"What do you think about meeting my parents?"
Sakura stopped zooming in on a particularly gruesome murder scene on her phone.
It was bleeding into closing hours at the old bowling alley and the only people left were a couple teenagers at the end lanes and a small family settling a last score—she was right about the carpets being similar to the ones at the arcade, but these ones wouldn't suffer from a vacuuming or a deep cleaning.
She eyed a dark stain near her foot she knew was blood that couldn't be completely scrubbed out. The carpet wouldn't suffer from being completely replaced either.
"I mean, Casey's already met you and likes you a hell of a lot more than she does most people and I know Mom's going to love you."
She re-zoomed on the picture, focusing on the blood gushing from an artery in the shoulder. Meeting parents wasn't as novel as the idea to finish her schooling in the states; Tsume had liked her enough. When she first met Kiba, she'd be over at his house a couple times a week amidst more than a handful of dogs and his mother's and sister's jovial, booming voices. They welcomed her with open arms and wouldn't stop mussing up her hair when they found out she was the reason for Kiba's rising grades.
The last time she'd been at the Inuzuka house was right before their first encounter with Danzo.
(She wondered if Tsume would still smile at her if she saw her again.)
"Dad's, uh... I don't really know what'll happen with Dad. I've told you he's kind of a hardass and hard to please and I wouldn't wish that on anyone, especially not you but, uh, if you meet Mom you've got no choice but to meet him and. Uh." A pause. "I'm not really selling my case, am I?"
And Shibi had lost his warmth for her and Kiba a long time ago. She didn't blame him.
"If you were a door to door salesman, I would be reprimanding you on not meeting your quota," she responded dryly. Leon's laughter rang clearly through her left earbud as she slowly swiped her screen. Her focus zipped to the twisted leg bend opposite of how the knee was meant to and the tibia erupting from the skin through muddled red fluids. But on a few of the chunks of flayed skin she noted meticulously needled ink. "You don't need to explain more. I'll meet them."
"Really?"
"Mm." She zoomed out, deleted the photo, and pulled up her call screen. "Just let me know when."
"I'll talk to them tonight, but Mom'll probably have you over for dinner as soon as physically possible. She's an okay cook, but I can't say she won't burn anything."
"Your quota return is lower than I could ever imagine."
She could already envision the pout on his lips. "Sakuraaaaa..."
The door to one of the back offices swung open and she barely cast it a glance as she pulled her earbud case out of her pants pocket.
"Keep whining if you want, but I have to go. I'll see you tomorrow."
"See you, babe!" Came his chipper voice, and she raised an incredulous brow at the new nickname. "I'll text you later."
She plucked the bud out of her ear and placed it back in the case, and the shadows that came to loom over her only spoke when the END CALL was clear on her screen.
"Did you find anything?"
"Yeah." Sakura looked up. "It was a murder."
Kakuzu's eye twitched. "Prolonged exposure to Hidan has subjected you to his brand of stupidity."
"He might be right about some things. You need a hobby, and you probably need to get laid."
"Is anything worthwhile going to come out of your mouth or should I shut you up by ripping your tongue out of your head?"
Sakura stood up from her seat on the cheap plastic chair bolted into the ground.
"You would miss our engaging conversations," she deadpanned. He snorted quietly as they walked to one of the few cars left in the parking lot. "But your info was good. Chaz Morris, fifty-two, face disfigured, teeth pulled, fingerprints burned off all after death. A blood sample wouldn't ring him in any system and he deleted all social media presence under his real name."
As she slid into the passenger seat, her phone buzzed.
Itachi: pick up @ marina's, side door, 03-27-01 [6:42 pm]
She flashed the screen to Kakuzu and waited for him to shift the gear into drive to continue.
"I found one picture of him on his sister's inactive Facebook account, fishing trip in '98. The tattoos on the right shins match."
She watched the sun begin to dip past sharp building angles, a nuclear orange glow in the sky courtesy of the thunderstorms rolling in for the weekend. Claire had invited them all out for a movie night on Saturday, something about a new slasher series they all had to watch because she already roped Chris and Leon into it and it'd be so much more fun if you guys came too please, please, pleaseee?
"So yeah, your mark was murdered before you could get there first," she said. "You should have a word with the client about hiring multiple hitters for the same target."
