Legacy Protocol Version Alpha
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 13A
They spent the second day of Tom’s visit at Universal Studios, a full family outing Kaito had proposed half-jokingly and Tom had accepted without a second’s hesitation.
“I haven’t been to an amusement park since I was younger than Midori,” Tom admitted in the car, “and even then it was a county fair with one rickety Ferris wheel. This is going to be educational for me.”
“You’re about to get destroyed,” Midori said, already vibrating with anticipation. “I’ve been on the big coaster nine times. I know exactly which seat makes you feel like you’re going to die.”
“Wonderful. Something to look forward to.”
He rode everything they put him on, without complaint, including the coaster Midori steered him toward with obvious malicious intent, and came off it slightly green but laughing, one hand braced on the railing.
“You weren’t kidding,” he managed.
“Told you,” Midori said, delighted with herself.
Hana, who preferred watching to riding, spent most of the day trailing a half-step behind with her camera, and Tom noticed, without her having to say anything, and slowed his pace to walk beside her instead of ahead.
“You don’t have to keep me company,” she said. “I like watching more than doing.”
“I know. I’d still rather walk with you than leave you behind.” He nodded toward her camera. “What are you actually looking for, when you’re framing something? I’ve never been able to tell, watching people photograph things, what they’re actually chasing.”
Hana considered the question seriously, the way she considered most things. “The moment right before someone decides how they want to look,” she said. “Before the smile gets arranged. That’s the only one that’s ever real.”
Tom looked at her for a long moment, something quietly impressed crossing his face. “That’s a better answer than I expected.”
“Most people don’t ask the actual question,” Hana said. “They just say ‘nice picture’ and move on.”
Kaito, meanwhile, had commandeered most of the day toward the park’s few genuinely difficult games — the ones rigged just enough that winning required either real skill or a working understanding of the odds, which he’d apparently done in his head before they’d even reached the booth.
“You’re supposed to lose this one,” Tom observed, watching Kaito line up a shot with unnerving focus. “That’s the whole business model.”
“I know,” Kaito said, and won anyway, walking off with a stuffed animal roughly the size of Midori, which he handed to her without comment, already moving on to the next booth.
By the time they collapsed into a booth at dinner, all four of them sunburned and worn out in the good way a long day outdoors leaves people, Emiko looked around the table — Midori recounting the coaster for the third time with increasingly dramatic embellishment, Hana quietly showing Tom a photo on her camera screen, Kaito already planning tomorrow’s individual date with the same tactical focus he’d brought to the ring toss — and felt something settle in her chest that had nothing to do with romance at all.
It looked, for the first time in longer than she let herself track, simply like a family.
The kids scattered to their rooms not long after they got home, worn out the way a full day of sun and adrenaline leaves a teenager — showers, then doors closing, then quiet. Emiko found Tom on the back patio, still in his sunburned t-shirt, nursing a glass of water like it was the only thing keeping him upright.
“Survived,” he said, when she sat down beside him.
“Barely. Midori nearly killed you on that coaster.”
“Twice.” He shifted, making room, and she settled against his side without either of them making a production of it, his arm coming around her shoulders the way it had a dozen times now, familiar rather than new. “Your kids are exhausting. In the best way.”
“I heard.” She smiled into his shoulder. “Hana showed me the picture she took of you mid-scream.”
“Please tell me that’s staying off the internet.”
“No promises.”
They sat quietly for a while, running back through pieces of the day out loud — Kaito’s unnerving skill at the rigged games, Midori’s running commentary on every ride, the quiet, careful way Hana had walked beside Tom with her camera instead of ahead of him.
“You were good with them today,” Emiko said eventually. “Really good. Not performing it. Just — there.”
“I was terrified half the time,” Tom admitted. “Kaito’s games alone. I kept waiting for one of them to ask me something I couldn’t answer.”
“They will, eventually. That’s not a bad thing.”
“I know.” He kissed the top of her head, unhurried. “I just want to get this right, Emiko. Not just liking them. Actually building something real with each of them, the way you asked me to think about.”
“You are,” she said quietly. “I watched you do it all day without even trying to.”
They stayed out there a long while after that, past when the sky had gone fully dark, not saying much else — just the ordinary, unremarkable comfort of two tired people at the end of a good day.
Midori claimed the first individual date the very next morning, unwilling to wait even a day longer — she’d been counting down since Tom first proposed the idea, and nobody in the house had any illusions about making her stand in line behind her siblings.
She was already at the door the moment she heard his car, itinerary in hand, actually typed, printed, in a plastic sleeve.
