Touya's funeral was held on a rainy day.

Fuyumi had cried all morning. Natsuo, although he hadn't understood the gravity of the situation, had also started to cry when he realized that he would never see his brother again.

Rei had behaved admirably for a woman who had just lost her son. She hadn't stopped wailing behind closed doors, but as soon as she faced the world, she put on that expression of restrained grief that gave her the air of a martyr.

Dad hadn't let me out of his sight since the night of his birthday. He'd taken me to the emergency room himself, asked for a hospital bed for himself, and slept with me for the five days I was there.

I don't think Rei even knew that Touya had almost torn off my finger.

I'd listened to every call he made, whether it was to arrange the funeral or to find out the results of the police investigation.

Touya's body had never been found.

The police had found the remains of a child's lower jaw. The remainder were ashes and scorched earth. But everyone had swallowed the implication without blinking an eye.

How else to explain the jaw ?

If anyone objected, it would imply that Touya had found the corpse of a child, burned it, and managed to throw the jawbone last so that it was the only thing that survived his blue fire.

In their eyes, Touya was a disturbed child. But not crazy.

Or not that crazy.

But I knew better than to believe that nonsense.

There was no cemetery near the house.

The nearest one was eight kilometers away, and you had to go through the village. The time the fire started in our forest and the time the fire department arrived didn't coincide with the time it would have taken him to get to the cemetery, dig up a body, come back with it, and dispose of the evidence.

This meant only one thing: like me, Touya had planned everything.

He planned to get rid of me and then disappear without a trace. Maybe he had even kept another body to burn, to say that we both died in the fire.

No one would have ever known.

My eyes slid to my left middle finger.

The mark of his teeth had left a pale, circular scar at the base of my finger, like a crown of tiny spikes.

Dad's book, Lorenzaccio, had something like that at the end of the story. When the creepy Lorenzo suddenly wants to clear his conscience decides to kill the hand that fed him. He bit off his finger, but it was Lorenzo's ring finger. And Lorenzo killed him.

That's what I would have done if Dad hadn't come in time. I would have killed him, even if I'd had to die in that collapsing house.

A flash of red and yellow light went through my mind. I saw myself from an external point of view, beating him until his face was dripping blood. Until he was unrecognizable.

A headache washed over me, as if I had been hit in the head with a hammer.

From the moment our eyes had met in the mirror, all I had in mind was a flash of accelerated memories.

But there was a sour taste in the back of my throat every time I thought about it. And a weird kind of fear seized my stomach.

My memories were strange. As if I had only been a spectator of my body in motion.

Of my own impulses.

I wanted to hurt him.

And then I lost control.

The flush pulled me out of my thoughts.

I scratched the scar on my thumb without realizing it. I forced myself to stop and put my hand back in my pocket.

Dad came out and looked at me for a moment before washing his hands in the sink next to me. He dried his hands with a towel emblazoned with the hotel’s name in gold.

“We don't have to stay for the banquet”

In the Before, I used to be one of those rare people who had never seen anyone close to them die before they died themselves.

The idea of filling my stomach while burying someone seemed strange to me, but since it was Touya and the coffin was empty…

“No. Let's stay”

He nodded, his eyes lowering to the granite sink. His features were drawn, his face pale. He looked ten years older.

He and Rei no longer spoke, and I knew that even if he... tolerated my presence, he wouldn't confide in a five-year-old about his state of mind.

But he was my father, and I'd known him for a long time: even if he didn't show it, Touya's death - his child, the flesh of his flesh, the blood of his blood - had hurt him deeply.

“Come here”

I let myself be pulled to him. He dusted off my immaculate suit, straightened my tie, which didn't need straightening, then ran his hand through my hair. He pushed back the lock that had slipped across my forehead, his fingers brushing my face.

His skin was dry, rough, but his gestures were gentle and loving.

I slid my hand into his.

His eyes returned to the mirror.

He made a visible effort to straighten up, pushing his shoulders back. His eyes lost their dull sparkle and his face became hard and cold again. He looked at himself for a long moment, probably trying to see if he gave the impression that he really was.