Kakuzu bared his teeth as they pulled onto the freeway. "If an idiot doesn't understand what it means to sign a mercenary contract, there shouldn't be a signature on the contract to begin with," he growled. He zipped past some cars over twenty past the limit, and she was thankful it was after rush hour so she wouldn't have to wrestle the wheel out of his road-raged grip. "Fucking idiot. I'll kill him."
"Unless a third hire we don't know about kills him first."
She ignored the glower he turned onto her as she hooked her phone up to the car. Kakuzu was old—not old enough to refuse to use new tech and apps as they came and went, but old enough enough to scowl at the price of memberships and premiums while refusing to pay them.
She pressed shuffle on a classical playlist and settled to watch the scenes pass by out her window.
Or at least, she would have if she wasn't surprised by the next topic that didn't leave her to it for the rest of the drive.
"Were you talking to your boyfriend?"
Sakura slowly turned her head back around. Kakuzu's grip on the steering wheel had eased from his previous irritation and his eyes kept on the road ahead of them. His hair was still impeccable in its low ponytail and he didn't look at all worn out in his tailored suit despite the fact she knew he'd been around the city all day meeting with contacts, checking in with purchases, managing Jade Vine's storage warehouse on the other side of town when the pre-winter customer uptick would pack his shop in the upcoming weeks. She'd been splitting her time between there and Hiruko's as of late to help with the influx.
She narrowed her eyes. He kept driving.
She didn't want to say their relationship was complicated for the simple reason that it wasn't. He worked with her the same as everyone else, threatened her the same as everyone else, and she supposed he never got physical with her like he and Hidan were with each other because none of their conversations ended with her telling him to eat shit and die.
He never forced her to kill. Never said anything if she refused. Never said anything when she did it anyway.
So she figured with how little something like this would matter to him, he wouldn't say anything about it either.
"... Yeah," she answered slowly. "He wants me to meet his parents."
He grunted, barely audible over the low hum of cellos.
"When?"
"Soon. Maybe Sunday since that's the only day his dad's off." She glanced at him and at the question in his face. "He's a police captain."
"Hesukristo."
"I wasn't thrilled when I found out either."
"We're on our way to pick up a weapons shipment. I killed someone last week. You killed someone last week." He rubbed his forehead, and she batted away the slow throbbing that threatened to creep into her head. "The Chief of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department stuffed you and the boys in a shipping container intent on your corpses turning up in South Africa and you're dating a police captain's son?"
Well, when he said it like that.
"Superintendent General Shimura," the name trickled out of her like tar, poison on her tongue like the ink that stained it, "was his own beast and ended up in the ground regardless." The sun outside sunk even lower, spitting away half the citrus glow for a more blue-purple sky. "I don't have to trust the captain to trust Leon—kids aren't the sum of their parent's parts."
That implication she left to hang heavy in the air and she was tempted to roll the window down to let some of it out, but Kakuzu didn't mind. Never minded anything that wasn't a mouthy quip, usually.
"You're already on the job this Saturday," he said, and she nodded once. A job two cities over, in before the sun rose and out before it set. They might even make it back when dinner was still lukewarm. She already told Kiba and Shino to head to Claire's for the marathon and to extend her apologies for not showing up—appointment, visiting family, errands she couldn't shuck off, they had their pick of excuses. "I'll add another job in the area that puts us through Sunday, and I'll drop you off at school Monday morning."
"Okay." It wasn't odd to tack on smaller jobs to their bigger ones. Kakuzu rarely refused the chance of bonus pay. "How much is the job?"
"Fifteen."
"Thousand?"
His finger spasmed against the wheel. "... Hundred."
Sakura's gaze burned holes into the side of his head.
Fifteen hundred dollars was a pittance in his eyes; pocket change, enough of a cut to foist over when she fixed up some of the cars without him asking and he was in a mood to thank her for it. Fifteen hundred dollars were pennies in the parking lot, and pennies didn't justify staying another night in a different city when there was so much to do in the one they were already in. Why even bring it up to extend the assignment through Sunday? It wasn't like there were any plans that—
Wait.
"Are you... giving me an out from meeting Leon's dad?"
It sounded even more improbable saying it out loud.
But Kakuzu's face only held on to its deep set glower so worn and frequent against the thin age lines in his face and sped up, black leather oxfords lined with steel pushing hard against the gas pedal.
She looked at the door lock and wondered if she could survive a quick roll on the freeway at almost ninety miles an hour.
"You're not throwing yourself out of my car."
