'BBJ' image."

God, how does he manage to make the quotation marks audible?

"I was mostly worried about that, actually. For when you'd realise he's not the person you idolised."

"I never idolised him."

"Mh-hm."

"Dad! I never did! I may have developed a tiny, teeny obsession after he saved my life, but I can assure you, the charm's been broken since the day I found him drooling on your shoulder on the couch. Or when he told me off for playing with his hair products. Or when I saw his stupid socks." Her father's smile is getting wider and wider by the second and Kaede realises she's getting side-tracked. "What I mean is that I'm still a Barnaby fan, I'll be one for life, but just like I'll be Wild Tiger's. Those things are kind of… out of my control."

"I know."

"And anyway, it's not BBJ, or Barnaby-the-hero I want to ask. It's... just Barnaby."

Kotetsu laughs softly. It's gentle, full of comprehension and pride, and she smiles in answer. She loves him so much when he's like this, when he's treating her like an adult.

"Then you should ask 'Just Barnaby', officially."


She does so at Christmas, during their traditional present-opening ceremony on the morning of the 25th. The three of them are reunited on the little living room, wearing matching horrendous sweaters – Kotetsu got them as a joke last Christmas but grown so fond of them that he decided to wear his unironically, surprising absolutely no one – a plate of gingerbread cookies being slowly emptied of its content laid out on the coffee table. Kaede and Kotetsu are mainly responsible for the disappearances; Barnaby, who still isn't a morning person, seems content to just sip on his coffee-flavoured eggnog. The three of them have abandoned the couch for the carpet a few minutes ago and Kaede has finished opening up what they offered her this Christmas.

She's been spoiled, and were those normal times, she would have squeaked and taken pictures of everything for Saroja to see.

But this year's different.

This year's special.

So, with the new wallet she gives Barnaby, Kaede wraps another present. Just a simple envelope, a brown thing, with a cute neon-pink ribbon scotched on it, along with a rabbit sticker that acts as a label, in which she scribbles his name with one of her glitter pens.

She waits for her father to leave for the kitchen to refill his glass to actually give it to Barnaby.

"Don't you want to wait for him to come back?" he asks, surprised, when he sees her handing him the well-wrapped, neat, stern but present-looking envelope.

"He knows what this is."

God, she's sweating. What if he says no? What if he doesn't dare say no but wants to? What if it's way too soon, way too much? She shouldn't have assumed. Shouldn't have put it like this, as a Christmas gift. He lost all his family at Christmas, what if he sees this as a replacement? What if he likes her but does not want to actually burden himself like this?

She's crazy. She's completely out of her mind and she should have tested out the waters first. This is awful, this is going to backfire horribly, oh, Lord-

It's too late. Barnaby has already gotten the pair of scissors to cut out the end of the envelope.

It scratches.

Who opens a present with scissors? Barnaby Brooks Jr., that's who. Kaede feels her heart pounding in her throat while watching him getting the papers out. He frowns when he discovers the heavy wad of black ink. Clearly, he was expecting some framed drawing, a picture, a book maybe, not twenty pages of printed official documents and a sweating, anxious, overly-watchful teen who can't get her eyes off him as he peels out the rest of the envelope.

"This is just a proposition, of course", she blurts, making him look away before he can read anything, "you don't have to accept."

And finally, finally, he reads it.

For a moment, the frowning deepens.

FAMILY COURT COVER SHEET;

GUARDIANSHIP FORM: STEPPARENT ADOPTION.

And then his eyebrows fly up, both at the same time, disappear under his fringe, his eyes grow huge, his jaw drops and when he finally raises his head, everything is blurred, the tears have won, Kaede is crying and all she can manage is a smile, wobbly and tentative and shy and so, so, so hopeful.

"I… wan-wanted…" she stutters.

Words flee. The papers state clearer all she could ever voice.

"Is this… Kaede…" he rasps.

"I'm not trying to replace Mom with you!" she all but screams, voice breaking. Well, not her best. She can be excused, she thinks, because Barnaby hasn't let go of the pages and his grip has begun to shake. "I am not trying to push you into a role you do not want either", she continues, through the tears but calmer now. "It's just that… Over the past years, you've looked over me, taken care of me, even though you didn't have to, and I… I love you. And I know that if something ever happened to Dad, I could count on you, and I… You're…"

She stares at his fingers, still on the ribbon, clearly shaking now, but does not dare lift her eyes to his face.