“Item one,” she announced, thrusting it at him before he’d made it past the threshold. “You take me to see a real trading floor. For the contract. I need to understand the industry I’m consulting for.”
“Can I get a cup of coffee first, Munchkin?”
“No time. Item one starts now.”
He got her onto the floor of a firm his brother knew, badge and all, and watched her walk through it with her hands clasped behind her back like a tiny, terrifying auditor, asking a floor trader precisely worded questions about margin calls until the man looked, faintly, like he wanted to call security.
“You scared him,” Tom said, once they were back outside.
“He didn’t know the answer,” Midori said, unbothered. “That’s not my fault.”
“Item two?” Tom asked, checking the sleeve.
“Ice cream. Obviously.”
They got ice cream. Midori ordered something with four toppings and ate half of it before they’d even sat down, swinging her feet under the bench, considerably more like a fourteen-year-old now than the small terrifying auditor from twenty minutes earlier.
“Can I ask you something?” she said, around a mouthful.
“Always.”
“Do you actually want to marry Mom, or do you just like her a lot?”
Tom set his own cone down, taking the question as seriously as she’d clearly meant it. “I want to marry her. I’ve known that for a while now, if I’m honest with you.”
“Even with us?” Midori pressed. “Like, the whole package. Not just Mom by herself.”
“Especially with you,” Tom said. “I didn’t fall for your mother and then have to figure out how to tolerate the three of you. It doesn’t work like that for me. You’re part of the whole thing I want, not an obstacle to it.”
Midori considered that, licking a drip off her wrist without breaking eye contact. “I still don’t want to call you Dad.”
“Nobody’s asking you to.”
“I know. I just wanted to say it again in case you forgot.” She took another bite, thinking. “But I don’t hate you. For the record.”
“High praise.”
“It is, actually.” She grinned at him, sudden and bright. “I don’t hate very many people.”
He laughed, real and surprised, and she looked pleased with herself for landing it.
“Item three,” she said, sliding the itinerary back toward him. “Claw machine. I’ve never won one and I refuse to leave this country without a stuffed animal I earned through pure skill.”
“That’s not skill, Midori. Those machines are rigged.”
“Then we’ll rig it back,” she said, already standing, already walking toward the arcade across the street. “Come on, Tom. We’ve got work to do.”
He followed her, shaking his head, and lost eleven dollars in quarters over the next twenty minutes before Midori finally wrestled a lopsided purple octopus free of the machine’s claw through what she insisted, loudly, was strategy and not luck.
“Munchkin Miller,” she said, hugging the octopus to her chest, triumphant, “does not lose.”
“No,” Tom agreed, watching her. “I don’t imagine you do.”
Emiko had the evening to herself while Midori recounted every detail of the day over dinner, and after the dishes were done and Midori had finally run out of things to say about the octopus, she found a quiet minute alone with Tom on the phone before he headed back to the hotel.
“She’s already asking if she can call the firm ‘her office,’” Emiko said, laughing.
“I may have created a monster.”
“You created a very happy monster. Thank you for today.”
“Thank her,” Tom said. “She had the whole itinerary planned before I’d even had coffee.”
Hana’s turn came two days later, after Tom had spent a quiet morning working through emails from his brother, and she asked, almost shyly, if he’d just sit with her somewhere rather than plan anything elaborate.
They ended up at a quiet café near the university, Hana’s camera resting on the table, forgotten.
“Can I tell you something?” she said. “I haven’t really told anyone.”
“Always.”
“My dad used to call me his high-maintenance fox.” Her voice caught somewhere in the middle of it, and she stopped, pressed her lips together, tried again. “I’d climb up next to him on the couch every night. He’d just — let me. Never made me feel too old for it.” A tear slipped down before she could stop it, and she swiped at it, embarrassed. “I miss being held. I don’t even know how to ask for that from anyone anymore. It feels stupid to want, at my age.”
“It’s not stupid.”
“I’m seventeen, Tom.”
“You were eight when you lost him,” he said, and his voice had gone quiet, rough at the edges in a way she hadn’t heard from him before. “That kind of missing doesn’t age out. Grief doesn’t check anyone’s ID.”
She was crying properly now, quiet and unguarded, and Tom got up, came around, and sat in the chair beside hers instead, close enough that his shoulder was there if she wanted it. She did. She leaned into him, and he put his arm around her, and for a long moment neither of them said anything at all, the café noise going on around them, indifferent, while he just let her cry against his shoulder.
“I’m here,” Tom said eventually, quiet. “And I’m not going anywhere. That has to count for something.”
“It counts,” Hana said, muffled against his shoulder. “It counts a lot.”
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