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Heart still pounding, Tobio’s hands shook as he turned the doorknob to the hospital room. The moment he’d received the phone call, he had run six blocks from his office to get there, but even after the mad rush, he hesitated as he opened the door. His imagination conjured a myriad of horrors on the sprint to the hospital, each subsequently more grotesque than the next. Dismemberment. Paralysis. Worse.
But he had to open that door. Not just to see for himself, but for the man standing next to him. He needed Tobio to be strong, and so did the person waiting behind that door.
Tobio’s heart lurched as he looked down and the small, frail girl on the bed, biting her lip as she tried not to cry while Papa and Daddy were watching.
“What happened?” he rasped while leaning into his husband’s tall frame.
Yuutarou let out a shaky breath as his fingers skated over the plaster cast on their daughter’s wrist. “She tried climbing the big kid monkey bars at school and fell off.” He let out a choked laugh and closed his eyes. “I’m surprised it didn’t happen before. She’s always been a climber.”
Tobio didn’t miss the hiccup in Yuutarou’s voice, and when he looked over, he could see the face he woke up to every morning scrunch as it dissolved into tears.
Reaching out his sweaty hand, Tobio laced his fingers with Yuutarou’s and rested his forehead on his husband’s quaking shoulder. “She’s strong.” He buried his nose in Yuutarou’s shirt and took a steadying breath. “Please don’t cry.”
Yuutarou’s fingers clenched into Tobio’s grip and wilted against him.
Tobio gathered Yuutarou to his chest and held him tightly, his own eyes itching with tears as Yuutarou’s own soaked into his shirt. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from Hana, their adopted daughter who they’ve cared for since the day she was born. They had battled through diapers and the terrible twos and all the bumps along the way, but nothing had quite prepared him for the feeling of seeing his baby girl lying in a hospital, in pain and fighting off tears even when her daddy and papa could barely hold it together.
Hana turned to Tobio with a wobbly frown. “Papa, I’m sorry I made Daddy sad.”
Yuutarou stiffened in Tobio’s arms, and he gave Tobio a panicked look and shook his head. Right away, Tobio knew he would have to address this. “No, Hana-chan. Daddy is just scared because he can’t make you better.”
Hana nodded solemnly. “That’s the conshu-conke —” Her brows wrinkled as she searched for the word.
“Consequences,” Tobio corrected. “And yeah, that’s what it means. Everything has consequences, even good stuff.”
“Like what?”
Tobio sighed. “Like when you eat, the consequence is that you’re not hungry anymore.”
Her lips pursed as she absorbed this. “That sounds nice, though. Like when you and Daddy take me out for curry.”
“But the bad stuff is harder to deal with.” Tobio recalled a slew of painful moments from middle school and the results of them, and he closed his eyes to the memory. “Daddy and Papa have done things with bad consequences — everybody does things like that — but you’ll learn how to see the bad things that might happen and do your best to avoid them.”
“Like . . . listening to the teacher who told me those bars were for big kids?” Hana shrank into the stark white bedding and whimpered. “That was bad.”
Tobio nodded, heaving in relief that he wouldn’t have to explain any more. “That’s right. Going too high on the bars was a consequence of you disobeying your teacher, and being too high on the bars made it more dangerous for you to fall because you’re so small, and your bones aren’t hard enough to fall that far without breaking.”
“I understand, Papa.” Hana sniffled. “I wanna go home.”
Yuutarou extracted himself from Tobio’s embrace and put on wide smile for his daughter. “I know, baby. I’ll go see when they’ll let us take you home.”
“Thanks, Daddy.” Reaching out her good hand, Hana snagged Tobio’s much larger hand in hers. “My hand hurts.” She held up her injured wrist to display the cast. “And this thing is itchy.”
Tobio’s trained eye, honed by his years as a sports therapist, inspected the emergency room doctor’s work and nodded in approval. “It will be for a while, but it will help you heal right.” He schooled his expression to what his friends in the past have lovingly designated as ‘murder face’. “You don’t want your wrist to be crooked, do you?”
“No, Papa.”
An easy smile replaced Tobio’s dour look as he sprung forward to tickle Hana’s exposed sides. Her shrieks of laughter echoed in the stark hospital room, also startling Yuutarou as he returned.
“Tobio,” he chided softly, but the doctor tailing after Yuutarou merely chuckled.
“Looks like someone’s feeling better. I don’t see any reason to keep her here any longer.” He turned to Yuutarou and rattled off a list of warnings Tobio already knew and gave the same prescription to manage the pain that he himself would have issued before excusing himself.
