Chapter Text
How…how could I have been so stupid…
Cye had been vomiting in the woods near Mia’s house for the past ten minutes, sobbing as the events of that afternoon and evening played in his head over and over and over again. It was like a grotesque horror movie was stuck in his brain and he was unable to shut it off. He wanted the puking to stop, he wanted the visions in his head to stop, but he was afraid of what would happen next.
Health class had always, always emphasized that the girls be careful about watching their drinks at parties or when with romantic partners who hadn’t earned their trust. It was something he and the other boys in class didn’t give a second thought, other than the lesson to not put drugs in a girl’s drink. Cye wouldn’t dream of taking advantage of a woman like that. It was barbaric and cruel. Message received. Don’t rape women. Got it.
Cye certainly understood the appeal of sex. It wasn’t as if he had never explored himself before: he was sixteen, puberty and teenage hormones were a lot to deal with…but he wasn’t really ready to be with an actual partner. There were too many risks he wasn’t sure he was ready to shoulder the consequences of, and it had only been a couple of months since the whole ordeal with the Evil Dynasty and Talpa…he still needed time to sort himself out after everything he’d gone through. For now, he was content to satisfy those urges on his own.
Sure, he sometimes fantasized about being with a girl, or, as he’d admitted to his friends, another boy (a somewhat nerve wracking conversation to be sure, but the relief he felt when it became clear his friends accepted his bisexuality was immeasurable). Maybe they’d settle in after a romantic night on the town in Tokyo…after a formal school dance…maybe at midnight on a beach somewhere…after a late night conversation in a college dorm room…he didn’t feel the need to wait for his wedding night or anything like that (unless that was his partner's wish) but he still wanted it to be special.
I didn’t want it to be like this…
Cye had been dating an exchange student from the United States for about a month or so. They’d met in the after school music club; she played the guitar, Cye played piano. They more or less hit it off once she learned he’d spent a lot of his boyhood in the United Kingdom due to the shared language. It was fun to have someone else who spoke English to spend time with, and having her be a cute girl certainly didn’t hurt. Friendly hang outs turned into more friendly hang outs, and at some point they became a couple.
A few nights ago, he’d gone to see her to “watch a movie” at her host family’s house. While they were making out on the couch, she had propositioned him for something more, and he politely turned her down. Partly because he hadn’t had his first time yet and wanted to make sure he was actually ready and not just, well, young, dumb, and horny. He explained that it wasn’t like he didn’t have certain thoughts or desires: he most certainly did and absolutely didn’t want to make it to the grave with his virginity intact, he just wasn’t ready. Kissing and getting a little bit handsy was as far as he wanted to go.
"She needs your consent just as much as you need hers."
She was upset and complained, accusing him of chickening out. That led to a pretty big fight. They didn’t talk for a few days, and Cye wondered if things were done between them. Maybe he hadn’t handled the situation as well as he could have, or maybe they were just incompatible. He briefly talked with Sage about it, who reaffirmed that he’d done nothing wrong and she was in the wrong to start a fight about something that was, as he put it, a two “yes” and one “no” situation.
Then she’d sent him a message, asking if they could talk to clear the air. Cye accepted the invitation and went to visit her at her host family’s home once again. The family was out of town for the weekend visiting relatives in another prefecture, and she said it would be easier to have this discussion privately. That much he’d agreed with.
Liar. LIAR!
She asked him if he wanted anything to drink, listing off iced tea, a couple of soda brands, water, the usual. Cye politely accepted and asked for a coke, and she brought him a glass complete with ice and a little blue cocktail umbrella. He’d laughed at the little umbrella, asking if she was trying to make a simple cola beverage extra fancy for him.
Oh, it was “extra fancy” all right…
Cye should have realized something was wrong when she avoided the subject of their fight, instead focusing on some drama that had happened at school between some of the other girls in her class. At first he’d thought it was just an ice breaker. She was drinking her own soda with its little pink umbrella, almost focusing on it, commenting on how hot it was outside every time she took a drink.