Damn, she had prepared this, she can say it. She needs to say it.

"You're the second parent I already have", she croaks. "And I'd like… I'd like to make it official."

She swallows the tears. Raises her chin. Finally meets his eyes and holds them. It's scary, it's huge, but she's never been more sure of anything in her life.

"I want you to be my family."

Somehow, that's what does it.

The dam breaks, papers crumple, green overflows and tears fall.

Barnaby all but crumbles.

Her first coherent thought somehow ends up being "shit, I've made Barnaby cry." Her second is to launch herself at him and hug him so hard she actually feels the air leaving his lungs. When he reaches behind her to cradle her head and back, his entire being shaking, she cannot really blame herself for sobbing as well.

She grabs his ugly sweater. It's a bit rough, strangely pink, and it smells like the cinnamon biscuits they've been cooking the previous afternoon, like coffee, like her father's softener, like him, like home.

So, huddled against Barnaby, Kaede cries.

Gripping her so tight she can feel each of his fingers, Barnaby cries, too.

Hey, Mom, I hope you can see us from over there, she thinks, strongly.

You would've loved him.

He takes care of me, Mom.

The thoughts make the tears come harder. But for a moment, she doesn't care. Eyes tightly closed, Kaede pushes her head on the wool of Barnaby's sweater, nearly drowns in the familiarity of his smell and tries and fails to stop sobbing like a child. It's alright. She's allowed to be a child. She's sixteen, but he's crying too, so that means it's alright, isn't it?

"O-kay, does this mean all went well? Did he say yes?"

Kotetsu's voice somehow clears up a path over their heads. Kaede feels his hand on her hair, right next to her ponytail. One day, she'll tell him that it feels like a giant paw when he does that. One day. She's not sure he won't make a big scene out of it, yet.

"You… You knew about this?" Barnaby stutters, voice completely broken and tumbling over each vowel. He gingerly accepts a tissue from Kotetsu, who, as it seems, heard them sniffling from the other room and came back armed with the full kitchen roll.

"She asked me a few weeks ago, yes."

It's a very strange sensation, feeling Barnaby softly blowing his nose from somewhere over her head. She's not ready to let go of the ugly sweater. If she lets go and he's still crying, she'll begin sobbing again, and she needs to stop, she's not a baby anymore, she's sixteen, for God's sake.

These are just adoption papers.

Just adoption papers.

Freaking adoption papers.

For Barnaby Brooks Jr. Which made him cry. Good Lord.

Because Kaede's jut asked Barnaby to adopt her.

Oh, no. Tears come back and within a few seconds, she's sobbing, again.

Kotetsu all but throws himself on the floor and joins the hug without any invitation. She lets herself be cradled into their combined embrace for a few moments, then, tentatively, she moves back, seizes a tissue, and does not even complain about her father's hand that somehow ended on her back, drawing mindless patterns on the wool of her own sweater.

Hers is less ugly than Barnaby's, at least.

"So… Is it a yes? Or a maybe?" she asks, plainly, but the tremble in her voice must give out her uncertainty, because Barnaby immediately softens and answers:

"Yes, Kaede, yes, it's much more than… That you'd… That I'd… Fuck. Of course. Yes."

He smiles. There are stars in his eyes and tears streaks on his cheeks.

They look like stripes.

"You'd be stuck for life with me, though", she dares, only half-joking.

She has never seen his eyes that green.

"Isn't he, already?"

She elbows her father in the ribs for breaking the moment. But Barnaby scoffs, sniffs, and looks at the papers again.

"Are you… are you sure about this? If I were to adopt you, we would be… legally family. You'd be… Kaede, you'd be my daughter."

The word brings new tears to his eyes. She follows the new lines they paint on his cheeks and feels water rolling down her own face. Oh, how alike we already are, she thinks. And I'd be his daughter.

The word feels warm. It feels right.

"Yes, I'm sure", she murmurs, like it's a promise, a secret, a prayer all at once, suddenly feeling like the world solidified under her knees, right here, on her father's stupid idea of a carpet, beside a half-full plate of gingerbread cookies.