"Why not?" She shot back. "You're being weird."
A muscle in his face twitched, jolting the pale scars on his cheeks as he scowled deeper. But if anything it looked strained. Almost as if he was the one forcing the expression on his face.
"Involving yourself with him is a bad idea, but as long as it doesn't interfere with the business I couldn't care less about what you decide to do with your life," he said. He paused, searching for his next set of words like they would pop up as hazards on the road. "Kisame wants you to have a semblance of a normal life before you're fully committed to the business." His eyes watched her briefly before they focused back on the road as the car switched into the right couple lanes approaching their exit. "I don't know what fantasy he thinks he's living in, but you've never been normal and you'll never get to be normal. You're already living through the consequences of that." Under his breath he muttered, "a police captain, ano ba yan," before a tense sigh heaved out of his chest. "Leon..." A second, shorter sigh. "Makes you. Happy. Doesn't he?"
Sakura held onto her seat belt with both hands and nodded slowly. His teeth grit as they slowed at a red light and he shifted in his seat, trying to find a comfortable position in the wake of the uncomfortable everything-else he willed into existence into the bulked up coupe.
"... Good," he managed. "You should be if he's worth the trouble."
She stared at him blankly for a moment before she clicked the car door open.
It immediately locked again.
"Stop doing that."
"Then stop being weird."
"I'm not—" The words tangled up in his throat as his face morphed back into that dark and grumpy look synonymous with his name. Sakura pressed herself against the passenger door; not many things could "freak her out," and haven't been able to for years now with her experiences between prisons and corrupt officials and illegal fight clubs, but Kakuzu? Fumbling over words and feelings?
She might have to call a priest. Or an exorcist. Whichever was cheapest.
"I may think that Kisame's idealism is useless in our line of work, but I can see why he's worried. You killed someone last week," he repeated quietly, "and no one else knows, just like I promised."
Sakura shut her eyes for a brief moment and fought the impulse to sink down in her seat.
The Killing Thing was one of those Things her dad still didn't like to talk about even when it was just the two of them in the room. She hadn't told him the gory-er details of her time in Japan, and she didn't think he could live with some of the things she did to survive—to garner respect. Between Danzo's schemes and Former Prime Minister Sarutobi's meddling and that year her and the boys toiled away at the Cloud Sanctuary in South Africa learning how to care for sick animals in the day and how to shoot rifles and sawed-offs in the night, the Killing Thing came naturally. Maybe too naturally, Bee once joked while he was teaching her how to drive a stick shift.
"You're sixteen, but you follow orders just like everyone else," Kakuzu said. "It isn't the worst thing not to be like everyone else for a while."
Nightfall curtained over tall trees and ever taller buildings and street lights flickered on one by one by one, chasing tail lights down the street. Leon would text her in the next hour or two and when she got home later tonight her, Shino, and Kiba would be in the living room under piles of fleece blankets in a house empty save for them for the third night in a row.
Her shoulders loosened by a single unwound coil.
"You shouldn't take the job for Sunday. Or at least, I won't be tagging along," she said. "I want to keep it open if that's when I'm meeting Leon's parents."
Kakuzu grunted once before falling silent, nothing but the sound of tires on the road and the next song in the playlist filling the space in the car.
Then.
"You might as well not come for the assignment on Saturday either," he started, and her hackles began to rise. "Kiba mentioned a marathon that—"
This time, Sakura made it halfway out of the car before she was grabbed by the scruff and yanked back inside.
::
Leon paced.
Socked feet tread over the recently vacuumed carpet in his room, back and forth and back again past his bed and his desk and the drawn curtains on his window before he passed the curtains and the desk and the bed and well, look at that, he was starting all over again from the very top. He didn't know why he was so nervous tonight; if Sakura was unruffled by the literal madmen that were her tattoo artist friends, then dealing with Captain Caleb Kennedy would be a walk in the park.
He bit the inside of his cheek and made another loop.
"You're making me dizzy," Casey said as she scrolled on her phone as she sprawled on top of his covers. "Can you sit down and chill out? Sakura's cool, Dad's not gonna get to her."