We went to the door. He stopped in front of it, his fingers grazing the handle. His hand was shaking.

I squeezed the hand he'd clasped around mine. His eyes met mine. I smiled shyly.

His gaze softened.

“Let's go”

*

The reception was held in the banquet hall of a luxurious hotel.The decor was sober, though very rich, and only a pianist had been hired for the occasion. One of the walls, made of glass, gave life to the clipped hedges and the drowned petunias of the garden.

Low, gray clouds gathered in the sky, with occasional flashes of white lightning.The heat was on full blast to keep the bitter cold from creeping in, but the atmosphere was eerie.

Many people I'd never met in my life came to the reception.

There must have been at least a hundred people there. Some were members of Rei's family, and a woman who looked just like her was crying with her in a corner.

Apparently, dad had no family other than himself. He had invited professional acquaintances and a few other people who had met Touya in their lives, but no one else.

He was in charge of greeting the guests, shaking hands and thanking them for coming. All they had to say was the same generic condolences, devoid of depth.

I began to wonder if I wasn't stuck in a two-bit time loop, condemned to attend the funeral of the man who was supposed to be my murderer, even though his coffin was empty.

It would have made a good movie.

I barely looked at them, their faces blurred together, as the tenth couple in suits and dresses joined us.

They at least had the decency not to speak to me, certainly not to stir the pot, but I didn't miss their irritating, pitying looks.

“You can go and sit down if you’d prefer", Enji whispered to me when the condolence line was temporarily empty.

He pointed to Rei and her two children at the other end of the room. They hadn't let her skirts down since last Thursday.

“I'd rather stay here”

It was boring as hell, but I preferred not to leave my father alone.

And if I did I risked making a scene with Natsuo...

“We'll be here for a while”

I could see that he was trying to discourage me. Why, I could not figure out.

I took his hand without looking, my fingers curling around two of his. His hand was huge.

“Other people are coming”

He turned his attention back to the guests, interrupting our conversation.

But by the way he held my hand, I was sure he was glad I'd stayed.

*

The car ride back home was deathly quiet.

I sat next to Dad on a bench, while Rei and the other two sat across from us.

The forest and mountains were nothing more than blurry patches of moving color behind the fuzzy glass. It had been raining in a downpour since yesterday, and there was no sign of it letting up.

“Where have you been ?”

I pretended not to hear Natsuo.

He stirred.

“When we put the flowers in the grave, you weren't there.Why weren't you there ?

He was a child, and an angry one. But I was tired of all the kids around me being cruel and rude just because they were kids.

“I didn't feel like it”

Natsuo gave the parents a look that meant 'Did you hear him ?’. None of them reacted. He clenched his fists in his lap.

“Our brother died and you didn't cry. Why didn't you ?”

“Because I didn't feel like it”

Dad didn't react. But Rei's knee twitched.

Fuyumi frowned and gave me a confused look. She tried to calm her brother down.

“Leave him alone, Natsu. He's just a baby, he doesn't understand yet-”

Natsuo shouted.

“You always say he understands everything !How smart he is ! What's the difference now ?”

Fuyumi became silent, her voice dying in her throat.She let her watery eyes fall into her lap.Rei put a hand on her son's knee to calm him down, but the boy pushed her away.His angry eyes were fixed on me.

“Where have you been for the past five days ? While we were waiting for the police to tell us what happened to Touya ?”

To my right, my father became agitated. His voice roared with anger.

“That's enough Natsuo”

But the boy was angry now. He was sad, hurt, and wanted to vent his anger on someone, anyone.

“He hated you. He told me so. And besides Mom, you're the only one who saw him that night”

He didn't say outright said it, but I could see the accusation on his face.No one missed the insinuation.

I considered telling him it wasn't my fault, but I'd have loved it to be if it meant we'd buried a full coffin.

But there was Dad.

And the other kid, too. She hadn't done anything to me, even if she was as passive as her mother.

“The hospital was your fault too, right ? The place they sent him to ?”