About ten, fifteen minutes into her babbling, Cye got impatient and started to ask her about their fight, and instead of apologizing like she said she would, she doubled down. She admitted to having been with a couple of other boyfriends and really liking the experience. He’d rolled his eyes, saying that he wasn’t one of her ex-boyfriends and had his reasons for wanting to wait. She insisted he was was being dramatic, and for a moment it seemed like they were going to have the exact same fight they’d just had a few days earlier.
But that was about when Cye started to feel…off
For a moment, whatever was suddenly wrong with him seemed like it might have knocked some sense into his girlfriend. She asked him if he was feeling all right. He said he was a little dizzy but probably fine, finished off his soda and stood up, thinking it was time to leave. Then the wooziness got worse and his legs nearly buckled under him. She immediately got to her feet and said he needed to lie down. He agreed with her…everything felt so wrong…but he’d been fine when he got there…what happened?
Cye barely noticed she was leading him to her room. She sat him down on the edge of her bed…and started kissing his neck. He asked her what she was doing, wasn’t he supposed to be laying down? This wasn’t a good time to be making out…and when she didn’t stop, instead pushing him down and crawling on top of him…that was when he realized what was happening, and that in his current state, he was powerless to stop it.
She never intended to clear the air and come to an agreement.
The umbrellas weren’t her being “fancy”: she was marking which drink she’d drugged.
She was going to take what she wanted by force.
Cye had tried to fight back, but he couldn’t stand up to whatever it was she’d put in his drink. It was barely an effort. His body was betraying him. He couldn’t move right, if he could move at all, he could barely speak…but he wasn’t losing consciousness. He pleaded with her stop as she started to unbutton and unzip the fly of his jeans. He watched through blurred vision as she pulled off her top, telling him it was “going to be fine” and to just “lay back and enjoy it”.
“Relax, it’ll feel real good…”
I trusted you…
She raped him.
Twice.
I trusted you…
“…oh my God…you feel amazing…”
I TRUSTED YOU!!!
Cye had been too drugged to move, but he felt everything. Every unwanted touch, every unwanted grab…all of it. He wasn’t sure if she’d intended for him to be awake or not, thinking maybe it was his armor trying to flush out whatever she’d drugged him with as fast as possible so he could get the hell out of there, but all it did was keep him from passing out. All he’d been able to do was stare up at her in horror and cry as she held him down and covered his mouth with her hand.
“Why are you crying? Calm down, it’s just sex!”
The worst part was that he’d…finished. Both times.
“See, that wasn’t so bad!”
Some old lecture from biology or health class tried to remind him it was just a natural response to external stimuli and that didn’t mean he wanted it or liked it…but Cye still hated himself for it. It made him feel cheap, used, and disgusted by his own body. He hadn’t been able to stop it from happening despite every advantage he should have had in the situation.
Humiliating.
Once he was able to move again, Cye waited for her to get up to go to the bathroom before pulling up his underwear and his jeans (and trying desperately to ignore how…wet and sticky everything was) and making a run for it…or at least an awkward, desperate stumble for it. He could barely hear her calling his name as he stumbled out the front door. Did she not understand what she’d just done? Did she not understand how much she’d just violated him? Used him?
Cye found the strength to start running, and that’s exactly what he did. Ran like if he was fast enough, he could erase the past few hours. Ran like he could somehow forget. Ran like it was all some kind of bad dream and he’d wake up to a world where none of it had happened. Ran like he couldn’t still feel her hands holding him down. Ran like his body hadn’t betrayed him, allowing it to happen not just once, but twice.
How he got back to Mia’s he wasn’t sure, but before Cye could go inside or even approach the front door, he had the overwhelming urge to vomit. He stumbled into the thicket near the house before double over by a bush, puking his guts out from either the drug or the stress or both or whatever, crying his eyes out as he did.