"I know, I know." He stopped. Thought about it for a little longer. Then started pacing again. "But what if—"
His baby sister groaned and rolled her eyes. "Come on—"
"But what if this is the one thing that chases her off? I don't want to have her put up with Dad if he's never going to change. Because he's not." A grimace pulled at his lip as he caught sight of one of the pictures in his room—one back when he was in peewee football with a gap-toothed grin and Dad's hand on his shoulder, a thin line for a mouth and a dark head of hair only starting to salt white. "He's not going to like her, and he's not going to give her the chance she deserves the second he sees her hair."
Casey didn't say anything when he started pacing again this time, and they kept their unsettled quiet for a few minutes before one of the passes Leon made by his window showed a sleek black sports car pulling way too fast down the street. Messy white brushstroke detailing gave the feel of smoke and ash in billowing dust, and an angry visage of a skull sat as the hood ornament on top of the car's glossy finish.
The passenger door swung open, something like dark trap metal pouring out as its heavy bass rattled against the nearby houses. Sakura stepped out next, half annoyed, half resigned as she hefted a covered plate in her hands and turned around to say something into the car. The driver's side popped open then, and Leon frowned when Hidan slunk out and pillowed his chin on his arms on the roof of the car, his reply making Sakura roll her eyes.
"Whoa, who's that guy?"
Casey pressed her face against the glass and turned her face this way and that to try and get a better look.
"Uh, one of her friends." Down below, Hidan threw his head back and shrieked a cackle that loosened a couple strands of hair from his slick back. "He's a tattoo artist."
"He looks like he could kick your ass."
"Not if I kick his ass first," he muttered back. Casey snorted before she squinted down at the road one last time and made her way down the stairs.
"She's here!" She called out.
Dad's voice was faint as it floated up from around the kitchen. "Is that what that noise is?"
Leon shut his eyes for a few seconds before standing up straight and breathing out. One dinner. They could get through one dinner. How hard could one dinner be? Before he could follow his sister's lead and head downstairs, a short prickling feeling raised the hairs along the back of his neck and he turned to the window one last time.
Hidan stared straight at him, light eyes under lighter hair, and smiled too sharp to be friendly and everything about it made Leon want to gnash his teeth. Seeing him any time within the next year would be too soon, but he wrenched his gaze away and hurried down to the sound of heavy bass fading away. He passed Mom putting the final touches on her casserole, Casey setting a pitcher of water on the table, Dad by Mom at the counter trailing an eye after him in steeled scrutiny—
His stride didn't break on his way to the front door and after a quick fix of his bangs in the key bowl reflection, he blew out a breath, straightened his checkered blue and white button down, and opened the door.
The porch light was a soft daffodil glow over her hair, straightened and barely brushing against her shoulders. A crisp white collar poked out her navy blue sweater and a thin gold chain hung around her neck, a moose antler pendant hanging down the middle.
"I would've asked Hidan to turn down the music once we turned into the neighborhood," Sakura said quietly as he stepped aside to let her in.The soft kiss she planted on his lips warmed his chest from the evening chill, and he doubled his efforts to remember to wipe that "dopey" smile off his face unless he wanted Casey to tell Claire and Claire to tell Chris and then he'd have three C's gang up on him about it for the next week. "But he would've only turned the volume all the way up and I didn't want to risk your parents seeing us beat the shit out of each other in the street."
"You would've totally won."
She hummed lightly and he wrapped an arm around her middle to press a second kiss to her cheek. "It's a lot of work to clean blood off cement."
"Sounds like you got experience. Skateboarded off another roof?"
"Something like that."
Casey hopped into the hallway and beelined straight for Sakura, screeching to a stop only a couple steps away to stare up at her with big brown eyes, and Leon smiled. He didn't know what exactly happened when they first met, but ever since they all went out of Thai, Casey hung around her the same way she hung around Claire; eyes full of stars and a promise to be as cool as them when she got bigger.
"What'd you bring?"
"Dessert, if that's okay. Gulab jamun."
Sakura held up the dish, dark brown and a little more shallow than a bowl with a sheet of aluminum foil stretched over the top. "Liken them to... donut holes soaked in rosewater syrup."
"Goo-lahb ja-moon," Casey tried out. Sakura's lips quirked up for half a second as she patted the younger girl's hair, and another warm pulse wriggled through Leon's chest when he caught sight of it.
"It's an Indian dish. My godmother taught me to make it a little while after I moved back here."
"Where did you live before?"
Mom poked her head into the hallway, her round glasses sitting on the bridge of her nose as her beam lit up on the little group still in the entryway. Sakura didn't visibly startle or do anything that showed she was surprised, really, but if Leon hadn't had his arm around her middle he would've missed the way her muscles went taut under his hand. He squeezed her side lightly where Mom couldn't see. She let up, just a bit.
