Chapter Text
September 2009
“Taylor, can I talk to you about something?”
I felt my whole body tense when Dad asked the question. He looked uncomfortable, breaking the silence that had overtaken the dinner table ever since Mom died with a stunted voice, and I just knew he was going to ask about Emma.
School had only been back in session for a week, but it’d been a lot longer since Emma had last been over or since Dad had last seen her. I’d hoped he wouldn’t ask, and I’d hoped even harder since school started and Emma made it clear we weren’t friends anymore.
I’d told Dad that first day of class—about the bullying, not that Emma was the instigator—but I was really regretting it now. It’d escalated since then, and I really, really didn’t want Dad to get involved, but I knew that was the direction this conversation was going.
I was so certain that Dad was going to ask about Emma and the bullying that I’m pretty sure my jaw actually dropped when he asked, “How would you feel about me dating again?”
It was so unexpected that it felt like my brain and every thought running through my head came to a screeching halt, like it couldn’t even process what he’d just said. Dad? Dating? It felt like those two words shouldn’t even be in the same sentence, let alone coming out of either of our mouths. It was weird to think about, but the more pressing feeling was one more like hurt. What about Mom? It hadn’t been that long, had it? How long was a normal amount of time to start dating again after losing your wife?
I didn’t know. I didn’t have any friends who’d lost a parent before. Or, well, I didn’t have any friends, period. The closest thing I had was my history with Emma, and I supposed there was a little to go off from there, but not much. Mr. Barnes had some stories from work as a divorce lawyer, but he never got into much detail, and I usually didn’t care enough to listen past what would be considered polite.
With divorce, it seemed pretty hit or miss. Either people started dating again right away, or they never dated again. Was it the same with death? It felt like it shouldn’t, but I really didn’t know. It felt like long enough had passed that it didn’t feel totally inappropriate to entertain the idea of Dad dating, but her death was still fresh enough that it felt a little like a betrayal once I’d thought about it after a few moments. I couldn’t stop thinking about Mom once I’d started. That probably meant it was too soon, right?
“Are- Are you just thinking about it?” I asked once I found my voice. It was a real possibility that Kurt and Lacey had just encouraged Dad to go speed dating or something. I didn’t think Dad would talk to me about that, though. It had to be something more concrete. “Or did you meet someone?”
I thought it was a good question. It made me feel like I knew more about relationships than I actually did. More importantly, it would give me more information to work with before giving Dad an answer to his question.
“Um, the latter,” Dad told me, and I wasn’t sure if that was better or worse. Worse, probably. It meant he was thinking about a real person, not just the abstract idea of replacing Mom. “We saw each other a lot when you were at summer camp, and things have been going well. I think we might really have something, but I don’t want to… I don’t know, do anything you aren’t okay with.”
In other words, he was willing to break up with her if I asked. Okay. I didn’t know how to feel about that. I guess it was nice to know I had the power here, but the fact that Dad was willing to give me that power made me feel guilty about using it.
“What’s she like?” I asked, still not answering the question.
“He,” Dad corrected, and that was even more surprising than the whole dating thing.
“He?” I echoed. The idea had never even crossed my mind.
“He,” Dad confirmed, looking a little more nervous, but there was something stronger brimming underneath it. Happiness? No, definitely not. Pride? Probably not, but maybe. Relief? I could see it. “You know your mother ran with Lustrum’s gang.”
People had said that to me enough that I knew what the euphemism meant. It still didn’t explain Dad, though. Was he just reminding me that Mom liked women? Or that she might’ve liked women. I guess no one explicitly told me one thing or the other. I didn’t see much point in Dad mentioning it right now.
“What’s he like then?” I asked, deciding it was better to circle back than keep asking Dad about his sexuality. It didn’t sound like this was something new for him, but he seemed uncomfortable talking about it, and I didn’t really want to think about it. It didn’t really matter in the end. Man or woman, the important part was that it was my dad who was dating them.
Okay, now that I’d sat with it for a few seconds, maybe it mattered a little bit. I’d stopped thinking about Mom so much when Dad said the person he liked was a guy. It made it a little easier to separate “Dad is dating someone” from “Dad is replacing Mom.” Was that homophobic? I should look it up later, especially if Dad dating men was going to be a thing.
Dad said the man’s name was Ken. Dad met him through work, because of course he did. Where else did Dad go? He met him at a DWA negotiation, Ken having a similar role in one of the other groups that occupied the space around the docks. If I’d ever thought about it before, that was probably the kind of guy I’d say I could see Dad dating. Someone like him, maybe a little more rugged.
“He’s um, Asian,” Dad told me when I didn’t say anything for a little too long after he’d finished telling me about Ken. His voice went a little nervous again, and I wasn’t sure why. Ken being Asian wasn’t any worse than finding out Dad was dating again or that Dad was gay. Or bisexual, I guess. Queer.
“Okay?” I responded, not knowing what Dad wanted me to say. Did he think I was racist or something? “You know I’m not part of the Empire or anything like that.”
“I know,” Dad said, and he almost sounded a little amused. “It’s just… You know most Asian people in Brockton Bay run with the ABB? Especially the men, and especially around the docks.”
