"Can I sit here?" Akechi asked.
"Yeah, whatever."
Akechi sat down on the other side of a Leblanc booth with a cup of coffee and watched Futaba alternate between reading something from her laptop screen and writing something down on a piece of paper. It didn't look like kanji, kana or the English alphabet.
"If you pardon my curiosity…"
"I got bored, learned Russian Cyryllic, and now I'm learning how to transliterate between Russian and Japanese." She glanced at him. "Fun fact, the default Russian transliteration would change your family name to 'Aketi', for some reason."
"Hm." He poked the sheet of paper in front of her. "And what does this say?"
"That's my name." She pointed at each word as she went, "'Futaba Sojirovna Sakura'."
Akechi raised an eyebrow. "Sojirovna?"
"Yup, that's a patronym," she explained. "A part of your legal name, derived from your dad's first name. Mandatory in Russia and some other countries."
Akechi scowled. "So people in… ahem, a situation similar to mine end up singled out from the word go?"
"Few people were used as assassins-"
"You know what I mean," he rolled his eyes. "When there's no father to speak of from a legal standpoint."
"Ah." She glanced at the laptop screen again. "In a case like that, the mother – or whoever's filling the papers – can pick an arbitrary patronym." A neuron fired in the back of her brain and she suppressed a smirk. "You know, I'm curious: your mom's… logged off too, and I guess you'd be old enough to pick a patronym for yourself. What would you pick?"
Akechi took a large sip of his coffee, to give himself a pause for thought. "Shit, I don't know," he finally said. "I guess… I guess at this point, I'd go with 'Renovich', or however you'd write it."
"Really?"
"I mean," he went on, "I know I've caused him enormous amounts of grief, but… well, even I am forced to admit, Ren is an exceptional man, and… and if he wouldn't mind being honored like this, I'd go with his name."
He downed his coffee and put the empty mug down. Futaba grinned. "So, if I understand this correctly… you want Ren to be your daddy?"
Akechi took a moment to process that joke, then got up from the booth. "If that's okay with you, I'll go and throw myself under a subway train."
