Losing Dogs (Part 1)
(See look I haven’t forgotten about the DILF AU)
Maybe Yuuichi should have realized something was wrong when the girl he’d gone too far with at a party suddenly was enrolled to study abroad in Switzerland. Maybe something in his fourteen year old mind should have clicked, connected these dots earlier.
She was gone nine months before having her friends pass him a note, asking to meet up at a park to talk. Something about nine months should have told him everything he needed to know.
He was embarrassed to say that he didn’t even realize what was happening as she wordlessly handed him a carseat and a diaper bag. But as he was sitting on a park bench, looking miserable as every old couple walking by stopped to coo at the little blue lump fast asleep in the car seat.
This was his son.
He knew full well he couldn’t leave him there at the park. He wasn’t heartless. But he couldn’t take him home. There were other options. He could take him to the police station, claim he had found him and didn’t know who his parents were. He could leave him at a fire station, surrendering him no questions asked. But none of these ideas came to him fast enough,
Instead he called a cab, taking the unnamed baby to the Ootori’s second house. Technically, it was the first house. But it was smaller and his father insisted it wasn’t as nice as the main estate so they rarely used it. Yuuichi could remember coming here often as a young child, back when his great grandmother Kyoko used to teach him traditional Okinawan songs and play little games with him.
The staff was gone, not due to arrive to tidy the place up for any guests for a few more weeks. Yuuichi knew where the key to the staff entrance was hidden.
It was a good place to hide.
That's where he was sitting, holding his son with uncertainty. He didn’t look very old, the math suggesting that he can’t be over a month in age. But Yuuichi was too young to remember what Akito and Fuyumi looked like when they were born, he had no frame of reference for how big a baby should be.
What he did know is that his son hadn’t yet outgrown that pudgy, squishy look that newborns had. The kind of quality that he had always thought made babies on TV look like aliens. But on this baby it was… different. In fact, he would go as far as to say he liked it.
Maybe fatherhood wouldn’t be too bad. His baby seemed mild mannered enough, sleeping peacefully in his arms, only twitching his little fingers once in a while. He was still dressed in a white hospital onesie, making Yuuichi believe that he couldn’t be more than a few days old. In fact, for all he knew he could have been born this morning and handed to him right out of the gate. Highly unlikely in hindsight, but completely probable to his scrambled teenage brain.
As the hours passed, the sun set, and the rain started. It wasn’t smart, but Yuuichi was growing used to the weight of the baby in his arms. In fact, he was fond of him. He didn’t think he was fully in love with him yet, though he really ought to have been. But he smelled like powder, and his heartbeat was calming. Yuuichi had never really thought about having children too much. He knew as the eldest son he would be expected to have an heir of his own, but that was always something that felt so far away.
This was now.
His son opened his eyes, just enough for Yuuichi to see the steel gray of the irises, a color that matched his own perfectly.
That’s when he started to cry. He held the boy tightly to his chest, one hand feeling the light fuzz of black hair on his son’s still soft head. He could hear the baby’s soft, raspy breaths in his ears as he let the tears fall against the scratchy blue hospital blanket he was swaddled in. Yuuichi was a child, in every sense of the word. And now he had a son who with just one look had suddenly grabbed him by his still-small shoulders and drowned him in love and so much fear.
He mourned for his own child as he realized there was no way he could peacefully part with his son now.
---
He couldn’t hide forever. Frankly, he had been foolish to do so for as long as he did.
The walk back to the estate in the rain was unpleasant, but mercifully short. He was soaked to the bone, woefully unprepared for the storm since he hadn’t intended to be gone for so long. His father was pacing the length of the foyer, face stern with a type of worry that you had to dissect to recognize. Yuuichi made no move to announce his presence, he simply waited for his father to turn and see him.
The moment their eyes met, Yoshio’s expression changed in a way that looked like it was far beneath the skin. Mechanical and nearly impossible to notice. “Where have you been? School let out hours ago.”
Yuuichi didn’t answer. He didn’t have the words to. Yoshio softened as much as he would allow himself. He crossed the room, taking a blanket from one of the couches to drape over his shivering son.
That’s when the baby sneezed.
His father paused, a look of pure confusion as his eyes settled onto the carseat. The face he made lacked any of the small, subtle movements that his usual expressions made. This was a sudden, dramatic shift. Confusion, a quick glance at Yuuichi’s guilty eyes, and then… Well, Yuuichi could only describe it as heartbreak.
There was no point in saying what had happened. It was all right there, plain as the blanket that the baby kicked off in his fuss.
“... Are you positive?” Yoshio asked, cutting right to the point.
Yuuichi almost scoffed. Maybe he had just already made his mind up as to what he was going to do next and saw what he wanted, but the resemblance was already uncanny.
Yuuichi bit his bottom lip. “If I deny him, then he has nothing.”
Yoshio Ootori looked down at his grandson, whose fussy whines filled the tense silence. “Then he has nothing.”
“You don’t mean that.” Yuuichi said, far too boldly for someone in his position.