I hadn’t known that. Should I have? It made sense. There were a lot of posters at school with resources to help Asian kids who were having trouble with the ABB, but I’d never seen anyone looking at them. I figured they just knew the school sucked and wouldn’t help them.
“So, he’s a gang member?” I asked. I didn’t like the idea of Dad dating someone like that.
“Well… He’s never told me he is or he isn’t, but I haven’t asked either,” Dad said, and what kind of answer was that? “The ABB has a lot of legitimate businesses around the docks, but I really doubt there’s a lot of people who are just part of one or the other.”
Wasn’t the ABB a gang? Was that how gangs worked? I’d seen stuff about protection payment on PHO and in Mafia movies, not that I’d really watched any. Was that what Dad meant? But why would Ken be negotiating with the DWA if he was just a business worker in ABB territory?
“Like I said, pretty much every Asian person in Brockton Bay is connected to the ABB,” Dad went on. He paused briefly, subtly ducking his head a bit to meet my eyes. “They don’t have much of a choice.”
Oh. Oh. That made a little more sense. I think I saw something about that on PHO? About how Lung consolidated all the Asian gangs in Brockton Bay, regardless of where they came from or what language they spoke. Part of that involved… I didn’t know what the word was, uniting? Uniting sounded too positive for a super villain, too heroic. Including? Maybe that was better? It sounded too weak for Lung, though. But he’d transformed Brockton Bay’s Asian population to something that could stand up against Empire 88, so that was something. That had to include people who weren’t gangsters, right?
There were still parts of Dad’s story that weren’t really making sense. There was still that thing about Ken being involved in a negotiation with the DWA. That had to mean he was pretty involved, right? But the way Dad said it made it sound like he had to.
I hadn’t said anything yet, but some of what I was thinking must have shown on my face. Dad gave me a sympathetic sort of smile and told me, “I hate to say you’ll understand when you’re older, but Brockton Bay racial politics might be too much for you at this point in your life. I mean, you just started high school.”
He was probably right, as much as I hated to admit it. Dad was a grown man, and he’d dealt with the ABB, the Empire, and the Merchants for far longer and far more than I ever had or ever would. I just had to trust that Dad knew what he was doing, even if I didn’t want to.
“But you like him? He makes you happy?” I finally asked. Dad nodded wordlessly, and that was enough for me. For now at least. We’d see how I felt if and when I met him.
October 2009
I think Dad might have looked up how to introduce your kid to your new partner on the computer because the way he did it really wasn’t what I was expecting.
I was expecting Ken to come over for dinner, probably at home, but maybe at a restaurant. We’d all kind of sit together awkwardly, and Ken would ask me about school, and I would tell him it was fine, but not be able to say much because I was so stressed about Dad reading into something I said. Ken would try for a bit, but then he’d see how awkward and weird I was, and he’d give up after awhile, and we’d just kind of eat in silence. Maybe do a board game after dinner, and then he’d go home, and Dad wouldn’t bring him around anymore unless he married him, which I couldn’t really see happening.
That was not what happened. Instead, I met him standing in the doorway the Friday before Halloween, both of us in some of the worst Halloween costumes I’d ever seen.
Seriously. I wasn’t planning on doing anything for Halloween this year, too old for trick-or-treating, and the Trio’s bullying getting bad enough that I didn’t even look at any of the flyers advertising the school’s Halloween party. But Dad said Kurt and Lacey invited him, Ken, and a couple of Ken’s friends to their Halloween party this year, and I was invited like I always was. Some years I went, and some years I didn’t, but when I’d gone before, Emma had always come with me, or at the very least Mom had been there for me to hide behind. What was I supposed to do without either of them there? Just sit in the corner and hope no one talked to me?
But Dad said this was a good time to meet Ken because there wasn’t pressure for us to talk a lot one-on-one. He seemed excited about it in that quiet sort of way he did, so I didn’t have the heart to say no. And because I couldn’t think of a good excuse to get out of it.
So, about thirty minutes before Ken was supposed to pick us up, I’d dug a pair of cat ears out of the basement and drawn whiskers on my face with a thick, dried-out marker. Definitely the worst Halloween costume I’d ever worn. Even Dad’s was better. He looked kind of lame in a cloak with plastic vampire fangs, but at least it was an actual costume. I hoped Ken didn’t show up as a vampire hunter or something. I knew I was kind of dorky, and I got it from Dad, but I don’t think I would be able to handle it if his boyfriend was dorky too.
Ken definitely wasn’t dorky.
I was kind of hovering behind Dad when he opened the door, so I got a good look at him right away and had a moment to take it all in while Dad talked to him. Ken was really not the kind of guy I was expecting Dad to be dating.
The first thing I noticed was that he was Asian, which I already knew, but it was still the first thing I noticed. The second thing I noticed was how big he was.
Dad was tall, but no one would ever call him big. Dad was thin like I was. He was a little wiry just from spending time on the docks, but no one would ever call him muscular. But Ken was muscular. He wasn’t, like, a bodybuilder with bulging muscles or anything, but one look at him and it was immediately obvious how much more space he took up than Dad. Sure, his arms were kind of big, but his shoulders and chest? I was sure he could knock Dad over if he just puffed his chest out a bit.
