Legacy Protocol Version Alpha
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 15
Tom’s visits had settled into something like a rhythm by early summer — three, sometimes four days at a stretch, close enough together now that the house had started rearranging itself quietly around his presence without anyone announcing it. His shaving kit lived in the guest bath. There was a mug in the cabinet nobody else used. Midori had started leaving her math homework on the kitchen table on the nights he was expected, as if his presence alone might make the problem sets less painful.
He arrived on a Thursday in June to find Hana already at the door before he’d finished parking, which wasn’t unusual — what was unusual was the look on her face, drawn and tired in a way that had nothing to do with jet lag on his end.
“Bad day?” he asked, setting his bag down inside the entryway.
“The worst kind. The boring kind.” She crossed her arms, not quite looking at him. “Group project. Everyone assumed I’d do it because I’m ‘the smart one,’ and then got resentful when I actually did it well. Same thing, different week.” She hesitated, and something in her posture went smaller. “Tom, I really need a hug today.”
He didn’t make it a moment. He just opened his arms, and she stepped into them, and he held her the way he’d learned to over the months — steady, unhurried, no urgency to let go first.
“I’m sorry today was that kind of day,” he said, into her hair.
“It’s not even that bad. It’s just — every day like this adds up. Nobody wants to actually know me. They want to borrow my brain and then resent that I have one.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m not going to pretend I can fix that. But I can be someone who wants to know you instead of borrow you. That much I can do.”
Hana laughed, wet and a little surprised, and pulled back enough to wipe her eyes. “That’s a very Tom thing to say.”
“I’ve been told.” He kissed the top of her head, the way he always did, and let her go when she was ready to be let go, not a second before.
Emiko found them like that from the kitchen doorway, and something in her chest did the same complicated thing it always did lately, watching this — pride tangled up with an old, familiar ache she recognized without wanting to.
She knew where the ache came from. She’d spent years figuring it out, back before Josh, back when the loneliness had first taught her to name its own shape: her father had never once opened his arms to her like that, not without her earning it first, not without a reason attached. Watching her daughter get, without asking twice, exactly what Emiko herself had spent a childhood starving for — it should have felt like nothing but joy. Mostly it did. But some small corner of her sometimes wondered what it might have done to her, at seventeen, to have had a man simply available like that.
She didn’t say any of it out loud. She just came and stood beside them both, and Tom’s free arm opened for her too, and for a moment the three of them stood there in the entryway, not talking, just occupying the same warm quiet.
Midori found her opening later that evening, once the movie had started and the lights had gone down — some old comedy Hana had picked, low stakes, background noise more than plot.
She didn’t ask. She simply flopped down on the couch between Tom and the armrest, tucked herself under his arm like she’d been doing it her whole life instead of four months, and immediately started narrating the movie in a running commentary only he seemed obligated to respond to.
“That’s a terrible decision,” she informed him, twenty minutes in. “No competent person would do that.”
“It’s a comedy, Munchkin. Bad decisions are the whole plot.”
“Still. I’d have handled it better.”
“You’d have handled everything better. I’m aware.”
“Damn right I would have.” She elbowed him, sharp and casual, and he didn’t flinch, didn’t correct her language, just absorbed it the way he absorbed most things from her — with an ease that asked nothing of her in return.
That was the thing about Tom that Midori had never quite said out loud to anyone, not even Hana. With everyone else — teachers, other girls, even boys who circled her out of curiosity more than genuine interest — she had to calculate. Soften the sharpness or lean into it, depending on the room. With Tom, she’d never once had to decide which version of herself was safe to bring. She could be as combative as she wanted, needle him relentlessly, call him out on every bad joke and worse decision, and none of it ever cost her anything. He never once treated her fire as a threat to manage. He just met it, matched it, gave it right back.
She didn’t know how to explain that this was the rarest thing in her entire life. So she just leaned harder into his side and kept narrating the movie, and he kept absorbing it, and neither of them needed the explanation at all.
Kaito watched all of it from the armchair across the room, half-invested in the film, mostly invested in the picture the four of them made without meaning to — his mother tucked against Tom’s other side, Hana curled at the far end of the couch with her feet in Midori’s lap, Midori still narrating, Tom’s arm doing double duty holding two daughters who weren’t legally his yet and might as well have been.
He thought, not for the first time, about his own life outside this room — the easy attention he got at school, the effortless social gravity that had never once, until recently, translated into anyone actually knowing him the way this room, somehow, against every rational expectation, had made room for.
Except that wasn’t entirely true anymore, and he let himself sit with the correction.
Kaito had been training since he was five, long before he understood it as anything more than a way to spend an hour of the day that didn’t involve his own thoughts, and by the time the school formed a competitive taekwondo team his sophomore year, he was already several years ahead of anyone else who tried out. He made captain within a semester.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.