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Hayato is a messy eater. He smacks his fat hands carelessly on his tray even though, today, Touya tried one of those sensory plates - the ones that are technically for dogs - just to see if Hayato would enjoy it. He does; mashed sweet potato and peach are splattered up the wall, abstract art on a canvas of white.
Touya sighs heavily through his nose and, spoon still in hand, uses the back of his sleeve to wipe between his lips and nose.
“Hayato, baby, please,” he says, ignoring the exhaustion that weighs him down because even if it’s nearly naptime, Touya still has to do laundry before he can lie down, too. Hayato is dangerously low on onesies and, even though it’s early May and the heat is already near-overbearing to Touya, Touya’s son doesn’t have his quirk and he worries that he’ll get cold if he’s not wearing long sleeves.
“Odou!” Hayato tells him, slapping at the section with wiggly, diagonal grooves. He grips his pureed fruits and squeezes his hand into a fist so orange glop spills through his fingers and lands with a splat next to his cracker puffs on the tray, then giggles hysterically.
“I see,” Touya says, sighs. He thinks he might have a marble in his brain, loose and rattling. He pinches and rubs over the bridge of his nose, opening his mouth to prompt Hayato to do the same. “Ahh.”
“Anana?” Hayato burbles, but otherwise doesn’t open his mouth for anything other than his own gummed-on fist.
“Yep,” Touya says, nudging the rubber tipped baby spoon against Hayato’s spit-slobbery mouth. His little fist drops back to his tray to make room. “Say ahh.” Hayato opens wide and bites hard on the rubber once it’s in his mouth so Touya can’t pull the spoon away, and bursts into giggles when Touya just sighs again, heavier, his gray eyes scrunching at the corners with delight. “Let go, bubba.”
“Mmm,” Hayato says, mimicking sounds and tones he’s beginning to recognize, and then giggles again, drooling banana mush down his chin. Touya’s lips quirk upward without his consent because, as much as he is and wants to be frustrated, the unfiltered joy his son finds in spraying food from his mouth is hard to be truly upset about.
“Is that good?” Touya asks, biting the corner of his lip to keep from grinning fully lest it give Hayato any ideas.
“Ah!” Hayato cries. He releases the clamp of his jaw and starts smacking at his tray in a sudden burst of pre-nap energy, wings fluttering wildly behind him. “Ododododo!”
Touya laughs, knocking his head back. “Yeah?” he asks, high and loud, the spoon shaking in his hand. Hayato squeals and leans forward to try and get it back in his mouth, eyes bright and shining, but Touya tugs it hastily out of his reach. Hayato’s handful of teeth clack together when he dives forward to snap his jaws playfully at the empty air. “You can’t eat the spoon!”
Hayato shrieks with giggles, little wings flaring and flapping where they’re trapped between his back and the highchair. “Ee-mmBah!” he argues, chittering and babbling as Touya spoons up another bite of bananas.
“You can’t!” Touya argues back. Hayato squawks, and Touya takes the opportunity to slip the spoon into his mouth. Hayato giggles around the bite, swiping his arms at nothing, yellow mash spilling down his chin. He swallows his bite and then what Touya spoons back into his mouth, and after, Touya decides it’s probably time to give up. He drops the spoon back into the jar of mashed banana, feeling well and truly defeated.
Several puffs stick to Hayato’s fingers when he smacks them back onto his tray; Hayato paws them into his fist, then shoves his fist into his mouth to gum on.
“You’re silly,” Touya tells him, sitting the little glass jar of baby food on the dining table. He nudges it with his fingertips to the center so he doesn’t accidentally knock it over with his elbow. “Are you all done?”
Hayato warbles, snagging more strawberry cracker puffs. He crunches them with his five and a half teeth and, after digging around the maze rings of his sensory plate for stragglers, holds his hand out.
“More?”
“Ah,” Hayato says, affirmative, making grabby hands. His feet kick out excitedly when Touya overturns the little plastic container to shake more out onto his tray. He lets a number of them fall into the grooves of the sensory plate, and Hayato surges forward in his highchair to grab at them.
“Oh my,” Touya says, popping the lid back on and sitting the puffs to the side. “So impatient.” Hayato babbles, at him but not in his direction, talking through his bites. “Uh-huh, I hear ya.” Touya hums, taking a single, half-soggy puff when Hayato pinches it between his fingers and holds it out to him. “Thank you, baby, very yummy,” he says, sneaking it back onto the tray when Hayato whips around to stare out the open window above the kitchen sink. There’s a small sparrow on the sill, pecking at the bird feeder. Hayato chirps at it, turning back to Touya and babbling some very serious stuff when it flies off.