Okay, he wasn’t huge. I was probably overreacting a bit. He looked like kind of a normal guy in pretty good shape. I still wasn’t expecting it, though. I was expecting someone more like Dad, someone a little more puny and maybe a little nerdy. Dad was definitely shooting up with Ken.
Once Dad moved out of the way a bit, my mind focused enough to remember we were going to a Halloween party. Ken had these sprawling tattoos on his arms that I thought were fake at first, but then I realized there weren’t any sleeves poking out from his white and blue t-shirt. Those were most definitely real. Not part of his Halloween costume then. What was he supposed to be?
“Taylor,” Dad said, drawing my attention. He was sort of Ken’s height, I realized. Dad was leaning on him a bit, which looked a little silly, but neither of them seemed to notice. “This is my boyfriend. Kenta, this is my daughter Taylor.”
Kenta? His name was Kenta? Was I supposed to call him Ken or Kenta? Should I call him mister? Was that weird? Oh, he was looking at me. I was regretting the cat ears now. They probably made me look pretty kiddy.
“Your father said you liked tea,” Kenta said, voice so hurried I almost couldn’t understand him through his thick accent. Another thing I wasn’t expecting. He held out his hands, almost like he was shoving the box he was holding toward me. “I got you some.”
Slowly, I lifted my hands to take the box, and I couldn’t help but feel a little endeared. He was nervous too, way more than I was. I could work with that.
“Thank you, um, Kenta,” I responded, taking a shot in the dark. Dad called him Kenta, so didn’t that mean that was his name? Even though he’d called him Ken all the time up until now. Wait, I should say something now, shouldn’t I? About the gift. About the tea. What was a nice way to ask if it was a gross kind? “Where did you get it?”
“Docks,” Kenta said, and Dad elbowed him not so subtly. Kenta didn’t even glance at him, but he kept talking like this was a regular occurrence, only stumbling over his words for a moment. “The Asian market imports a lot of tea from China.”
How was that different from the stuff I bought at the store? I looked at the box and rotated it in my hands. The writing was in some language I was pretty sure was Chinese, but I didn’t really know what that was supposed to mean. Still, I was looking forward to trying it. “Thanks.”
I wanted to slap myself. I’d already thanked him. I tried not to wince as I looked up, hoping I seemed normal, when Kenta’s costume finally clicked in my mind. His shirt. I’d mentally waved it off as just a t-shirt, and it kind of was, but I knew that design. White and blue. Legend’s colors. It didn’t make for a great t-shirt, but it was an iconic design. I couldn’t believe it’d taken me so long to recognize it.
Did Kenta like capes? I should’ve dressed as a cape. That’d give me something to talk about. Then again, I was already worried about seeming nerdy. But I’d kind of expected Kenta to be nerdy too before I saw his muscles and tattoos. People who had muscles and tattoos could still be nerdy, right? He didn’t look nerdy, but I could hope.
I was getting ahead of myself. It was kind of a crappy costume. He literally was just wearing a t-shirt. His pants didn’t even match Legend’s colors. He probably just picked some random costume from the store, sort of like how I’d grabbed the first thing that resembled a costume from the basement when I’d remembered I should dress up.
But Legend seemed kind of specific. He was one of the most popular and famous heroes in the world, but some inkling in my brain was telling me that it mattered that Kenta had picked Legend over someone like Eidolon, Armsmaster, or Dauntless. What was it? I didn’t know that much about Legend. I usually stuck to the Brockton Bay forums on PHO.
Wait. We’d talked about Legend in US history last year. It was like a day of class, but I’d been excited to talk about capes at school. The Triumvirate had a huge impact on the world, of course, but Legend had affected the country in a way that a lot of heroes hadn’t. Had Kenta picked the Legend shirt because he was gay? Or, more eloquently, because his fame and actions had advanced queer rights in the US? I could see it, but I could see it just as easily as Kenta liking Legend because he was a popular hero, and I could see that just as easily as him grabbing a random shirt off a rack that sort of resembled a Halloween costume.
“Why don’t you put that in the kitchen, and we can head over to Kurt and Lacey’s?” Dad suggested, and I remembered I was holding the box still. I scurried off, putting the box in the cabinet with the rest of my tea, and followed Dad and Kenta out to the car. Or, to Kenta’s car, rather.
I didn’t know anything about cars, and I didn’t really care about what kind of car he was driving. I was a little more focused on the fact that there was already someone in Kenta’s passenger seat. Dad had said some of Kenta’s friends had been invited, but I didn’t really think that meant we would be driving one of them.
Kenta got in the driver’s seat, and Dad got in the back with me, which I was grateful for. I half-expected Dad to go sit in the front with Kenta and for that other guy to come in the back to sit with me. Or worse, Dad and Kenta sat in the back, and I’d be in the passenger seat pretending I couldn’t see them in the mirrors. I didn’t really want to sit with Dad, but this was a lot better than the alternatives.
“This is Lee,” Kenta told me when we all got in the car. Lee gave me a curt nod, briefly making eye contact with me through one of the mirrors. He had one of those lame t-shirt costumes like Kenta, but I couldn’t really see it from where I was sitting, and I didn’t recognize the color scheme at first glance. I thought maybe I should say something or ask how he and Kenta knew each other, but I didn’t really want to, so I didn’t.