He knew it happened to men, sometimes…but he’d never thought it would happen to him. How could it happen to him? He wasn’t just Cye Mouri, competitive swimmer, only son of the late Hirokai Mouri and his widow Cordelia Mouri, voracious reader, pretty okay pianist, and tea enthusiast. No, he was Cye of the Torrent, bound by destiny to a mystical armor, giving him the powers of water and the ocean and a really cool spear, and he’d fought off demons and Dark Warlords with his friends just a couple of months ago…how could this happen to him!?
Cye pulled out his armor orb once he felt like the contents of his stomach had been thoroughly emptied. Why…why didn’t you protect me…why didn’t you protect me!? It took all of his will power to not throw the damn thing deep into the woods. What good was it? What had it brought him? Trauma from Talpa’s invasions? Trauma from his imprisonment in the Nether Realm? And now it hadn’t even protected him from a normal teenage girl!?
It wasn’t fair. He’d fought so hard to save the world, her included, and she couldn’t even respect his “no”. Nearly sacrificed his life multiple times. Nearly got killed multiple times. Watched his friends get hurt over and over again. He’d been tortured for multiple days. And this was the thanks he got. The only remaining fragment of of his youthful innocence…his virginity…gone forever, and it was taken from him by force.
He didn’t get to make love for the first time after romantic night on the town in Tokyo, with dinner and a movie and a walk in the park.
He didn’t offer himself to his lover after a formal school dance, quietly avoiding his mother or his partner’s parents.
No midnight tryst on the beach with the waves crashing against the shore in the background, the smell of sea salt clinging to their bodies.
No idly holding someone after a late night conversation in a college dorm room, half asleep and happy in a single sized bed holding two.
Not even his wedding night, if that was what his wife (or husband) wanted, and sharing the first night of the rest of their lives together.
All of those experiences he’d been forever denied. This would forever and always be the story of his first time.
What am I supposed to do now?
Did he call the police and report what had happened to him? Did he tell Ryo and the others what happened? What would they do if they knew? Did he go back home to Yamaguchi? Part of him wanted his mother badly in that moment, to just cry in her arms until the hurt went away.
Then again…if word about what happened gets out…
Cye didn’t want people to know. People would talk at school. The other Ronin Warriors would not react well: Ryo and Rowen were already over protective of him, Sage, and Kento after what happened to the three of them, but this would make that so much worse. If he tried to press charges…well, for one, who would even believe him, and two, the idea the having to testify or give statements over and over again sounded just…awful.
No. He was taking this to his grave.
The sound of snapping twigs and crunching leaves alerted him to the presence of something else in the woods. He got to his feet, wiping the tears from his eyes. If one of the guys had heard something…he didn’t want them to see him like this. He needed to calm down before any of them saw him. They couldn’t know. They wouldn’t look at him the same way. Not after this.
Much to his relief, it was White Blaze. Cye still felt awful but felt a little more at ease as the tiger approached him, rubbing his head against his side. Do you know what happened to me, boy? Cye dropped to his knees to look the big cat in the eyes. “White Blaze…can you just…stay with me for a little bit?”
White Blaze nuzzled the side of his face, and Cye embraced the tiger. “Thank you.”
They stayed like that for a while. It was nice having a giant cat around to comfort you on the worst day of your life. Even if this big cat was a warrior in his own right and likely immortal, his fur was still soft and he still offered comfort to the five young Ronins when they needed it. He sobbed quietly into the side of the tiger’s neck, grateful for this little bit of comfort, even if White Blaze didn’t fully understand what had happened to him.
In that moment, it was what he desperately needed.
Cye pressed his forehead to White Blaze, and the tiger responded by licking the side of his face. Still beside himself but a little surprised by the gesture, the Warrior of Water couldn’t help but laugh. He started to cry again, but the tiger had successfully brought a smile to his face. It was reminder that he still had his friends, still had things to look forward to. He would be all right…eventually. It might take a while to move past this but…at least it’s over. I’ll break up with her officially next time I see her at school and…that’ll be it. I can make this all a bad memory.
Fate had other plans.