Touya nods along, responding when appropriate, passing Hayato a larger, more nutritious fruit cracker once he’s finished inhaling his puffs. He offers him another bite of banana puree in between very gummed, soggy bites of cracker, but Hayato grunts and pushes at the spoon every time he tries, so Touya decides to just reseal the jar and return it to the fridge for later. They’ll try again with dinner. Maybe Keigo can try doing airplane with his feathers, if he gets back early enough.
As he passes around the high chair, freshly dampened burp cloth in hand, he presses a kiss to Hayato’s messy curls, brushing his bangs back with the tips of his fingers. Hayato’s baby wings tickle his chin, flapping happily, and he coos, tilting his head back to keep eyes, however awkwardly, on his daddy. He holds the last bite of his extremely wet cracker out, nose scrunched.
“Ododo,” he burbles, drooling excessively. Touya dabs the cloth over the bottom half of Hayato’s face, cheeks, chin, and nose all smeared with a slobbery mess of crumbs and fruit mash, holding him still with his opposite palm as he squirms away from the touch. It’s one of their older, rougher burp cloths, and Touya’s sorry to have to use it; they’ve found that Hayato tends to prefer softer fabrics, but nothing else is clean, so it will have to do for now.
“Otou-chan is all full,” Touya says, passing the scent gland in his wrist over the back of Hayato’s neck and feathery ear as he pulls the cloth away, hoping his scent will soothe Hayato’s fussing. “But thank you for offering, my sweet boy.”
“Odou,” Hayato says, reaching out with both arms now, eyes big and wet.
“I know, angel,” Touya says, purr already crackling in his throat. “I’m sorry, I know that one feels yucky.” He snaps the safety buckles of Hayato’s highchair straps, rumbling softly to keep his pup calm as he works on the clasps of the tray. “Almost done… There, Otou-chan got it. Come here, sweetheart.” With one hand flat over Hayato’s bloated belly, Touya sits the tray on the dining table, then scoops his son into his arms with a soft, warbling croon. Hayato, fist still gripping tightly to the last bite of his cracker, buries his face in Touya’s neck with a wobbly little hiccup.
He gurgles, nose to Touya’s marked scent gland, little legs stomping in the air. His cracker-occupied fist settles neatly over Touya’s collarbone. “Odou-jaa,” he says, muffled where his cheek rests on Touya’s shoulder.
“You’re okay,” Touya says, smoothing his knuckles up his pup’s trembling spine, massaging right between his speckled wings. Hayato slumps in his hold. His wings go limp, warm breaths puffing across Touya’s mottled throat between soft hums of self-soothing.
A few moments later, Hayato’s crackered fist nudges into his mouth, and Touya, as he paces back and forth across the sunken living room of the apartment, listens to the sounds of his son finishing his cracker, then, once it’s gone, to the little, hitched breaths he gasps against his skin, hiccupy like he’d been sobbing, even though he hasn’t.
“Got yourself all worked up, Haya-tan,” Touya says, resting his cheek atop Hayato’s warm, feathery head. His crest wiggles, fluffs, and settles. Touya glances at the clock on the DVR. 12:27. They're making good time. “Let’s go take our nap now, huh?”
Hayato smells like warm rice.
It’s specific, soft and still milky, and it reminds Touya of being very, very little, too short, still, to even see over the countertop; of standing in the kitchen with his mom, her belly not-yet heavy with a brother he hadn’t wanted, lunch or early dinner cooking on the stove; of impatience and hunger and a growing knot in the divot of his chest where his ribs meet. In the memory, his mother is rolling dough, or maybe chopping vegetables, hair shorn just above her shoulders, and Touya can’t see her face. He doesn’t know what expression she’s making, and doesn’t particularly care to, because it doesn’t matter; knowing won’t change what happened to him, or her, or any of them. Mostly, Touya remembers the neutral scent of rice and the ache in his chest that accompanied it.
But the rice in Hayato’s scent doesn’t smell anything like a grief too big for a child’s body. Instead, Hayato’s rice is something very kind, very gentle; it feels a lot like dipping his head under water and using his fingers to push his hair back from his eyes, bright and dewy, to blink wet lashes wide open. It’s a much better thought to have when he thinks of his son; renewal, rebirth, and something that feels terribly like contentment.
Touya exhales through his nose and blinks back to himself, settled in the rocking chair in the barely-lit nursery. The blackout curtains are drawn, the sound machine humming; the only light comes from the hallway, a warm yellow like the afternoon sun. It’s not yet one.