We stayed quiet for most of the car ride, but Lee messed with the radio most of the time, changing the channel whenever a commercial or talk show came on, so there was enough noise that it didn’t really feel awkward. There’d be plenty of time for that later.
The night was kind of whatever. Dad seemed to have a good time catching up with his buddies, and Kenta seemed to fit in well enough. There were a few other Asian people there that I thought might’ve been Kenta’s friends, but there were a few Asian people in the DWA, so maybe I was just making assumptions.
I mostly sat on the couch with my book, trying to ignore the handful of younger kids who’d come to the party with their parents. Lee sat on the other side of the couch after awhile. He was doing something on his cell phone, and he looked pretty focused, but I couldn’t help but feel like he was expecting me to say something. I resisted the urge for awhile, but I really wasn’t that strong-willed and I caved a lot sooner than I would’ve liked.
“Why aren’t you with the rest of them?” I asked, and I wanted to cringe. I’d hate it if someone asked me something like that. Lee didn’t seem all that bothered, though.
“I don’t really work with the DWA that much,” Lee answered, and that kind of made sense, but it also made me wonder why he was here if he didn’t know anyone other than Kenta, “and they’re drinking.”
That last part was a little unexpected. “You don’t drink?”
Lee shrugged. “Not really. I don’t handle it super well. I’m designated driver.”
“Does Kenta drink?” I asked, and that was probably a weird thing to ask, but I was curious. Dad did a bit, not as much as the other dockworkers, but I knew he snuck beers that he thought I didn’t know about. I didn’t know how I felt about mixing a boyfriend into all that.
“His Asian glow is pretty bad. He gets embarrassed about it,” Lee answered casually, and I really had no idea what that meant. Lee said it like something I should know, but I didn’t, and I didn’t want to ask. He sort of shook his head when he said it, though, so it sounded like the answer was no? “He still will sometimes. He gets over it pretty fast when- uh, I mean, it’s sometimes a little worse when, um, in casual settings.”
The way Lee stumbled through those last few sentences told me he really didn’t want to be talking about drinking with a fifteen-year-old, so I stopped bothering him. Lee got up a couple times to get more food, nursing a small plate of cheese cubes most of the night, but eventually joined some of the other grown-ups in something or another, leaving me alone on the couch the way I wanted it to be.
We left fairly early compared to the others, Lee dropping me and Dad off at our house around eleven. I squirrled off inside so I didn’t have to watch to see if Dad and Kenta would kiss each other goodbye. I’d sat in the passenger seat on the way back, and my earlier fear about having to look at them in the back through rearview mirrors had come true. Neither was drunk, just a little red-faced, but they were acting warmer than they had before, and I didn’t really want to see that.
I made a cup of that new tea when I got home and looked up what Asian glow was on my computer. I don’t know why Lee thought I’d know what that was. It seemed kind of specific.
The tea was good, but I hadn’t realized it was caffeinated until I’d been on the computer long enough to hear Dad turning in. I ended up staying up long enough on PHO to get live updates on a sudden middle-of-the-night showdown between Lung, Oni Lee, and some E88 capes. I ended up ruining my sleep schedule a bit, but it was totally worth it to watch the online chatter about the fight. All in all, not a bad night.
November 2009
We did end up having the awkward dinner and board games eventually. It wasn’t awful, but I didn’t look forward to the days I knew he was coming over. School kept getting worse, and having someone over inevitably meant being asked how school was going, which kind of tainted the visits. I thought about asking if he was a fan of Legend, but Kenta dressed like a normal person after Halloween, no more superhero shirts, so I never worked up the courage.
Kurt and Lacey invited us over for Thanksgiving this year, which I was kind of looking forward to because the holiday meant an escape from school, and the food meant the attention wouldn’t be on me. Dad and I spent the afternoon peeling and mashing potatoes to bring over and making pumpkin pie from store-bought crusts and canned pie filling. We didn’t talk much, but it didn’t feel weird. We skipped Thanksgiving last year, Mom’s death being a little too fresh, but this felt kind of like returning to normal.
Ken picked us up like he had for the Halloween party, but his friend Lee hadn’t come along this time, so I sat in the back with the potatoes, the pies, and some bowl-like thing with a cord attached that had been in the car when I got in. Whatever Kenta was bringing, I assumed, but I felt kind of weird about asking, so I didn’t.
There were a good number of people already at Kurt and Lacey’s house when we arrived. Lacey’s mother, brother, sister-in-law, and nephew were there, the nephew thankfully being a little older than me and thus pretty uninterested in making small talk. One of Kurt’s cousins was there, which I thought was a little odd. A couple more DWA guys arrived, one with his girlfriend, when we were putting our food in the kitchen. I recognized them, and they seemed happy to see me, but mostly stayed out of the kitchen, so I was spared any awkward greetings.
I basically just followed Lacey’s instructions until we were ready to eat, helping out with little tasks like setting the table, tossing the salad, and moving dishes around as she saw fit. I found out that the bowl-like thing from the car had to be plugged in, and it was filled with rice, which I thought was kind of a weird thing to bring to Thanksgiving. Maybe Kenta had never celebrated Thanksgiving before?