“I do mean that. With all my heart.” Yoshio turned nose up at Yuuichi’s child, who had begun to cry softly and fight against the confines of the carseat. “We’ll take him to a fire station. An orphanage. I don’t care, he just can’t stay here any longer-”
“You can’t do that!” Yuuichi yelled, stepping between his father and the car seat.
“Do you have any idea how this looks?” Yoshio hisses, his hand wrapping around Yuuichi’s wrist in an attempt to move him away. “We can’t afford a mistake like this!”
Yuuichi bit his bottom lip. “My son isn’t a-”
“Spare me, Yuuichi. Spare me.” Yoshio let go of his wrist, giving up on trying to move a son who was almost as tall as him. “You’ve been a father for what? A few hours? You don’t know a damn thing about what that means.”
Yuuichi was silent. He didn’t know what to say to that. Maybe part of him knew that Yoshio was trying to be a father himself in that moment, stopping his son from making what he perceived as a mistake.
“... I can care for him, you don’t need to-”
“For god’s sake, he isn't a stray dog!” Yoshio scoffed.
Yuuichi observed his father, the panic rising in his chest. He was losing. He needed to do something quickly.
“... You need my consent to do anything with him.” Yuuichi said defiantly. “And I won’t sign my rights over.”
“Then his mother-”
“She doesn’t want him! This family is all he has, if you send him away then I’ll just go back and get him.” Yuuichi insisted, his voice so loud that it turned into a shout.
Yoshio barely flinched at his son’s harsh tone. “... Yuuichi, at what age can he eat solids?”
“... What?”
“When should you expect him to start sitting up on his own?” His father continued. “How do you enroll him in school when the time comes? How often should you schedule doctor's appointments for him?”
Yuuichi’s eyes narrowed in annoyance as he realized what his father was calling him; Incompetent. And even more annoying was the fact that he was making his point well. Yuuichi didn’t know the answers to any of these questions. Instead, he stood with the inside of his bottom lip between his teeth, looking angrily at the ground and saying nothing.
Yoshio drank in his silence. “You can walk out of that door with him if you want. But you will get no help from me.”
There was a break in his fathers voice, a quality that almost made it sound like he was in pain. That’s how Yuuichi knew he was being serious.
His throat was dry as he looked back up at his father, hoping to find a sign of hesitation on his face. Instead he was met with that same, steadfast stare that he had seen so many times in the business meetings he had been allowed to sit in on.
He had to think of something quickly.
“... He’s still going to grow even if I give him up,” Yuuichi said as evenly as he could. “And when he does he will ask questions.”
Yoshio didn't respond to that immediately. Instead he furrowed his brow as his son elaborated.
“You can either let me take responsibility now,” Yuuichi continued with more confidence. “Or the Ootoris will have a lot to answer for two decades from now.”
He was finally speaking his fathers language. Yoshio pursed his lips before nodding solemnly. He took his phone out of his pocket, turning to make a short, formality-less phone call that Yuuichi could barely hear. Even after his father hung up, he kept his back turned on Yuuichi in the way he always did when he had run out of arguments or ideas.
Fast, even footsteps echoed down the hallway, ending abruptly when a young man appeared in the doorway. Yuuichi recognized him as a member of the security staff, but only because of the uniform he was wearing. The young man looked around the room almost frantically, as if he was trying to put an entire puzzle together while missing most of the pieces.
“Tachibana,” Yoshio greeted in a breathy, exasperated voice as he walked over and clapped a hand on the young man’s shoulder. He leaned in and whispered something into the man’s ear. Tachibana’s eyes widened and he looked over to Yuuichi for just a second before staring down at the ground politely. Yoshio finished whatever he was whispering, his face growing stern. “None of what you’ve seen tonight is to leave this room.”
Tachibana hesitated before walking over to the car seat on the ground. He went to pick the baby up, but the little guy was not pleased to be woken up so rudely from an otherwise peaceful nap. He fussed, then he whined, then he cried.
“Here,” Yuuichi carefully snuck his hands in between Tachibana’s and lifted the baby from his seat, holding him to his chest until his son’s breath evened out and he drifted back to sleep in a matter of seconds.
Tachibana just sat there, watching and waiting for Yuuichi to deem the boy calm enough to pass over. Yuuichi hesitated, but eventually passed the baby into Tachibana’s waiting arms. His hand rested on his son’s little chest, feeling the way it rose and fell with every stuffy-nosed breath.
“... From now on, he is your younger brother.” Yoshio said it quietly, like he was trying to make sure Yuuichi didn’t hear it. But in the tense silence, it echoed off the walls clear as day.
Yuuichi’s eyes widened. “That’s not-”
“That’s my final condition.” Yoshio said sternly. “I will not discuss it further.”
His father began to leave the room.
“Kyoya.”
Yoshio stopped. “What?”
Yuuichi took his hand off of the baby’s chest slowly, like he was fighting against some type of force trying to hold it there. “His name is Kyoya.”
His father didn’t respond. Instead, his footsteps echoed, followed by the slam of a door.
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