Hayato nurses with his freshly-cleaned fist curled overtop Touya’s breast, fingers twitching in time with his droopy wings every few swallows. There’s a bead of milk at the corner of his lips that Touya finds he aches to dab at with the spit cloth, but Hayato is slowly sagging into sleep and he really hates the way the fabric feels against his skin, so Touya keeps himself still other than the rhythmic swaying of the armchair.
“Haya-tan,” Touya says, low and light. Hayato’s eyelids flutter, lashes damp and clumped from fussing. His taloned nails pinch at Touya’s breast, right beside a tiny, blooming, green-hued bruise from last night’s feeding. He hadn’t pinched much this morning, too distracted by tracking Keigo as he got ready for work. His mouth moves soundlessly around Touya’s nipple. “How can such a little tummy have so much room, huh?” Touya asks him softly, brushing his thumb first over Hayato’s wrist and then again over the swell of his cheek, wiping the tear stains from the crease of his eye. Hayato has Touya’s face shape and Keigo’s appetite, rounded-out and plump. He coos, spilling more milk down his chin, the feathers on his ears unfurling. He gets those from Keigo, too, delicate feathers lining him like freckles.
“I know. I’m sorry,” Touya says, tucking a thick, white curl behind Hayato’s ear. It bounces back over and Touya opts to ignore it instead of bothering to fix it. Hayato’s nose scrunches. “Keep eating, baby.” Hayato gurgles, swallowing a thick, noisy gulp of milk before he can spill too much more of it. The material of his body suit jumps when he kicks one of his legs, movement weak and lazy as if he hadn’t meant to do it. His eyelids droop and flutter like he’s fighting to keep them open.
“My poor angel,” Touya murmurs, shifting the nursing pillow into a more secure position under his arm and Hayato’s body. It’s bulky and tends to slip, even tucked between Touya’s knee and belly. “So, so sleepy. It’s so hard, isn’t it, bubba?” Hayato grunts, suckling more aggressively as he’s jostled. He’s not often so greedy, but the transition to solids makes him hungrier than he seems to know how to handle. Touya pats his bottom lightly, releasing more of his scent into the room. It’s milky, and lays over them like a well-weighted blanket. Hayato’s throat rumbles with a little puppy purr, wings shivering to the tips before falling limp over Touya’s forearm again. Hayato’s head is heavy in the crook of his elbow.
“Haya-tan,” Touya says again, talking just to talk. Hayato’s eye’s flit in the general direction of his face, then lid to stare at the heft of his breast over his nose. He sniffles, suckles, grunts, and pinches more firmly at Touya’s skin. “I know,” Touya says, more emotional than he ought to be. It’s one o’clock on a Wednesday, and Touya feels like crying. He won’t, lest whatever this emotion is slips into his scent and taints the sanctity of Hayato’s nursery, but the feeling is there nonetheless. He thinks it’s a good feeling, but he’s still getting used to those postpartum. There’s a lot of love inside of him, he’s learned, and sometimes it spills out of him.
Touya aches, but he thinks this ache is good. It doesn’t burn, at the very least.
As Hayato’s eyes flutter shut, Touya brushes his thumb, feather-light, over Hayato’s eyelid. It’s warm, baby soft, and slightly damp. His lashes are dark from the wetness. “My baby,” Touya whispers, a little overwhelmed and very, very tired. “My handsome boy.” He sniffles, using his foot on the ground to urge the rocking chair back into motion, giving himself something to do other than wallow in all this love. Hayato makes a soft, breathy noise around his nipple, no more than gumming at it as he begins to nod off for real. Touya’s breast is still leaking, he can feel it, but it’s hardly more than a drip, and it should stop once Hayato’s mouth goes fully slack with sleep.
It doesn’t take more than a few minutes for Hayato to drift off, weight shifting in Touya’s arms. Touya waits, counts to thirty five times in his head, and carefully slips a finger between his tender nipple and Hayato’s tongue to properly unlatch him. Hayato grunts, furrows his brows, and smacks his lips and tongue together with a pop as Touya takes his little, itty bitty hand where it rests over the curve of his breast and moves it so he can tuck his (unfortunately) still-leaking tit back into his bra. Hayato’s body curls, knees pulling inwards towards his belly despite Touya’s chest blocking the way.
From there it’s easy to settle Hayato in his crib, low to the ground to mimic a pallet but walled and without the excess material of a futon. He lays him carefully on his back, his wings instinctively folding in once his body, even in sleep, sensed movement. Touya doesn’t worry about crushing them; Keigo will preen him before bed tonight anyway, and any ruffled feathers should fix themselves when he wakes.