I took the thought back when we all sat down at the table, and I finally took a bite of the tiny clump of rice I’d put on my plate to be polite. I felt my eyes widen a bit when the first forkful entered my mouth. I liked rice fine, but I wouldn’t say I thought rice was particularly good, before now at least. This stuff was good!
I thought about saying something, but Lacey’s mom beat me to it.
“Why, Ken,” she said, holding up her hand in front of her full mouth politely, “this is about the best rice I’ve had. What’s your secret?”
Kenta looked a little embarrassed but accepted the praise with grace. “Thank you, ma’am. It’s nothing special.”
Dad clapped his hand on Kenta’s forearm, looking a little proud. “It’s the rice cooker. The first time we cooked together, I thought Kenta was going to have an aneurysm when he saw me put rice on the stove!”
Kenta made a noise of agreement. “White rice is essential to meals in Japan and China. In both languages, there is no distinction between the words for rice and a meal. It’s important to have at large meals like these because the rice absorbs the grease and juice from the meat, making it more flavorful and helping settle the stomach.”
That was probably the most I’ve ever heard Kenta say at once. The most eloquent too, like he’d had the line prepared. Maybe he had? Lacey’s mom nodded along, but she looked a little lost. I think maybe she was having a hard time understanding his accent? I followed his advice, though, pushing the rice on my plate so it was closer to the turkey and the gravy on the mashed potatoes.
“So, which are you from? China or Japan?” one of the DWA guys asked, and I felt my head snap up at the question. Even I knew you weren’t supposed to ask stuff like that, even if I’d been wondering ever since Dad told me he was dating an Asian person. Kenta didn’t look offended, though, so maybe I was wrong?
“My mother was from China, but my father was Japanese, and I was born in Japan,” Kenta answered easily. I expected that to be the end of it, and I was pretty surprised when he kept talking and what he said next. “My mother and I were in Kyushu when it sank, and we fled to the CUI. I, um, was arrested pretty early on, though, and we got separated. I escaped and came to the States in 2002.”
That… um, wow. Neither Dad nor Kenta had told me all that, though I hadn’t asked. Kyushu and the harshness of the CUI, particularly because of the Yàngbǎn, were pretty famous. But surviving both? The sinking of an island and capture by the CUI? It almost didn’t sound real.
“Prison?” someone echoed. The DWA guy’s girlfriend, I was pretty sure. I assumed she didn’t know what happened in Kyushu or who the Yàngbǎn were, because the prison part was such a minor part of what he’d said that my brain hadn’t even registered it.
“The CUI does not take kindly to people like me,” Kenta answered, and I wasn’t sure if he meant gay people, Japanese people, refugees, or something else.
“Did you see Leviathan?” I asked because that was what everyone really should have been focused on. Even if they didn’t know anything about the CUI, everyone could recognize the Endbringer’s names.
Kenta made a noise of acknowledgement. “I was in the water most of the time, so I saw quite a bit. It was Alexandria who got me out, actually. I mostly saw Legend and Eidolon’s blasts and a few of the other capes when they fell in the water, but I got a good look when Lung joined.”
“Lung?” about half the table echoed in unison. Kenta looked a little startled, and it was Lacey’s nephew who clarified. “I didn’t know Lung was there.”
Kenta blinked a few times. “It was where he got the name Man-Dragon.”
I’d never heard Lung called that before. Hell, I didn’t know a thing about Lung, just that he led the ABB and lived in Brockton Bay. “The PHO page for Lung just redirects to the page for the ABB. There’s not a lot of coverage about Endbringer battles, so I guess people just never found out about it.”
Kenta shook his head. “Endbringer censorship is less strict outside the West. My friend Lee has a newspaper clipping with a picture of them fighting. I could ask him to find it if you were interested.”
Oh no. I’d shown interest in something. I tried not to look around. These were the kinds of people who’d latched onto the one thing they knew about a kid. Kurt and Lacey knew I liked books ever since I was little, and now they asked me what I was reading every time I saw them. I hoped Kenta wouldn’t start asking me what I thought about all the different Endbringer battles every time I saw him.
“Maybe a weekend activity,” Dad suggested, and I realized it wasn’t Kenta who’d lock onto my brief expression of interest but Dad.
December 2009
I eagerly counted down the days until winter break in my class planner. It “mysteriously” went missing with about three days left, but even that wasn’t enough to dim my excitement.
Being at home alone wasn’t exactly exciting. I planned on spending it reading and pursuing PHO, maybe cooking some meals that took a little longer, and I was happy with that plan. Evidently, Dad felt bad about having to work and leaving me at home all day because he scheduled for me to spend a day with Kenta about a week into my break.
I felt pretty awkward about it. I’d met him a good number of times by now, but we’d never spent any time together one-on-one. But Dad had apparently remembered just about every detail of every positive interaction we’d had and practically planned a whole day for us.
“We’re going to the Chinese grocery first to get you more tea,” Kenta told me when I’d climbed into the front seat of his car, “and then we’re going to go by Lee’s to look at his box of newspapers. We can find somewhere to get lunch if you get hungry, or I can bring you home if you don’t like anything near Lee’s apartment, and we can stop somewhere to get your Dad a Christmas present if you want.”
With everything at school, I’d kind of forgotten about Christmas. “Are you getting him anything?”