"You're the family I chose", she says, like it's the easiest and truest thing in the world, and maybe it is, because Kotetsu repeats it, changes the I into a we, his voice soft and maybe a bit wet, too, and it makes Barnaby bite his lips, make a strange pout, a breathless sound that she is definitely not going to call a sob, and the next thing she knows she's drawn into another hug, cheek pressed between Barnaby's shoulder and her father's arm, and the two adults are crying.

It's alright. They're family. Have been for a long time now, but maybe they needed her to come to the front and state the obvious. Maybe they had been waiting for her to do it, to choose it.

And so Barnaby cries, huddled between them, in the heap of arms and shoulders they have formed on the carpet.

Somehow, it's the sight of his tears that make it all real.

He's not just her dad's partner anymore.

He's her parent.

He's hers, too.

She accepts the whole emotional ordeal for a full minute, as a Christmas treat, then decides that there's been enough tears and embraces for a full month and undoes the bundle of limbs that formed over her head.

"All right, that's enough, if we stay like this I'm going to cry for a whole hour. Who wants more eggnog?"

Both men look at her with strange wonder. Their faces are drenched with tears and Barnaby's hand has not let go of her father's. She does not look too closely, for if she were to, she's pretty sure she'd see their fingers trembling.

"I do, thank you", Barnaby rasps, another tissue already in his hand.

She disappears into the kitchen, wiping her eyes absentmindedly, wondering when exactly it became so easy to cry in front of Barnaby, or if she will one day be able to forget the look in his eyes, the way green became so bright, when she called him family.

In a way, she feels like she's creating a life-changing bond between them. Like something inside of her had been growing, expanding in her chest, and hatched in their waiting hands. Like something clicked into place.

It feels right in a way few things ever did before.

Through pain and laughs and cries and so many lazy mornings or quiet evenings, they became family. So maybe it began in the back of an ambulance. Maybe it began in the rubbles of a mall, or in the passenger seat of a car, or the day she stopped seeing Barnaby as a celebrity and caught sight of the man beneath. Maybe it began at a dinner table, with her mathematic schoolbook open next to their plates and his hushed explanations of Thales' theorem.

Maybe it was there, all along, ready to be, ready to burst, to explode. But still hers to name, hers to seize.

It doesn't matter, really.

Because her father never forced her to spend time with Barnaby. She's the one who came to him, learnt to know him, to let him in, inside her life. She's the one who wanted it.

She doesn't regret it one bit.

Because they've been family for a while, in this strange unspoken agreement they all had, that they now were a unit, a front, joined by a shared wish to care for each other.

But she made a page turn.

Because now, the unspoken is written in black letters, and the agreement is a promise.

Kaede isn't really sure she's the one who sealed it.

Maybe it's the tears. The tears, painted on all their faces, drawing lines of gold and amber on their skins in the dim and colourful lights of the Christmas tree.

On Barnaby's face, on Kotetsu's, and on hers too, the lines look like streaks.

The tears, like stripes.

Yes, she smiles, pouring herself a new drink, family.


This night, when they all go to bed full to the brink with turkey leftovers and ginger cake, and when calm reigns again in the flat, she lets her mind drift watching the stars twinkle behind the glass. From her bed, she can see Orion's belt, his quiver and outstretched arm.

It's always been soothing, watching the night sky.

She prays for a moment, then, as she always does on Christmas days, and addresses her mother.

What a strange life I'm living, Mom, she thinks. What a curious, bizarre, amazing conjunction of events led me here. Wanting Barnaby Brooks Jr. to adopt me. Actually wanting another parent, when it all seemed impossible, undesirable, a few years ago.

I think I'm happy, Mom.

I think Dad is, too.

As in answer, a star shines brighter. It could be a satellite. It could be a sign. It could mean anything or everything.

It doesn't matter.

What does is what you do with it, a voice inside her, sounding calm and serene, says.

So Kaede smiles at the star, thinks about the future, and lets one last tear fall.

This one is full of hope and love. This one, Barnaby does not see.

It doesn't matter.

He'll be here to wipe all the rest.


I still seek shelter in black streaks

Guidance in their orange obliques

Because in troubles great, mild and prized

I too have been weak, cried, and realised,

Ushered between the stripes of tigers wild:

It's in your smile that family lies, my child.


[Thank you if you've read this far! Please don't hesitate to leave a comment, even years after the publication date of this fic, it'll always cheer me up to know you've been there And stay tuned, because the huge project that is Neon-Pink has just begun. 😉]