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Rei has killed a lot of people in his lifetime - unsurprising, considering it’s his job - which also means that he’s learned how to not feel guilty about it.
(Or, at least, to mostly forget the guilt so that it only bothers him during those increasingly rare nights when he’s alone, staring up at the ceiling tiles at 2am. It kills him then, the guilt, but that’s besides the point right now.)
This kill, though, is one of those ones where the guilt will always simmer quietly in the back of his mind, on occasion boiling over and tearing him apart.
(He’s never been so glad before that he has somebody now who can help him put himself back together again.)
But it’s different to the others, even still. The guilt from this one isn’t about the taking of a life, for cutting short the potential of a person, for ripping someones loved one away from them forever… No, this time, the guilt that he feels is for not doing it sooner.
(He feels guilty for thinking it would fix anything.)
It had taken him three whole days to find the bastard. More than twice as long as he had had her for. Rei had made sure to keep him… well, awake might be a bit generous but certainly alive - for as long as he had held her away from them.
And then he’d completed the job. And then he’d gone home.
Presumably, in a normal family, there’d be a lot more fanfare over him returning home after four days with no contact, right after something like this had happened.
He can almost picture it in his head:
He’d walk in the front door at some stupid time of night, brush sweat damp hair out of his eyes with blood stained gloves. Kazuki would have heard the lock click and come running into the entrance hall; he’d have tears in his eyes and his jaw would be clenched so tightly that Rei would be able to see all the sinew of neck.
“Where the hell have you been?” Kazuki would ask him in a whispered yell because she would be asleep. “I needed you. She needed you!”
And he’d look at Rei’s shirt, which had once been white but was now soaked crimson, and he’d smell the petrol that had splashed Rei’s legs when he was getting rid of the evidence, and he’d know the answer to his own question. And he’d ask it anyway and pray for a different one.
And Rei would snarl back with, “I was doing it for her !” because his emotions would be running high and he’s not good with being challenged at the best of times and they’d end up in a screaming match and everything would go so much more horribly wrong than it already had done-
He’s imagining it so vividly as he walks up the stairs to their apartment that, for a moment, he worries that that’s how it will actually happen.
But whilst they’re a family, they’ve never been normal.
He leans heavily against the door as soon as it closes behind him - he’s exhausted, he’s emotional (an awful experience that he still hasn’t gotten used to, this last decade), but he’s home .
Looking up at the sound of quiet footsteps, his unnaturally hard eyes rise to meet Kazuki’s unnaturally soft ones.
There’s joy and relief evident in Kazuki’s voice as he lets out a clearly long-held breath of, “You’re safe.”
And… that’s it. He doesn’t shout, doesn’t get mad, doesn’t say anything else at all. Just cups the palm of his hand on Rei’s face, thumb stroking gently across his cheekbone, and presses their foreheads together.
They stay like that for… a while, the amount of time isn’t what’s important here, what is, is that by the time Kazuki speaks again he isn’t gripping onto Rei as though he’s too terrified to ever let go, and Rei’s breathing has slowed from being shallow and erratic to deep and even (and absolutely not in time with the heart beating beneath the hand he has laying on Kazuki’s chest).
“She’s awake, by the way,” Kazuki murmurs, so close that Rei can feel the warmth of his breath as he speaks. “She wanted to wait up for you.”
Rei isn’t surprised. Rei will be surprised if she ever gets a good night's sleep again.
(In hindsight, Rei will realise that it probably would have been a good idea to change his shirt and wash his hands before he saw her.)
Her eyes light up as soon as Rei steps into the doorway of the aggressively pink bedroom. Both of them, as well, and Rei is immensely grateful that the swelling in her left eye has gone down significantly and there doesn’t seem to be any permanent damage.
“Papa!” she calls out, sitting up further against the headboard.
He can feel tears prickling against the corners of his eyes and he’s across the room in an instant, sweeping her into a tight embrace, her head cradled against his chest.
(Blood is smearing everywhere, on the sheets, on her, but in that moment, neither of them can bring themselves to care.)
“I’m sorry, I’m so- Fuck ! I’m so sorry, Miri, I swear that I will never let anybody hurt you ever again.”
His voice cracks as he speaks, murmuring soft apologies and promises into her hair. The words come out almost in a jumble, there’s so much he wants to say and not enough words that could possibly begin to express the depth of the emotion that he’s feeling.
She pulls back slightly to look at him, her face streaked with the still wet blood covering his shirt and gloves.
“Did you kill him?”
The question is laced with neither fear nor apprehension - the normal things you would expect from a fourteen year old girl faced with a murderer - just the simple curiosity of a child, and a small amount of vindictiveness (which you would, frankly, find in any teenage girl).
This is something which has come up a lot between him and Kazuki, whispered over late nights where neither of them can sleep, over cigarettes and whisky in the back of some dimly lit bar after a difficult job, on those rare occasions when Miri is with Kyu and they have five minutes to themselves, how much do they tell her? How much can she be trusted to know? Is it fair for them to put the secret on her? It’s something that they’ve discussed extensively and never found an answer for.
Tonight, Rei makes the decision that things have changed enough that all of that can go out the window.
“Yes. I killed him. He’s dead.”
She doesn’t need to know any more than that, he decides, but she needs to know .
(He and Kazuki will argue about it later, a heated discussion under the blankets at 3am so as not to wake her, Kazuki maintaining that she’s just a kid and didn’t need to know any of it. Rei will tell him about how much worse her nightmares would have been, how she’d be terrified of ever leaving the house for the rest of her life, how every box dropping and car backfiring and thing that goes bump in the night would always be him - and Kazuki will see something in Rei’s eyes that will make him drop it. But that’s for later.)
Rei thinks his heart might actually stop when she cuddles back into his chest and says, simply, “Good.”
He’s always been proud of how much like him and Kazuki Miri has turned out to be, neither of them actually being related to her and all, but now he’s thinking that maybe she’s a little too much like him.
He looks down at his daughter, at how she’s covered in bruises and fresh scars, the skin on her wrists raw from handcuffs, how casually she accepts that her father just killed a man, and he sees far too much of himself at that age.
God, fuck , is she going to turn out just like him? Is she going to end up as fucked up as he is? Has he been completely and utterly selfish by bringing her into his life and now she’s never going to have any chance at just being a normal kid?
He can’t help but imagine her in ten years time, imagining her in his place as a young adult - drunk, suicidal, stuck in an endless cycle of crime and violence - can’t help but think that this is what he’s doomed her to, fuck -
He’s so deep in his spiralling that he almost doesn’t hear her continue.
“I’m glad that means he can’t hurt you anymore.”
Rei freezes. Then he pulls her in even tighter because, God, after fucking everything that she’s been through in the past few days, she’s concerned about him .
“Oh, Miri, sweetheart, it means he can’t hurt any of us anymore.”
For the first time, he thinks that maybe, one day, not anytime soon but eventually, they might, all of them, be alright.
(There’s a time, a few months in the future, when Miri bounds into the kitchen at six in the morning and cheerfully asks if they can teach her how to shoot a gun.
“You know, in case I get kidnapped again or something!”
“Absolutely fucking not,” Rei responds, at the same time as Kazuki’s, “Sure, as long as you don’t tell the cops.”
And the moment is so bizarre that three of them look at each other for a few, tense moments, before bursting into uncontrollable laughter.
It’s in that moment that Rei doesn’t just think - he knows it.)