“Beer,” Kenta answered bluntly. My distaste must have shown on my face because he quickly amended. “He once told me that all the good German beer is in Empire bars and shops, so he doesn’t drink it. I thought one nice pack couldn’t hurt. I got him a nice jacket too.”
Those were actually pretty thoughtful gifts. Better than what I could come up with. Should I get Kenta something too? It seemed like the thing to do, but I really didn’t know what he liked or didn’t like yet. I could put some thought into it later, or maybe keep an eye out for what he looked at in the shop.
“I’ll get something on my own later,” I told him, and we were off.
Brockton Bay didn’t really have ethnic districts like other major cities had, so there was no Chinatown or Japantown or anything like that, but I’d known there was a pretty big Asian population bordering the docks. I guess I’d never actually been there before, though, because the street Kenta parked on looked totally alien to me.
It was all a bit rundown. A lot of places in Brockton Bay were, but the shops looked run down in a way that the others I’d been to didn’t. Not worse necessarily, but I couldn’t really pinpoint what it was. The aesthetic overall was a little different, too. It was a little more cramped, most of the buildings’ doors had red or green overhangings, and there were a lot more signs on all the windows, all the same laminated printer paper with a bunch of writing I couldn’t read. Pretty different from what I was used to.
Kenta led me into a shop with crates of oranges outside and a bunch of white and red cat statues in the window. I’d seen them at Chinese restaurants before, not that Mom and Dad had taken me to Chinese restaurants all that often, but I’d never seen more than one at a time. There had to be dozens here.
Kenta greeted the woman behind the counter in what I assumed to be Mandarin. They exchanged a few lines, and I waited beside Kenta politely until he walked into the store. I half-expected him to repeat what she’d said in English, but he didn’t, and I was left feeling a little off.
The store was even more cramped inside than it looked outside. I really thought Kenta was going to knock over something with his big shoulders as we walked down an aisle, but he seemed perfectly at ease just walking around, even though there was so much stuff. The store wasn’t even that big. How did they get all this stuff in here?
A lot of the shelves had what looked like snacks to me, but there was a whole section with just tea, which was pretty cool. Some of the boxes had labels in both English and what I, again, assumed to be Mandarin, but Kenta was looking in the section without any English writing, so I stared in the direction he was looking and pretended like I could tell how one box was different from another.
I heard someone yell from the other side of the store, and Kenta yelled back without even looking up. Like before, the exchange was a few lines, and Kenta didn’t translate. I wanted to ignore it again, but my curiosity was becoming a need, and I couldn’t keep the question back. “What’d they say?”
“The fish vendor said you looked too skinny and he had a good deal on sea bass,” Kenta told me, and that gave me more questions than answers. “I told him I didn’t have time to cook a fish today. He said he had shrimp, and I told him I’d come look at the bass some other time.”
Huh. Was that rude? That felt rude. It was weird he’d called me skinny, and it was even weirder that he was yelling at Kenta across the store to buy fish… Wait. Fish? “They have fish here?”
Kenta looked a little surprised by the question and leaned back a bit, putting his back against the racks dividing the aisle. “The tanks are in the back. You can’t smell them?”
Tanks? That made sense. I had smelled something a little off, but I’d sort of assumed that was just how a Chinese shop would smell. Was it racist for me to think that? They did just have tanks of fish here, though, so maybe the thought wasn’t totally unfounded? “Are they alive?”
“Barely,” Kenta responded dryly. There was more there, but I didn’t know about fish or tanks to know what. “You can go look if you want. It is not uncommon for American children to look at the tanks, so the butcher would not try to make you buy anything if you went over there.”
I glanced past Kenta toward the back of the store, realizing he’d leaned back to give me a better view. My vision wasn’t that good, even with glasses. I’d thought there were just boxes back there at first, but I could make out the movement of water now. I didn’t really want to get a better look than that, and I was kind of worried there would be a fishy smell. “I’ll stick to the tea.”
Kenta paid for the tea even though I’d brought cash. He talked to the woman at the cash register a bit and ended up getting a couple of half-filled bags of vegetables as well. Why they were selling fish, tea, vegetables, snack bags, and cat statues all in one place, I did not know. I didn’t think I’d trust the food here, but I really liked the tea Kenta had gotten me before, so I tried not to complain, even if I was only complaining in my head.
But with that out of the way, we could finally get to the part of the day that I was really looking forward to: Lee’s newspaper clippings.
“You just have a key to Lee’s apartment?” I asked when I realized Lee wasn’t even there.
Kenta shrugged and unlocked the door. “Your dad has a key to Kurt and Lacey’s house, doesn’t he?”
That was a good point. Was Lee Kenta’s Kurt and Lacey? I’d only met the guy once, but he had been invited to be a little bit of a buffer between me and Dad’s new boyfriend, so I guess he had to be pretty good friends with Kenta to do that. It was still a little weird being in his apartment, especially since I hadn’t even seen where Kenta lived yet.
I didn’t really have any expectations going in. I don’t think I’d ever been in an apartment before now. Emma, Kurt and Lacey, my grandparents, and some more distant family were really the only people I’d ever visited, and they all had houses. It was nice enough, though. It looked clean enough and sort of organized, but it was clear it was lived in. I tried not to look around too much and just followed Kenta as he led me to the living room, where a cardboard box awaited us atop the coffee table.