Rei's eyes widened. She gave dad a worried look.

“What are you-”

Fuyumi was alarmed.

“Mom, what's he talking about? Which hospital ?”

Natsuo answered.

“The place where he'd been for months and where we visited him to”

Fuyumi stammered.

“A hospital ? But...I thought it was a school ?”

“Natsuo", Dad warned, “I advise you to stop here”

The car slowed down. I could barely hear the sound of the gravel being crushed by the tires as we entered the courtyard of the house.

“The firemen said the fire started in your room. And you're obviously not strong enough to make blue flames. He came to see you, didn't he ? Did he and you talked ?”

Fuyumi's cheeks were drenched with tears.I waited impassively for him to finish. But obviously, it only managed to make him more angry.

Natsuo spat, his face distorted with rage.

“I'd rather you had died”

My left hand shook violently.

I opened my mouth.

The next second, Natsuo was curled up in terror, crying his eyes out. Dad's fist was embedded in the leather of the seat, a hair's breadth from where Natsuo's head had been the second before.

His skin was red, and veins larger than my fingers pulsed violently across his forehead and against his throat.His lips were white, his mouth set in a cold, hard line. His eyes were two narrow slits, asthe eyes of a reptile.

The air smelled burnt.

“What the-

“Get out ”

Rei didn't even try to argue.

Pale, she unbuckled Natsuo's belt, took him in her arms and ran out of the car. Fuyumi's hands shook as she unbuckled her own belt. She bit her lips until they bled and stifled a sniffle, then slammed the door behind her.

My heart pounded in my chest, my chakra swirling furiously beneath my skin.

What just happened ?

Enji remained motionless, his fist still pressed into the seat, his face red with rage.

Slowly, he withdrew his hand. His shoulders slumped. He rested his elbows on his knees and buried his head in his palms.

My eyes darted back and forth between Dad's prostrate form and the deformed leather imprint left by his fist.

“Are you... okay ?”

He let out a long sigh.

The rain continued to beat against the windows.I could see the front porch and the burned, temporarily uninhabitable portion of the east wing of our house.

I relaxed my muscles and sank back into the seat, my eyes drifting to the ceiling. Silence fell upon us.

Even almost dead and this bastard keeps screwing up my life.

I'm sure there was a moral to this story. There always was, in books. But if there really was one, it clearly went right over my head.

“Am I a bad father ?”

His voice was so low, so faint, that I almost didn't hear him through the tumult of the rain curtain.

My answer was:

“No”

He had saved my life three times under three different circumstances. He'd held me in his arms after I'd almost died, made sure I went to all my appointments with my psychiatrist. He always made sure he was home by eight and never fell asleep before me, even when he was a blink away from collaspsing of exhaustion.He woke up every night for a month after the incident to calm me down when I felt like I was drowning in my own sleep.He never asked me to hand over the knives I'd hidden.He'd never asked me why I was training. He hadn't forced me to go see Touya. He'd never forced me to forgive him.

He swore that he would protect me.

And he did.

I opened my mouth and closed it. A multitude of emotions flowed through me. Words jostled at the gates of my lips, but none seemed right enough to clearly express what I was feeling.

But the fear that he would think I was lying to him got the better of me and I said :

“I don't know about the others, but I'm glad you're my father”

The moment the words left my mouth, I bit my cheek until it bled.The answer was so far from what I wanted to say.

He exhaled. Heavily.

I think he's disappointed.

A pang of sadness rose in my heart.

“Come here”

In the same breath, he grabbed me and pulled me towards him, closing his arms around me. I froze for a moment, my eyes wide open, trying to understand what was happening.

My arms remained at my sides.He buried his head in my hair, holding me tighter.

His shoulders jerked.

Why is he-

Something wet trickled down my forehead.

It took me a few seconds to realize it was tears.

My heart sank.

Slowly, very slowly, I wrapped my arms around his.

His voice was a broken hush.

“I hope you'll never leave me”

I had a lump in my throat.

I swear.

*

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