Meeting new people and not immediately knowing their names is an experience Rem will never be used to, the mid-conversation realization that she has no idea who she's speaking a surprising jolt every time. Jihyun's parents introduce him to all manner of adults on the Sundays they visit church, and though the fact he is a child means he rarely has to address adults by name, even mentally keeping track of everyone is a demanding and seemingly impossible task. Trying to memorize names while a choir sings in the background is even more tedious.
Church is interesting. Rem already knows that heaven and hell don't exist and is aware of some of the basics of human religion, but being made to sit still and listen to details about it from the mouth of a human, she can, to a certain extent, understand the appeal of such a concept. Shinigami likely wouldn't go to heaven or hell even if they did exist, especially as most of them don't die, but it'd certainly be preferable to be in heaven with Misa if she could be than to be in the human world as one of them. Her mother and father seem to attend church more out of a sense of obligation than actual belief, but they don't talk much about it or anything else to Rem and she finds attempts to converse fall short.
The other children at church don't seem to pay much attention to what's being said and their parents keep a close watch on them so they don't speak to one another. From what Rem can tell, most of the people here are completely different from Misa, putting care and calculation into the words they speak that would never have given Misa pause. Their style of dress reminds Rem of the task force that investigated Kira; bland, formal, and mutely coloured. Yes, rather than Misa, the people who live near the Kim family and attend the nearby church are like Kyosuke Higuchi; overly concerned with maintaining a pristine façade and coating their words in pretense, barely managing to maintain a friendly air with one another because they all have hidden motives. The way it extends to how they treat their children is repulsive; Rem can see it in the slaps on the small hands, the forcible rebuttoning of clumsily undone collars too close to the neck, the glares that silence questions without a word and the subsequent apologies for a child's impertinence to another set of parents doing the same with their own children.
Jihyun's parents are different, more relaxed and uninterested in controlling him, though in the car on the ride back home his older sister makes it clear she doesn't view their detachment as a good thing. Their parents are deeply engaged in an insular conversation about the church choir when Yunseo loudly demands to know whether or not they even care about their children.
Their mother's eyes widen in the rearview mirror, and their father's head turns, eyebrows raised, to peer into the backseat. The sudden awareness that she's being looked at makes Rem sink in her chair, though beside her Yunseo's back doesn't touch the chair, posture perfectly straight as she holds her father's gaze. Yunseo is seventeen years old, has had thirteen more years than Jihyun to learn and understand what a parent should be to a child, and this isn't the first time she's become angry with them in Jihyun's presence. She wears a shirt with buttons down the front and dark pants that suit the rest of the neighbourhood's attire, the same sort of outfit she tends to wear anywhere else. She doesn't spend much time with Jihyun, preferring to study or chat with her friends on the computer, but she always makes a point to greet him when she gets home from school, remind him to brush his teeth before he goes to bed, and clean both his dishes and her own after a meal.
"What makes you ask that?" their mother inquires after a beat of silence. Rem looks out the window to watch the passing cars.
"You didn't give us a single look the entire time we were at church," Yunseo says. "And now we're in the car and you're ignoring us, again."
Jihyun's mother makes a noise as though about to speak, but Yunseo hammers on. "I was trying to talk to you and it was like you didn't even hear me! When I talk to Ms. Chae, or Mr. Han, they actually look me in the eye and listen to what I'm saying, but my own parents don't?"
"Yunseo," their father murmurs. "Please lower your voice, you might scare Jihyun."
Rem hears Yunseo's hand smack the leather seat. "Don't tell me to lower my voice or act like you care about scaring Jihyun!" she exclaims. "If you were really worried about him then you would watch him while we're out and take care he's not talking to strangers or about to do something that could hurt himself!"
Though Rem takes care not to put herself in harm's way, Yunseo is always attentive of Jihyun when their family is out, herding him away from potential dangers even when they don't realistically seem threatening in Rem's opinion. Being watched so carefully can be unnerving, but when Rem thinks of the care she took in making sure Misa was always safe, it's not quite so difficult to understand.
"You don't pay any attention," Yunseo fumes. "You just talk to each other and to your friends without any regard for what's happening around you!"
Staring at the blur of colours on the road makes Rem dizzy, but she doesn't take her gaze off it, focusing on the feeling of slight nausea to cast Yunseo and her parents' voices into the background. It's not a long drive from the church to their home, but the speed of the car as well as the amount of traffic makes it seem so, especially compared to the speed with which Rem used to be able to fly. They live in a quiet area, enclosed in a mountainous region with steep roads, every passing house enormous. It's different from Higuchi's apartment in a very tall building but boasts similar wealth, many of the other families owning multiple cars despite not really needing them. That Jihyun's mother drives is an anomaly; most here don't drive themselves anywhere and hire someone else to do it. The car itself is different too. Rem doesn't know enough about cars to actually date it, but Jihyun's parents haven't changed their car since Jihyun's birth and, from what Rem has heard in their conversations about it, likely had it long before then. The next-door neighbours, on the other hand, change their car twice a year.
Rem starts when Yunseo crashes back against the chair, head turning sharply to face her sister. Yunseo wipes a bloodshot blue eye with her sleeve, uncharacteristic tears wetting the cuff.
"Mr. Mun accepted my internship application for this summer," Yunseo mumbles thickly. "And he's going to sponsor half of my tuition costs when I start my semester next year. I haven't even finished my last year of high school yet and he's doing that for me." She coughs, turning her face toward the window and away from Rem.
Their mother gasps. "But we told you we'd pay your tuition!"
"And I told you I don't want you paying a damn cent for me!" Yunseo retorts. Jihyun doesn't know what a tuition is, or an internship, and whatever conversation Yunseo is referring to must've happened away from him because he doesn't remember any of it.