Yuutarou read the prescription note and scratched his head. “I can’t even read this. He writes worse than you do.”
“It’s nothing you have to worry about, Yuutarou.” He picked up Hana and rested her weight on his hip. “Let’s go home.”
They left the hospital with child and medications in hand, but despite Hana merrily tapping away on Yuutarou’s phone, its owner had a stormy look on his face that Tobio knew they would have to talk about later.
It didn’t take long for Hana to succumb to the exhaustion of the day and fall asleep, leaving Tobio to change her into her pajamas before tucking her into bed. When he exited her room and found Yuutarou pacing across the breadth of the apartment, however, he knew that talk would have to come sooner rather than later.
“It’s not your fault,” Tobio blurted, groaning inwardly at his lack of tact. But Yuutarou stopping mid-stride to slump and droop his head told him it was the right thing to say. “Yuu, you can’t always be there.”
Raking his fingers through his hair, Yuutarou growled in disgust. “I was always there, though. I lived for her for the past five years, and she goes to school for three weeks and I’m already lost and helpless and —”
Tobio was across the room in almost an instant. Taking Yuutarou’s face into his hands, Tobio kissed away the rest of Yuutarou’s words and didn’t let go until the unease in his shoulders abated. Closing his eyes, Yuutarou rested his forehead against Tobio’s and gave him a shaky smile. “That was damn smooth, Kageyama.”
“She’s fine.” Tobio stared intently into Yuutarou’s eyes as if to beam his message into his husband’s soul. “She’ll learn from it, it’ll only hurt for a few days, and the worst thing we’ll have to worry about is how to keep her from digging her fingers into her cast to scratch.”
Yuutarou draped his arms over Tobio’s shoulders. “How do you see the good in this? I almost had a heart attack when her teacher called. I’m over here all freaking out, and you’re all normal like you deal with it every day.”
Tobio chortled. “When you called me, I was already running out of my office. I sprinted the whole way. I think I knocked over an old lady on the way.” He paused, brows knit in thought. “Actually, I do deal with it every day.”
“Yeah, I guess you do.” Yuutarou chuckled and feathered a kiss to Tobio’s lips. “Oh, and happy anniversary.”
Eyes flying open, Tobio reeled back in horror. “We had reservations at that place you wanted to try, and —”
“And we can go some other time.” He tugged Tobio back toward his chest. “Dinner and dancing isn’t going anywhere. We just had dinner, and we can have our dance wherever, right?” He folded their hands together and raised them and slowly started to sway.
Tobio’s heart filled as they moved together in harmony to music that only played in a memory until he started humming it out of habit. It was an awkward thing, more rocking in unison than a dance, but Tobio wondered if their usual dinner date for their anniversary could have led to a more perfect moment.
A moment that was, of course, pre-empted by Hana’s loud yawn beside them. “I can’t sleep. It’s too itchy.”
Yuutarou gave her a doting smile and ruffled her hair. “Thinking about it will only make it worse.”
Hana held out her arms to be picked up and, while loath to relinquish his hold on his husband, his little girl put up an excellent argument in her favor when she thrust out her bottom lip. He stroked her hair as her limbs spidered around his torso, face burrowed soundly into the curve of his shoulder.
“Papa, can you sing me a song?” She poked her head up enough to give Tobio the wide, begging eyes she had to have known he couldn’t resist. “Like you did when I was little?”
Tobio took in Yuutarou’s raised brow and sighed at his little secret was let slip into the household. So Tobio liked to sing, and Hana liked to hear it. So what if he had carefully concealed that fact from his husband for the fifteen years they’d been together?
But they had all had a long, trying day, and Tobio was too tired to argue. “Okay. Which one do you want to hear?” At her noncommittal muttering, he scoured his memory banks and came up with one that fit perfectly. “How about the acorn one?”
“Okay.” Even as she tried to keep her eyes open, Tobio could tell she was almost ready to fall asleep at any moment. The song was short, but it would last long enough. Tobio’s smooth, melodic voice filled the aura of peace around them, and he began to sway once more — this time, to a new song. A song of family, of their family.
He welcomed Yuutarou’s arms around both of them, and with their daughter safely ensconced between them, they danced far past the end of the short lullaby. They danced until Tobio’s own eyes could barely keep open, and Yuutarou didn’t fare much better.
Tobio corralled them all toward their bedroom and gently lowered Hana in the middle and tucked the covers in around her before following suit. Their hands threaded together, Tobio’s eyes met Yuutarou’s over the crown of Hana’s head, and he knew they agreed on one thing:
There was nowhere else they’d rather be than here, and with nobody else.