"Japan," she answered, ever smooth. "South Africa, for a while."
Casey carefully lifted the dish out of her hands and toted it to the kitchen as Mom drew closer.
"You'll have to tell us about it over dinner! Oh, it's so nice to finally meet you, call me Anne!"
And she was locked in the smaller woman's arms not a second later.
Mom's always been a pretty tactile person, pulling embraces from firm handshakes and grabbing shoulders amidst bright laughter. She was bubbly and loveable, the antithesis of Dad, but now he hid a short laugh the way Sakura froze up. Her arms glued to her sides and her normally unruffled expression turned into one of a deer's in the middle of oncoming traffic, and it was a full breath until her brain synced backup and she raised a hand to give Mom a couple awkward pats on the back.
"... Sakura," his girlfriend introduced. "It's nice to meet you too."
Mom stepped back, hands still on her biceps and that smile not dropping a single watt.
"Come in, come in, dinner just got out of the oven—oh, Leon, could you shut the door, please? Thank you—we've got chicken and rice casserole with a side of mashed sweet potatoes and roasted broccoli—"
::
"—nothing too fancy, unless you want me to burn the house down!" Anne joked before peals of laughter shook out her mouth.
Caleb didn't look up from sliding the dirty pots and cookware into the sink as the group moved into the dining room. He wiped down the counter, checked to make sure the stove was off, and glanced at the covered dish his youngest set down before she scurried out the swinging door.
A faint floral scent wafted up to his nose. Rosewater.
He wiped his hands on a towel and folded it neatly by the sink.
"It can't be that bad," a voice he'd never heard before said, and the even tone of it was enough for him to tip his head in surprise. It was softer than he expected; deeper, self-assured in a way most teeangers never were.
"It can," Leon and Casey answered in tandem, spurring another bout of laughter out of Anne.
He glanced down at his attire—dark slacks, a muted green shirt pressed and tucked, the metal of his belt buckle perfectly aligned with the fly of his pants—and ensured there weren't any stains or flecks before he looked towards the swinging door connecting to the dining room.
Caleb knew he was a man with a wealth of expectations. He'd been on the force for as long as he could remember, jumping straight into the Academy as quickly as he could after graduating high school. He bulldozed through his first part of his career like he was possessed, switching his title from Officer to Detective to Sergeant so fast the precinct joked that he left tire skids wherever he tread.
What is it you're racing against?
He didn't know. He still doesn't know. But everything in him was always telling him not to stop, so he didn't.
But he did slow down somewhere between sergeant and lieutenant. It was spring around then at an on-campus rally where he ordered his officers to keep their heads turned the other way unless actual molotovs were getting chucked—but even then, batons weren't made to beat kids and if any of them had an inkling, they'd answer to him.
But spring. Campus. Rally. And in the middle of it all a Dr. Anne Palladino, armed with a megaphone and who took one look at him from across the quad and flipped him off.
They'd gotten married a couple years after that.
The expectations he'd come to live with didn't diminish when she came into his life. In fact, they boiled and bubbled, rising in his chest and accepting no extinguisher. It rose with Casey's birth. Even higher when he brought Leon to live with them. Moreso when Leon proved himself brighter than many.
So with those insatiable expectations that nested behind his lungs and threaded through the ladder of his rib cage, it only seemed natural they'd latch themselves onto his children. Casey was... young, still. She'd rather listen to her favorite boyband's new album than finish the make up test her teacher let her retake and she had no interests in sports or instruments or even joining something like a debate club at her middle school. Her lack of drive was a main source of a lot of his headaches, to be frank, but he would try to curb that out of her once she started high school.
And Leon...
Caleb squared his shoulders and pushed through the swinging door.
He expected to walk in and see a typical high school girl, maybe shy and polite, maybe on a sports team. Soccer. Volleyball. Tennis. Regardless, that picture was nothing but an amorphous blob because all he knew was that her name was Sakura, no surname.
But he walked in and saw...
He wasn't sure what he saw.
The girl's face was completely devoid of emotion—almost unnatural, in a sense—as her attention moved back and forth from Anne to Casey and back again as they took turns telling her the story of their most recent culinary disaster: ceiling pot roast. She nodded along to the story, oddly serious and fully attentive as she towered over them both. Thick pink hair made him want to cock a brow and she stood with the perfect posture of a soldier. Dark clothes, dark gaze, and a dark way about her as she kept still and didn't move once, not even to fidget.