“Did you and Lee know each other in Japan?” I asked, hoping Lee was Japanese. I thought he was, but I wasn’t sure.
Kenta shook his head. “He lived in Shikoku. It was damaged by Leviathan’s attack, and he came to the States once his family could afford to send him. I think they moved to Honshu a few years ago.”
I didn’t know where either of those places meant or what Kenta meant by Lee’s family affording to send him to the US, but Kenta was getting the box open, so I was pretty quickly distracted.
There were a couple binders in the box, but it was mostly just loose pieces of newspaper, both full newspapers and smaller clippings. The ones on top, I recognized from some Brockton Bay papers, but I wasn’t very interested in those. I could probably look any of those up online anytime I wanted. I was interested in the ones not even PHO had gotten ahold of.
Kenta leafed through one of the binders and set it aside pretty quickly before looking at the other one. He closed it after a few moments, seeming satisfied, and passed it over to me. “It’s this one. I’m going to see if I can find anything else in the box.”
It was a plain white binder with a piece of printer paper slid into the cover pocket. Something was written in permanent marker, but I couldn’t read it, which I realized very quickly was going to become a recurring theme. The binder had some of those plastic page-sized pockets in it, newspaper clippings shoved in them a little haphazardly, and I couldn’t read a word on them either.
I felt a little bit like a kid flipping through a book until I found the pictures, but I didn’t want to ask Kenta to read every line for me, so I did the best I could. The first couple pictures I found were just of debris, and I had no idea if they were even of Kyushu. Kenta had said Lee lived somewhere else, so he might’ve just saved articles about his hometown.
I found a picture of a cape maybe four pictures in. I didn’t recognize her, but at least I was getting somewhere? She was probably a Japanese cape. Most of the people who’d fought Leviathan in Kyushu were. I found some distant, blurry pictures of what I was pretty sure was the Triumvirate next, but only a couple. There was one clear shot of Eidolon in the sky, and that was about it.
The pictures of Lung came a little suddenly, but it was clear it was him immediately. I’d seen some pictures and videos from when Lung had fought the Protectorate here in Brockton Bay, and I thought those had been pretty intense. Lung had pretty solidly won against the whole Protectorate, which the PHO forums had a lot to say about. But now that I was seeing a picture of him standing face to face with Leviathan, any opinions I had about the Lung v. Protectorate battle were dead. It was a wonder Brockton Bay was still standing after that.
I’d read that Leviathan was around thirty feet tall, and Lung was about equal height to him in this picture, as far as I could tell. It was taken from a distance, ruined buildings and water surrounding them, but it was still a pretty good photo. Leviathan was lunging for Lung, his water echo trailing behind him, and Lung was reared back, four wings and four arms spread like he was ready to catch the attack. The positions really showed how massive they both were.
I’d heard rumors that Lung could grow wings. I hadn’t really believed them. I could sort of picture a photo I’d seen of skeletal growths on his back, but I thought a parahuman taking after a dragon was a little too unrealistic. We didn’t know where powers came from, but we did know where dragons came from, and it was the human imagination. There was no way a guy could just grow into a made-up monster.
There was nothing unrealistic about it, though. I was looking at a picture of it.
“That was the article that first used the name Man-Dragon,” Kenta told me, looking over my shoulder a bit. I glanced at him and saw that his eyes were flickering a bit, skimming the page. “That article is explaining that he isn’t an Endbringer.”
“Did people think that?” I asked, suddenly curious. That kind of stuff wasn’t one of my main interests, but it was still kind of neat. Pretty much everyone older than me had lived through a lot of parahuman history, I realized. They probably remembered all the theories people had when a lot of these kinds of things were pretty new. I could ask Dad about that kind of stuff, and he’d probably have a lot to say I couldn’t find on PHO.
Kenta made a noncommittal kind of noise. “I’m not sure. I couldn’t find my mother for a few days after the attack, and then we were focused on getting off the island, so I never talked to anyone about it.”
Right. Dad might have lived through parahuman history, but Kenta really lived through parahuman history. He’d seen all these amazing things—the Triumvirate, Leviathan, Lung, maybe even the Yàngbǎn—but it wasn’t exactly a privilege. When Mom died, it felt like my whole world had come apart. But if I’d been in that car crash with her? If I couldn’t find her afterward? If I didn’t know if she’d lived or died? I couldn’t imagine how that would have felt, and what Kenta had experienced had been exponentially worse than that.
I didn’t know how to say all that, though. Instead, I told him, “That must have been scary.”
Kenta shrugged. “It was, and it wasn’t. There’s something… oddly calming about seeing such a force.”
I kept quiet and watched him as he seemed to collect his thoughts. The moment felt deeply personal in a way that went past us as Dad’s boyfriend and daughter. I wanted to hear what he had to say.
“Levithan cannot die,” Kenta said definitively. It was probably true, a lot of people thought it was, but he said it like he really knew it. “He is a natural disaster. When I fell into the water, I surrendered to that idea. I was ready to die knowing I’d witnessed something so past the peak of humanity.”
That… I didn’t know what to say to that. “You said Alexandria saved you.”