"Please stop shouting," Jihyun's father's hands are over his ears, no longer looking behind him. Jihyun's mother pulls the car into the side garage of their house.
"Jeongwu, take Jihyun inside," she instructs. "You can stay with him there, and Yunseo and I will—"
"I have nothing left to say to you," Yunseo mutters, rattling the door handle forward and back, but her door is still locked.
"Please, Yunseo," their mother says softly, and Jihyun can see the lines in her face are creased, watching her daughter in the mirror. "Let's talk about this."
Yunseo tries the handle one more time, then sighs. In her periphery, Rem can see her shrink away from the door. She folds her arms over her knees, slouching forward. "Now you want to talk?"
Jihyun's father removes his seatbelt and opens the door.
Once he and Jihyun are inside the house, Jihyun's father takes a deep breath, crossing their living room to sit on a large blue couch. The sun is shining outside, and through the enormous windows that cover the house there is no sense of privacy from the outdoors. Rem brushes a strand of hair behind her ear, and her father levels his gaze with hers seriously.
"I'm sorry you had to listen to that, Jihyun," he apologizes. "It must've been scary."
Rem stiffens.
She has never been apologized to before.
In the shinigami realm, the prospect that one could ever owe another an apology is virtually nonexistent, and other than beating another at gambling there were few things a shinigami could do to offend each other anyway. Once Rem came to Misa in the human world, people only wanted to use her if they interacted with her at all. It didn't matter to Rem, she was of another kind from them and couldn't experience the pain of betrayal the way humans felt it, so why should they apologize? Even when Misa explicitly ignored her request and told Light Yagami how shinigami are killed, Rem didn't mind that she wasn't sorry, even when Light Yagami later used that information to kill her, she never expected any sorrow to be felt on her behalf. Ryuk laughed at Rem's feelings, Higuchi treated her as though the only purpose for her existence was to listen to his disgusting thoughts. The detective wanted information from her and likely would've put Rem through the same torture he put Misa through if he were able and if it'd assist him in his goals. No shinigami or human truly cared for Rem, and she wouldn't know what to do if someone ever did.
Now, Jihyun's father looks at her, eyes trained intensely on her face, and Rem is unsure he or anyone else have ever looked at her with such genuine concern before, or even that the man sitting before her now has really looked at her before at all.
She doesn't know what the right response is, so she says, "Thank you."
For a moment, he's still. Then he looks away from her and stands to his feet. "Thank you," he repeats, or perhaps he says it back to her. Facing straight ahead, he walks away, down the hall into the room with the piano, and they say nothing more.
Rem wonders if Misa's parents were like this, if their conversations with their daughter were so sparing too. Misa also had an older sister, but Rem didn't learn about that until Thierry Morrello said so in the interview while Rem was still attached to Higuchi. When Light Yagami asked Misa why she was willing to sacrifice so much just to help him, she explained it was because Kira had avenged her parents.
Will Rem grow to love her parents as much as Misa did? Should she? Yunseo doesn't think their parents care about them, but it wouldn't be the first time Rem loved someone who didn't love her in return. It may have been a mistake, the greatest mistake of her existence, but she doesn't regret it, and she'll never apologize for it, and perhaps she's even more foolish than Misa was for falling for Light Yagami, since Misa at least didn't know she would die.
Rem hears music drift down the hall, or the beginning of music, stretching out for a few moments before stopping and starting again, the notes seeming to hesitate and interrupt each other. Jihyun's father plays many instruments, but he always starts with the piano when he's composing a new piece. Rem can see him in her mind's eye, dark hair falling just slightly over his face, lips twisting when the key he hits feels off, and she wonders what the appeal of music could possibly be to someone like him, who hates noise so much he used to cry whenever Jihyun did, not out of sympathy, but because he couldn't stand listening to it. Rem's not sure if he's tall, because everyone seems tall to her, but his eyes are pale green like the paint her mother uses for the sea. His features are gentle, the shape of his face reminding Rem a little of Touta Matsuda, and if Jihyun is beautiful by human standards it is no doubt in part due to his father.
His mother is the older of the two, streaks of grey in her brown hair that have been there as long as Rem has known her. Her eyes, a much murkier shade of brown than Misa's were, are the only part of her face that could be described as gentle, cheeks reminding Rem of her own skeletal body from her prior shinigami form, but her smooth and angular jaw is prominent on Jihyun's face too.
It's strange to look like someone else; every shinigami Rem has seen was unique and distinct, nothing binding them to one another and no concept of family between them. The history of humans lives in their features, for better or for worse, families in this neighbourhood easy to identify as related even without knowing their names. Rem noticed that much even when she was still a shinigami, but if humans then reacted to being told they look just like their mother by rolling their eyes like Yunseo does, it wasn't a subtlety Rem picked up on.
Jihyun's sister is pointy too, though her hair is soft and her eyes are sharp like her father's, blue like Jihyun's, puffy and red when she pushes the door open later that day. Her mother, face barren as the shinigami world, trudges in behind her. Neither of them speak a word, though Yunseo shoots Jihyun a withering glare that Rem cannot begin to understand. Apart for the uneasy sounds of the piano, the rest of the day is silence.
A/N: This chapter's a bit overdue from my mental goal, but not enough for me to be frustrated by it so I think we're good. This chapter was originally gonna be something completely different (which we'll get to in the next chapter instead), but I thought it'd be good to spend some time on V's family. I know it was a lot of OC talk in this chapter but future chapters will focus more on canon characters, I promise. To be honest, I'm usually a writer of short stories so this fic and this chapter is a challenge for me. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thank you for reading!