Nine months later
For the second time in less than a year, his ex-girlfriend wanted to make him vomit…but somehow this time it was so, so much worse.
At first, it seemed like the first few months after the rape were the hardest. When she’d approached him the following Monday, wrapped her arms around him, and tried to kiss him, he immediately dumped her. He never wanted her to touch him every again, never mind like this and in public. She was stunned, somehow still not understanding that what she had done was fucked up and he wanted nothing to do with her.
It was a heated conversation and caught the attention of a number of students, including Kento, who stepped in and shot her a look that could have frozen over Hell itself. She’d called him an asshole (like she was one to talk), flipped him the bird as she stomped away from the encounter, and eventually the onlookers dispersed. Now it was just a matter of avoiding her for the rest of the school year, avoiding questions from his friends about why he’d suddenly broken it off when “things had been going so well between you two”, and trying to move on with the rest of his life.
Then she disappeared from school about three months later, and as far as Cye was concerned? Good riddance. Now he didn’t have the constant reminder of what had happened to him hanging around. Most people assumed she’d gotten homesick for America and left to go home. That happened sometimes with exchange students. She was gone, he didn’t care to see her again, and he could finally try to forget about what happened and move on with his life.
The only thing he did keep in the back of his mind regarding what happened was getting himself tested at a local clinic: at no point during the incident did she bother with condoms, which meant she may have passed something on to him. All he’d needed to do was come up with an excuse to go into the city, run whatever errand he’d invented to keep his cover, and make sure she hadn’t given him anything.
Clean. Clean. Clean.
If she’d given him anything, it wasn’t on the standard panel. But, just to be safe, he tested again a few months later. Just to be certain.
Clean. Clean. Clean.
And for the next several, blissful months, Cye thought that was the end of it. He kept up his grades, he and the other Ronins got a chance to enjoy Tokyo without having to protect it from Talpa and the Dynasty, they were just normal teenagers again. She was gone from his life for good, and she’d left him no parting gifts.
Dead wrong.
Truth be told, he didn’t even remember what it was he’d gone into town for. It was supposed to be a quick errand. He hitched a ride with White Blaze to the train station near Mia’s house, watched the world go by while listening to his Spotify playlist, and probably thought about something mundane, like what everyone was going to have for dinner that night or if Rowen was finally going to rope them all into playing Dungeons and Dragons with him.
Once he was in the city…Cye ran into her one last time.
And she was very, very pregnant.
The conversation was a blur. Something about how she’d lost an entire week’s worth of her birth control pills, how she didn’t want to go back to America pregnant (apparently her family was extremely conservative and would have been angry with her…but somehow sexually assaulting him was just…fine?), how she’d somehow managed to transfer to a different high school even on her student visa…he didn’t register most of her story, he was too focused on her swollen, pregnant belly.
There…hadn’t been a condom…
…and while he understood it was an involuntary reaction to the physical stimulation…he’d...
Twice.
Without a condom.
Cye felt numb during the entire conversation…or, well, “conversation” in the sense that she’d been talking at him. He was too stunned to speak. A voice in the back of his head was screaming that there was a chance the baby wasn’t his, that if she’d been so damn desperate to fuck someone then maybe she’d found someone else, especially after he broke up with her.
Not your problem…not your problem…not your problem…
Twice.
Without a condom.
Then she went into labor. Her water broke right in front of him.
As much as Cye detested her…what happened to him wasn’t the baby’s fault, regardless of who the father was…which might not have been him. So, for the sake of the baby, he escorted her to the closest hospital (luckily within walking distance, even with a pregnant woman in labor) and despite wanting to get the hell out of there, he’d been hurried along into the delivery room with her, especially when she started telling the doctors he was her ex-boyfriend (true) and he was the father (unconfirmed).
Cye felt like he being dragged into a nightmare, the sliding doors of the emergency room feeling eerily like the giant red gates of the Dynasty. This hospital was a prison, and all of these doctors and nurses were his well-meaning, overly friendly jailers. Granted, most of the focus was (correctly) on her, but there was no running from this. No way out. They all thought he was the father. They wouldn’t let him leave even if he tried.