"Dad," Leon exclaimed once he caught sight of him. He straightened up instantly, his fingers brushing lightly against the girl's right hand. "This is my girlfriend, Sakura. Sakura, Captain Caleb Kennedy."
"Pleasure," he greeted as he held out his hand. Sakura eyed it for a moment before taking it, and he noted both the strong grip and rough calluses all along her fingers and palms. Working hands or athlete hands, he couldn't figure.
"Likewise," she answered in turn. Up close he could see the thin jagged lines clawing up one side of her chin.
He pulled his hand back first when she made no move to, and he narrowed his eyes. She didn't blink.
"Have a seat!" Anne chirped as she ushered them all to the dining table. As she passed behind Caleb, he held back a wince when she jabbed him in the side and shot him a warning look before her cheery smile jumped back onto her face and she took her usual seat to the right of the head of the table, Casey plopping down beside her. Leon took the place to the left of the head, leaving Sakura to take the place to his right. For a second though, he hesitated, eyes glancing down to her left side before rising up to meet her gaze in an apologetic question.
Whatever question he asked must've been the right one when her lips quirked up in the slightest of smiles and she shook her head once before her face fell back into a perfect mask of apathy.
"So, Sakura, you said you lived in Japan before? In South Africa? Did you live there long?"
"Japan for around six years. South Africa for nearly two." She let Leon serve her casserole and lay a hand on his forearm and murmured a near-silent thank you when she had enough, and accepted the bowl of mashed potatoes Casey handed over. "I moved back to the states a little over a year ago."
"Any particular reason?" Caleb questioned mildly.
"A change of pace," she replied, eyes as cold as the metal in her hands. "I heard the scenery was nice around here."
She set a piece of chicken in her mouth as Casey leaned forward and asked what kind of "cool things" she did before moving over, and Caleb looked down at his plate of rice, chicken, and vegetables, and thought.
Sakura was smart, that fact was non-negotiable. She was young and vague, answering their questions the same time she was giving him nothing to work with, but living in Japan that long would probably lead to a fluency to the language; South Africa he was far out of the know of the country—of the continent, even—but he wouldn't rule out her picking up the culture from her time there.
That was three languages she must know at the very least. Only sixteen years old, well-traveled, stoic. His gut told him that all of that wasn't just a personality flourishing under typical means; it was learned and molded and carved out of sterner stuff.
Or, he could just be a paranoid old bastard. Could be reading too far into someone Leon obviously cared about enough to sneak smiles her way even when she wasn't looking, watching her with the same sort of gaze Caleb himself had every time he woke up to Anne still asleep next to him in the barely-there morning light.
"—bout you, Sakura?" Anne asked, and he picked his gaze back up from his plate. "Are you in any extracurriculars at school?"
Sakura finished chewing her most recent bite of food before answering. "No, I have a couple jobs after school sometimes."
"You've got more than one job?"
"Yes."
A beat, and when there was nothing to follow—
"And what is it you do sometimes?" Caleb prompted. At the corner of his eye he watched Leon's fingers curl tighter around his fork, but he refused to draw his gaze away from the girl. She made no indication she'd been pierced by the pointed end of his question and returned his regard with the same evenness she carried through his front door.
"It varies by day," she said. "Sometimes I'll run the front of a tattoo shop and help sterilize between clients." Casey perked up at that and Caleb felt the future echoes of a migraine for when he'd have to watch out for her growing interest in tattoos. "Other times I'll moonlight as a mechanic and run fixes at a customs shop if they need an extra hand."
"Oh, you don't really hear people picking up jobs like that at your age. You'll learn a lot of neat skills, I'm sure," Anne grinned. She shot her husband a look. "Right, hun?"
Caleb speared a piece of broccoli. "Why a tattoo shop?"
Anne didn't quite sigh, but—
"Would you believe me if I said the scenery was also nice around there?"
He barely caught the corner of his eye before it let out an involuntary twitch. "No."
"Hm." She wiped her mouth with her napkin and placed it back over her lap. Her posture was rigid in her seat, had been since the second she sat down, but now he could see it wasn't due to the nerves. "The shop only has two artists. Old friends." Between the artists or with her and them, he wasn't too sure. He was about to cut in and push for a cleaner answer, but maybe that wasn't a tooth he was ready to pull. "If I'm not busy, I'll come in."
