It wasn’t quite a dream. It was too textured for that, too heavy with the specific weight of things that had actually happened. More like a room he’d been locked out of for years that the fever had quietly opened, letting him fall back through the door without asking whether he wanted to.

Everything was slightly soft at the edges. The way memories got when time had worked on them long enough, sanding down the sharp parts without erasing the shape of the wound beneath.

But he remembered this.

He remembered all of it.

He was ten years old, and he was on his knees on the dojo floor, and his father was looking at him the way Matthew Parker looked at most things — as though they had not yet proven themselves worth a different expression.

The kick had come fast. It always came fast. Nathan hadn’t blocked it in time and now the floor was beneath his palms and his own saliva was dripping from his lip and the world was still ringing faintly from the impact. He stayed down. Not because he couldn’t get up. Because for a moment he simply didn’t see the point.

"What are you doing, Nathan."

Not a question. Never really a question when his father used that tone. An indictment handed down without a trial.

Nathan’s fingers curled against the floor slowly. The wood grain pressed into his palms. He focused on that — the realness of it, the smallness of it — because looking up at his father’s face right now wasn’t something he was ready to do.

"Is it because of Ayaka and Akane?"

The flinch moved through him before he could stop it. Small. Involuntary. But in a room this quiet, with a man as observant as Matthew Parker watching him, it was as good as a confession.

He hadn’t seen it coming — that was the part that still sat wrong in him, even now, even here in this blurred half-world between sleeping and not. You never saw the things that mattered coming. His mother had gone first. Then Phoebe, following in her own quiet way, leaving a hole inside him. And then Ayaka and Akane had arrived, and for a while — for a stretch of time that Nathan had let himself believe was permanent — the world had been livable again. They were warmth in a house that had forgotten what warmth felt like. They were noise and laughter and the particular comfort of people who simply stayed.

He had loved them. In the uncomplicated, total way that ten-year-olds loved the people who made them feel less alone.

And then their mother died, and Nathan had opened his mouth to comfort them, and what had come out instead was something cold and precise and utterly wrong. He hadn’t meant it. He hadn’t even known that version of himself was sitting so close to the surface, so ready to speak. His father’s years of instruction had been doing their quiet work without Nathan realizing it, shaping the way he reached for words in moments of pain, and the result had come out not as comfort but as a kind of clinical detachment that had no business existing in the mouth of a child trying to hold someone he cared about together.

He would never forget the way they looked at him afterward.

That particular horror. The stepping back. The recalibration in their eyes of what, exactly, he was.

And before he could find the right words — before he could explain or apologize or claw back whatever had just been lost — they were gone. Japan. Their mother’s family. A distance that might as well have been the other side of the world, because it meant the same thing in the end.

He had been alone before. He knew the shape of it. But losing them had a different quality from the losses before — because this time, the emptiness had his own fingerprints on it.

"You are weak, Nathan."

His father’s footsteps crossed the dojo slowly. Unhurried. The sound of someone who had never in his life needed to rush toward anything.

"Everyone hates me." The words came out quietly, almost to the floor rather than to the man above him. Nathan hadn’t decided to say them. They had simply risen up and come out, the way things did when the body was too tired to maintain the usual filters.

"Is that supposed to be a problem?"

Nathan’s teeth came together hard.

"I don’t want to be alone."

"You are being pathetic."

Matthew stopped beside him. Nathan could see his father’s feet — perfectly still, perfectly planted.

"Your mother. Phoebe. Ayaka and Akane." He listed them the way another man might list debts in a ledger. "Every loss is not something to mourn. It is material. It is something you convert." A pause. "Block these emotions. Numb them. They are not feelings — they are vulnerabilities, and the world will find them before you do."

Nathan stayed on his knees.

"I don’t understand what you want from me, father."

"I want you to be strong."

The answer came without hesitation. It always came without hesitation, as though the word strong was the answer to every question ever asked in this house.

"You don’t need to become me," Matthew continued, something almost imperceptibly different moving through the words — not softer, but more precise. "But you must be ruthless. People are tools, Nathan. You use them or they use you. Love—" He said the word the way one said the name of something small and long dead. "Love is a mechanism for making you easier to destroy."

The dojo was very quiet.

Nathan lifted his eyes for the first time.

"You’re telling me you didn’t love her." His voice was smaller than he wanted it to be. "Mother."

Matthew went still.

It was subtle — barely a change at all, really, nothing a stranger would have caught. But Nathan had spent ten years reading his father’s silences, learning their different textures, and this one was unlike any he’d encountered before. It didn’t feel like the stillness of a man who had no answer. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

"I won’t believe it," Nathan said. Quietly. Firmly. Not a challenge — a boundary. The first one he’d ever drawn in this room.

Matthew held his gaze for a long moment.

Then he turned and walked away.

Nathan watched his father’s back recede toward the far end of the dojo, that straight-spined, unhurried walk that had never once looked back in all the years Nathan could remember. He watched it until the distance made it smaller and smaller, and then his arms gave out beneath him and he went down fully, cheek against the cool floor, his vision blurring at the edges with something he didn’t have the strength left to hold back.

His eyes stayed on his father’s receding figure until they couldn’t anymore.

And then he let them close.

That day despite himself lost another part of himself, following slowly the path his father wanted him to take...