Cye stood off to the side and watched as doctors and nurses crowded around his ex. She was screaming in pain, cursing loudly as her labor progressed. Dilation. Contractions. The medical team told her she was doing a good job.
To him? It felt like waiting for his turn at the gallows. He kept replaying the rape in his head, over and over again, mentally screaming at her for assaulting him and himself for not somehow stopping it, and now there was a baby about to be born that might be the result of that awful evening. He thought about the awful feeling in his stomach when he’d finished. This was the end result of that. The end result of him being unable to fight her off or stop himself from getting aroused and possibly…
It all felt unreal.
Two hours later, there was a brand new baby girl in the world that his ex-girlfriend insisted was his.
Cye was still deep in denial…but, the timeline did add up…and the baby had his blood type, which didn’t rule him out as the father…and maybe she had his nose…and soft tufts of auburn hair…just like his…
The baby didn’t look a thing like her mother.
But this little girl looked just. Like. Him.
A deep pit in his stomach formed: he basically already knew, but Cye still asked for a paternity test. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe she somehow found some other guy who looked like him (because clearly Tokyo was just crawling with auburn haired half-Englishmen for her to fuck) and this other guy who maybe existed was the one who got her pregnant, not him, even if they’d had unprotected sex roughly nine months earlier.
Cye was crestfallen when he learned the results would take three days, but if they had to wait, they had to wait. He had to be wrong. She had to be wrong.
I can’t do this…I can’t be a father…not now…not now!
She insisted he was the only one.
So…that’s where he had been for the past seventy-two hours: at the hospital, waiting for the results of the paternity test. As much as he didn’t want this, how much he desperately needed to be told the baby wasn’t his, how much he wanted to just run out of that hospital like his life depended on it because it actually kind of did, in a way…he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he didn’t know, and if the baby was his…he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he abandoned the baby, either.
Cye slept in the waiting room of the maternity ward. One of the nurses took pity on him and spotted him the occasional sandwich from the hospital cafeteria. He watched families come and go…soon to be grandparents and older siblings and aunts and uncles all excited for the arrival of their respective babies. It gave him anxiety, but he tried to hide it. Just because he was standing on a ledge overlooking the depths of despair didn’t mean he had to drag anyone else down with him. They were all prepared for those babies…he wasn’t.
He turned off location services on his phone soon after the baby was born, as well as on all his social media profiles, and then turned off his phone. The others were probably going crazy by now, but the last thing he needed was one of them to see him in this situation. If all went well and this baby wasn’t his, it would just be a few days, he’d apologize for disappearing on them and say he had personal business to attend to that he didn’t want to discuss.
Then it would be over. For good. He’d have his life back.
But he could feel that life slipping away from him with every minute that passed.
Cye refused to see his ex. This whole mess was her fault; he’d told her “no”, she ignored that “no”, and now there was a baby that was definitely hers and might or might not be his. He really, really needed her to have either cheated on him or fallen into bed with someone on the rebound. She was the other reason he really, really didn’t want to be this baby’s father: because it would tie him to the woman who’d raped him for the rest of his life. She’d be looking for child support or joint custody or…something.
Or at least, that’s what he thought.
On Day Two, she vanished from the hospital. Simply got dressed in her street clothes while the nurses were tending to other patients and…walked out. When confronted with this information by one of the nurses, Cye learned that she hadn’t signed off on any of the official paperwork for the baby, just for her own time in the hospital or something like that…it was a lot of talk about paperwork that flew over his head, especially in his distressed mental state.
Somehow, even though this was her child, there was nothing legally binding her to the baby, or something like that. It sounded liked heads were going to roll once the hospital administration got wind of this because it wasn’t as simple as his ex abandoning the baby; someone else had royally screwed up, but Cye really couldn’t muster a single solitary fuck about any of that. These past two days had been overwhelming and he only absorbed about half of any of it. Regarding this newest clusterfuck, all he knew for certain was that her name wasn’t on the birth certificate, and no one was sure where the hell she’d run off to. Probably back to America, he reasoned. If she got on a plane to go home…that would be the end of it, now wouldn’t it?