"If you are?"
"They're adults," she answered. "They'll manage."
The sound of an engine rumbled past the house, accompanying headlights swiping along the base of the front windows. Silverware scraped ceramic dishes, melting ice cubes clinked the insides of glass cups, a couple wary glances tore through the weighted silence in the room.
Caleb wasn't a man who minded silences. Sure, whenever he managed to make it home for family dinners, chatter always bubbled and over-filled the plates around him. Anne talked about students and classes and the day to day on campus, Casey complained about her classmates and assignments, and Leon was happy to interject with stories about games and his team. He tended not to speak up in the round robin of recounts, and if Anne ever asked—it was almost always Anne asking—he kept his responses the same. The precinct was busy. The coffee was bitter. The criminals never changed.
He watched as Sakura calmly continued to clean off her plate despite the air slowly condensing around the table. Anne was going to have a harsh word with him later, he already knew.
"Um, so when you work at the tattoo shop, do you get to see the artists make a lot of cool tattoos?" Casey piped up.
"Yeah. The rest of us in the shop end up getting free-handed with a sharpie if the day's slow enough."
"Free-hand? Like you guys doodle on each other?"
"Sharpie washes off," Sakura shrugged. "I can show you some of the designs they've drawn on me, if you want."
Casey's eyes sparkled across the table, but before she could even think to dive out of her seat to glue herself to Sakura's side and scroll through the pictures on her phone, a sharp prickle at the back of Caleb's head made him furrow his brow.
"How old are these artists?"
Sakura considered him for a moment. "Older."
"So too old for a high schooler to be regularly hanging out with."
"Dad," Leon hissed. Casey sank back into her seat and angled her face towards her plate as her eyes flickered back and forth between her father and her brother's girlfriend.
"Yeah," she admitted easily. "I'm sure a lot of people think the same way, Captain."
Caleb's eyebrow ticked, but then he caught himself as he stared her straight in the eye. The coldness that had been there had ebbed slightly to make room for this defiant fire. He could say it was way out of place to see that sort of glare in her eyes, but if he kept saying everything off about her didn't belong he wasn't sure there'd be anything of her left. His words skipped past her like flat pebbles across a lake, and the scars that thickened her skin probably ran deeper than what he'd seen.
"Don't you think that if a lot of people are saying it's wrong, it might be wrong?"
"Don't you think that if a lot of people keep making opinions about things they don't know anything about, they might be wrong?"
To his right, Anne wasn't even trying to hide her small, cheeky smile as she dug into her food and didn't try to pretend she was on his side.
He leaned back in his chair, wrists laid against the edge of the table as his knife and fork hung in his loose grasp. He took in her dark colors, her bright pink hair, the screeching noise some people called music that batted at his ears when she got out of the car. He thought of the rough finger pads in a firm handshake and how she refused to cow standing toe to toe with a figure that would scare most teenagers out of their wits. Pulled back shoulders, ramrod spine, expression carved in stone, everything, all of it, an unsettling crawl through his veins.
And there she sat beside his son.
The crawl through his veins turned to rush and raised the hair on the back of his head.
Leon had always been smart as a whip, his eyes as calculating as they were friendly and his wits were enough to get him out of spots of trouble, especially the ones he thought Caleb didn't know about. He kept up in school with no trouble, was on track to be salutatorian of his graduating class, was a star player on the school's football team, and was thinking of following in his footsteps in attending the Academy? Caleb could have never asked for more of his children.
So imagine his surprise when he learned of a girlfriend during one of the rare weeknights he was able to come home for dinner. The boy had a tendency for babble when excited, like his mother, though it had been coming out less and less the older he got. They'd been together for a couple months, the Redfields liked her, Casey liked her, and she agreed to come over whenever they wanted to meet her.
Anne had been ecstatic and told him to ask her over immediately. Caleb quietly continued eating and wondered why he couldn't immediately put together a picture in his head.
He supposed this was why.
"Thank you for the meal," Sakura said, and Caleb snapped back to himself to find his plate completely polished off and the food laid out cool and practically gone. "And having me over for dinner." She smiled slightly and glanced right at him, too calm, too poised, any wider and he'd have to call her shark-like. "Would you like to try dessert?"