“And I am grateful for it,” Kenta agreed easily, turning his head, and I realized he hadn’t been looking at me before now. “I did not wish to die. There is something humbling about accepting one’s fate, though.”
I didn’t really understand what he meant. That sounded terrible. I hadn’t thought about it all that much, but drowning sounded like one of the scariest ways to die. But all the buildup a Leviathan battle had before that point? That just made it so much worse, and even that wasn’t as bad as the aftermath. Kenta and his mom had to leave the whole country for crying out loud!
“Was your mom okay?” I asked, thoughts trailing back to the comparison between Kenta’s mom and mine. “I mean, was she in the water with you?”
“No. She’d been at home. She got on her neighbor's roof, and they washed a few miles away. The Sentai Elite relief team found them after a few days, and we found each other at the escape boats,” Kenta explained. He paused. “We were only together for about four months before I was taken by the CUI.”
“Have- Have you seen her since then?” I asked carefully. Kenta’s gaze had drifted away from me again. He shook his head ever so slightly and refused to meet my eyes. I swallowed thickly and decided I wouldn’t ask about the CUI even though I was really curious if he’d ever met any of the Yàngbǎn.
“Does this interest you?” Kenta asked, gesturing loosely to the binders, box, and newspaper clippings around them. “History?”
“Um, I guess?” I answered, a little thrown by the change of topic. I hesitated, wondering if I wanted to give the question a real answer. Kenta had shared something really personal with me, though, so I thought it was only fair I open up a bit. “Has, um, my dad told you about my mom at all?”
Kenta nodded, and I wasn’t sure if I found that surprising or not. “A bit. He told me that they met in college, and that she’d died in a car accident.”
Okay, so not a lot of details about Mom herself. That was probably normal? “Well, um, she was an English professor. She was always trying to get me to read, and we’d always talk about books and stuff. When the portal to Earth Aleph opened up and we established the cultural exchange cable… You know, we got a lot of new media. Or, like, the same media, but from a world without parahumans. Or, with fewer parahumans, I guess. But they don’t have Endbringers, and Mom said that changed their books and movies a lot.”
“I haven’t heard that,” Kenta admitted, and I pretended not to be surprised. How did he not know that? It was basically the only thing any Star Wars forum talked about these days, and the same could be said about pretty much any fandom or piece of mainstream media.
Then again, I doubted Dad knew what a forum or fandom was. I was pretty sure Kenta was a bit younger than Dad, but not by any significant amount, and his English could be pretty rough sometimes, so I guess it was pretty reasonable that he wouldn’t be analyzing Earth Aleph literature.
Kenta showed me a few other clippings he’d found in the box that Lee hadn’t put in the binder, and he translated a few headlines he thought would interest me. I wished I had a cell phone so I could take some pictures to post on PHO. This stuff would really get a good discussion going.
The historical aspects were pretty cool, but I was mostly interested in Lung’s involvement. He was a local cape, even if he was a villain, and PHO recognized him as the powerhouse he was, even if we didn’t know much about him. Being able to share that he was in Japan, that he’d fought an Endbringer? That was really something.
Maybe I’d still make a post about it, but the moderators were pretty strict about having evidence for making claims like that. Maybe I could say I saw the newspaper clippings and ask if anyone else had copies? But they probably would have posted them already if they had them. Whatever. It wasn’t really important. If Dad ever let me get a cell phone, I could ask Kenta if I could see the newspaper clippings again, so I could take pictures to post, assuming they were still together by then.
Assuming they were still together by then. The thought made me mentally jolt a bit. Where had that come from? Or, well, I knew where it’d come from. I’d sort of been thinking in those terms the past couple months. But the jolt. I felt kind of… bad. Did I want Kenta to stick around? Had we bonded? I hadn’t been rooting for them to break up or anything, but I’d be lying if I hadn’t wished for it a little bit. I still felt a little awkward around Kenta, but he’d been nice to me today, going out of his way to ask his friend to dig up some newspaper clippings for me. That had to count for something.
Kenta got a call on his cell phone a few minutes later, and it turned out it was just Dad calling from the DWA office to see if we wanted to meet up for lunch. The idea of eating alone with Kenta, no newspapers to focus our conversation on, made me cringe, so I agreed easily, and Kenta told me we’d go somewhere “you white people” would like. I wasn’t sure if he was kidding or not. I liked the place he brought me to, though, even if it had a bunch of tanks in it like the grocery store.
Dad was smiling when he walked up to the table we’d been sitting at, like he was happy to see his daughter and his boyfriend getting along. He probably was. Dad had never been an anxious person, but I knew he worried. Probably just seeing us sitting together was enough to ease his mind a little.
I got up and hugged him before he sat down, and Kenta half-rose to kiss Dad’s cheek, which just made Dad’s smile get even bigger. It was kind of cute, and I was grateful he hadn’t kissed him on the mouth. I didn’t think I’d hate it or anything, but I didn’t think I was ready for that, even after all the progress we’d made today.
“How was it?” Dad asked once he’d sat down. He glanced between me and Kenta. “You two have a good time?”
“Yeah,” I answered, and I was a little surprised that it was true. It’d been a while since I had a good day. Maybe this whole Dad and Kenta thing could be good.