But…if he was the father…there’d be one legal parent…
This was when he started to take an interest in the baby who might or might not be his. It was easy to figure out which one she was: swaddled in a pink blanket, and the only baby viewable through the nursery window with no nameplate on the plastic bassinet. No balloons, no cards, no little stuffed toys…just her, all alone in her crib, all alone in the world. He wondered what would happen to her if he wasn’t the father. He did feel bad: she’d probably get lost in the system, especially where her mother wasn’t Japanese. It was going to be a mess if that happened.
It really would be easier for her if he was the father. He had Japanese citizenship (though he used to have dual citizenship with the United Kingdom, something he gave up when he was fifteen). It would be better than if she was to be lost in the system somewhere. What did they even do with babies who had no citizenship? Was that even possible? Where would she go?
Cye had never felt so trapped before. Not even after that blasted Dark Warlord of Venom brought him into the Nether Realm to be tortured. This? This was worse. At least with Talpa he knew Ryo and Rowen were coming to the rescue eventually. There was no rescue from this. This was permanent if it was true. He couldn’t run away from this. There was no escaping it. Even if he did take the coward’s way out, he’d hate himself for the rest of his life.
Day Three arrived, and one of the doctors brought Cye into a private room to talk. They had the results of the paternity test, and as he looked over the results, the pit in his stomach grew so large it threatened to swallow him whole. It felt like time had simultaneously slowed down and sped up as he read the bottom of the print out:
Probability of Parenthood: 99.99%
The baby was his.
And his life as he knew it was over.
That was where Cye was in that moment. The doctor had left him alone to process the news, understanding that everything in his life was about to change, and not necessarily for the better. He was sixteen. A single father at sixteen.
Even if his ex had been lying about him being “the only one”, that really didn’t matter anymore. Even if there had been another man in the picture, it was his sperm that met with her egg. This little baby girl was his, and nothing was about to change that. Cye didn’t have the stomach to run away from this like she had. He couldn’t.
As terrified as he was, as much as he felt like his life was spiraling out of control, unraveling before him like a snagged sweater…the baby was his daughter. Like it or not, he was all she had in the whole world. He couldn’t abandon her.
It didn’t mean he was happy about it. Cye kept staring at the results, his hands trembling and tears running down his face. This wasn’t fair. He hadn’t wanted any of this. He’d told her no, she didn’t listen or care, and now…now his life was ruined. He couldn’t go back to Mia and the other Ronin Warriors. He couldn’t go back to Yamaguchi; his mother would be furious he’d made her a grandmother before his sister had. University? Ha. He wasn’t even sure if he’d be able to finish high school, never mind higher education.
I told her no…it’s not fair…this isn’t fair!
Cye had absolutely no idea where he was going after the hospital released the baby to him. He just knew he wouldn’t be able to stay there any longer, and he’d need to disappear, to evaporate into thin air, to become a jouhatsu. People did it all the time…up and left their lives behind them. He never thought he’d have to do that, but here he was, trying and failing to mentally prepare himself to leave.
Staying just…wasn’t an option. As much as he wanted to run back to Mia and the others, beg for help, call his mother, anything…it was a doomed plan. Everyone would know what happened to him and get angry at him for not telling them, or they’d accuse him of lying about it and get angry, or…he didn’t want to keep thinking of the possibilities. Truth was…he had no idea. And that terrified him.
In only a matter of days…he’d lost everything.
His friends.
His famiy.
His future.
Everything he held dear was gone.
Now it was just him, uncertainty, and a baby.
Damn it…DAMN IT!
One of the nurses poked her head in and asked if Cye wanted to see his daughter. He got to his feet, numbly nodding as he wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his hoodie. She held the door open and a second nurse came in, holding a softly crying bundle of blankets…his daughter. He stepped closer, looking at this tiny little person who was suddenly the most frightening thing in the world to him.