::
The girl wasn't surprised to find him across the hall from the bathroom door when she stepped out of it.
"Captain," she acknowledged quietly. Not too far away, they could hear Leon and Casey washing and drying the dishes and Anne upstairs taking a quick phone call from one of the other professors.
"Sakura," he returned just as quietly. He crossed his arms. "I'll make this quick."
"No need to tell me anything we both already know," she said, leaning back against the closed door. "You don't like me, and you don't want me dating your son. You'll tell him that after I leave, he won't agree with you, and then you'll be upset with the both of us. Me, most of all." Her eyes flashed, an ice cold fire. "Did I get that right?"
He thought of his son, of the little boy hiding in the pantry of a crime scene, blood in his blond hair and a kitchen knife clutched in his shaking grip as the bodies of his birth parents lay riddled with bullets in the next room over. How despite it all, he'd grown up with so much love in his heart that he was bursting with it.
"You're going to ruin him," he said. "I hope you know that too."
And for the first time that whole night, she finally met one of his expectations when her stone cold facade finally cracked.
::
The door had barely shut behind him when he'd taken her hands in his and pulled her close.
"I shouldn't have asked you over for dinner," Leon mumbled into her shoulder. He locked his arms around her middle as they stood out in the light of the porch. It had gotten a lot colder outside and he forgot to snag a jacket before stepping out, but her ride was on its way and he couldn't suffocate in the house for another second. "Actually, I should've just made sure that Dad was far away on a business trip. Do police captains take business trips? They should, or else they'd be at home making the worst fucking impression on people with their shit attitudes and their shit remarks and their shit thinking like what they know is what's right in the world..."
The rest of his words were swallowed up in Sakura's nice blue sweater when her arms pressed against his sides and she tucked her chin in the crook of his neck.
"It's fine."
"It wasn't."
"We knew your dad wasn't going to like me."
"Doesn't mean he should've acted like that the whole night." He sighed and pressed a kiss to the scars on her chin before he pulled back just enough to look her in the eye. "I'm sorry about him. Whatever he thinks is his own—I don't—nothing he'll ever say is going to change my mind about you. I want you to know that."
She gave him one of those laughs he loved hearing from her, a slight huff past her lips and the smallest uptick at the corner of her lips that made him want to lean in and kiss it.
He did. Her smile grew just a little bit wider before she pursed her lips to push it back down.
"I know," she said. Sakura reached up to push his bangs out of his eyes and with this clearer view of her, he watched her eyes dim as she took a short step back until his hands were left sitting on her waist. At the sound of a low rumble, his gaze drew down the street to a car he'd never seen before rolling to a stop in front of the house. Plain dark gray with almost illegally dark tinted windows—well, at least it wasn't Hidan again. "Thanks for inviting me over. Your mom's nice."
"Yeah, sometimes I wonder how she ever ended up with Dad in the first place." Leon stole one last kiss. "I'll see you Monday?"
"... Yeah. I'll see you."
She squeezed his hand, and he swore her eyes dimmed as she turned away and headed towards the car.
There were moths flying too close to his head as they bumbled around the yellowed porch light and he stayed, hands tucked in his pockets until she was just a pair of tail lights turning away from the street.
::
"How was dinner?"
The turn signal blinked as they waited at the light just out of the neighborhood, one of Kakuzu's hands on the wheel and the gold earrings in his lobes tinted red in the intersection glare.
"Fine," Sakura answered as she watched a car pull into a plaza a street over. "Nothing I didn't expect."
A grunt, then smooth acceleration when red switched to green. She made no move to play his favorite classical songs or was in any mood to annoy him with another play through of Three Heartbeats 'til Fall's new album—there was nothing but the sound of them on the road, the two of them still in their leather seats and her phone tucked away comfortably in her back pocket.
She spoke up again halfway into their drive back to her house.
"I heard you're skipping town the next two weeks starting tomorrow. The Prague Job, completely off the grid until you're back in the States." She exhaled through her nose. "Let me tag along. I'll handle Dad when he gets upset about it."
Kakuzu's gaze lingered on her the entire time they sat at the next stoplight, but he moved his attention back to the road not too long after they were driving again.
"Let him stay mad," he said, and she was glad he didn't say anything when she tipped her head back and closed her eyes. "There's nothing he can do when we're in the air before he gets up in the morning."
At the next intersection, he turned left instead of right and made his way towards RAIN instead.