What the hell am I supposed to do?!
“Do you want to hold her?”
There were a thousand ways in which the answer to that question was “no”, but Cye wordlessly nodded as the nurses showed him how to hold his daughter…his daughter…and passed the tiny bundle into his arms. He looked at her little face, and felt an overwhelming sense of something he hadn’t expected to feel in that moment:
Love.
Despite everything…Cye smiled. His daughter was softly cooing as he held her, and his heart melted as he stood there, staring at this tiny little person in his arms that he’d helped make, albeit unwillingly. He’d…made a person.
The baby made a whining sound and for a moment Cye was afraid he’d done something wrong. He wondered if she was was aware of hjm, if she had any idea who he was. But then she opened her eyes and looked at him, and he felt himself start to cry again.
Seafoam green eyes…just like his.
“Hey, there, little one…”
The next couple of days were overwhelming. Shakily signing his name to paperwork he barely understood and under any other circumstance he wasn’t old enough to agree to. Learning the basics of caring for a newborn from the nurses and a few books they had on hand. Draining his bank account from an ATM several blocks away. Setting his phone to the factory default and removing the SIM card before selling it. Trying to figure out what he next move was going to be.
Getting to know his daughter.
Truth be told, she was still the most terrifying thing in the world to him. Her entrance into his life was so traumatic and sudden…he should resent her, hate her, run away from this just like her mother had. But he didn’t resent her, or hate her, and the idea of running away from her made him feel ill, especially whenever he held her. The emptiness he felt when one of the nurses took her away to go back to the nursery was all consuming…he didn’t understand it.
How was he getting so attached to this little girl so quickly?
Cye drew a complete blank when someone asked him what he was naming his daughter, and that was when it dawned on him that his ex hadn’t given her one: she was being referred to by her mother’s last name, but it wasn’t official: he didn’t even need to ask permission to change her family name to his own, the decision was entirely his to make now. One of the nurses asked if there was any relation to the famous samurai family, which Cye sheepishly admitted to, but clarified he was a distant cousin to the main branch of the family: it was probably the distance from the main family that made his father comfortable enough to marry a foreigner i
Then one of the nurses’ cell phones rang, and her custom ring tone was “Under the Sea” from The Little Mermaid. That had been his favorite Disney movie when he was small, and the ring tone wormed its way it’s Cye’s head and refused to leave. The name “Ariel” popped in there and wouldn’t leave, but he wasn’t seriously going to name his daughter after a Disney movie, was he? That was ridiculous. Then he took a look at her and decided, well, maybe…
Somehow, he knew deep in his heart he’d found her name: Ariel.
Not long after he’d officially named his daughter was he informed that she was deemed healthy and stable enough to be discharged, and suddenly Cye was the sold person responsible for her safety, health, and well-being.
Cye stepped outside of the hospital with the clothes on his back, the five day old Ariel Mouri in his arms, and little else to his name. He’d bought a cheap backpack and stuffed it with the money from his savings and his phone, a few bottles of formula and diapers for the baby, and one last sandwich from the hospital cafeteria to tide him over until he reached his destination.
Wherever that was.
The sixteen year old father (a moniker Cye still wasn’t used to) looked around the outside of the hospital and readjusted his hold on his young daughter. He felt dead inside, and in some ways that was kind of true: soon enough, it would be like he died to anyone who knew him. He took a deep breath, pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt up to hide his face, and started to walk. He had no idea where he was going…the hospital was no longer an option, Mia’s house wasn’t an option, Yamaguchi wasn’t an option.
Cye was too lost in thought to notice the older teen with green hair paying too much attention to his phone until it was too late. He barely kept his balance and his grip on Ariel, who somehow managed to stay asleep during the encounter, but the incident scared him enough that he started to run.
Running away from the life he knew and to a life he didn’t want.
Running away from everyone he loved, except for the baby girl in his arms.
Running away to anywhere but Tokyo.