It takes fifteen minutes to start a load of laundry, and less than one for Touya to tuck himself into the nest.
Hayato burbles curiously in the low water, patting his palms gently and cautiously over the bubble bath.
“You like? Oton got it for you,” Touya says softly, carding his fingers through his baby’s freshly-washed, slicked-back curls, damp and plastered to his head. Hayato, resting against the pouch of Touya’s belly to help him sit upright, cranes his neck all the way back to look at him with big, wide eyes. He holds his fist up for Touya to see, babbling a question, then looks back to the water and shoves his hand below the surface. He squeezes his fingers around the bubbles, wings jerking and flapping between them when they dissipate. He makes a soft noise of excitement, half-cried and quiet, one of his legs kicking involuntarily.
“Odou,” he says, getting another fistful of bubbles to show Touya.
“Wow!” Touya tells him, copying the motion. Hayato squeals, chubby, squeaky-clean feet stomping underwater. “So cool, bubba. Oton did good, huh?”
“Ah,” Hayato says, the feathers on his ears fluttering. He looks towards the door, then back up at Touya. “Odon?”
“Yeah, Oton,” Touya says, bending to press a kiss to his son’s head. He smells flowery with soap. “Gotta tell him how much you love your new bubbles when he gets home, okay?” Hayato gurgles in confirmation despite having no idea what Touya’s just said to him, and grabs at his bird-hooked toes.
Keigo pokes his head around the crack in the bathroom door, hair dark blonde and still a little damp from showering at the office. “My ears are ringing,” he says, soft and almost sing-song. Hayato smacks his hands against the surface of the water and shrieks, sudden and startling.
“Odon!” he cries, breaking off into a garbled mixture of chirps and babbles. He holds his new fist of bubbles up for Keigo to see, shaking his fat little arm wildly.
“I see!” Keigo says with equal excitement, snagging the ducky towel behind the door on his way in. He squats beside their cramped little tub and dips his fingers into the water to tickle Hayato’s full tummy. “Somebody ate good tonight, huh?”
“Ah!” Hayato says, papping at the joint of Keigo’s wrist. “Ododododo.”
“This looks like a green bean belly,” Keigo says, grinning. He prods Hayato’s distended navel, then leans forward to kiss his nose when Hayato throws his head back against Touya’s chest to giggle. His belly hiccups with the force.
“Good guess, Oton,” Touya says, cooing; there’s a steady purr in his throat, unquashable. Hayato sits his bubbles on Touya’s knee and shoves his hands under the water to push at the floor of the tub. “We had green beans and carrots and the rest of our nanas from lunch.” Touya smooths Hayato’s crest back so he doesn’t drip water in his eyes. “And we tried to have some canned pineapples, but we didn’t like them very much.”
“I get it, little owl,” Keigo says, nodding. He lets Hayato take his hand off his belly, pinching and pulling at his fingers underwater and shaking it in the hold of his fists. “I don’t like them either.” Then, sweeter, “Hi, angel.” Keigo kisses Touya, chaste and quick. “Sounds like a very eventful dinner.”
“Mhm,” Touya says. He presses another kiss to the top of Hayato's head, just because he can. He grins when Hayato whines and swats at him with his fat baby fist, and pretends to bite at it to make Hayato giggle. “I made chazuke. Tea’s on the stove.”
“You’re so good to me.” Keigo presses a kiss to his forehead, licks his lips of the dampness once he pulls away. “Want me to get him ready for bed?”
“Please,” Touya says, slipping his fingers beneath Hayato’s air-chilled armpits. Hayato squawks as he’s lifted in the coldness of the bathroom, but it quickly dissolves into puppy purrs as Keigo wraps him in his ducky towel. Touya turns the faucet on when Keigo stands, sinking into the rising water. “I’ll just be a minute.”
“No rush,” Keigo says, cooing at their damp pup tucked snugly against his chest, feathery little toes poking out of his towel. Hayato tugs and pinches at the band of his daddy’s shirt collar, burbling and babbling quietly to himself. “We’ll just get our jammies on and do some tummy time while we wait. Ain’t that right, Haya-tan?”
Hayato peeps an answer at the questioning tone, but doesn’t lift his head from Keigo’s shoulder, still chirring from deep in his tummy. Keigo nods like he’d understood and winks at Touya over the crown of their son’s head. Touya flushes despite himself, because he’s nothing if not easily charmed.
“See? All good.”
Touya laughs softly, nudging the water warmer with his foot on the nozzle. “Sure,” he says, waving at Hayato over the rim of the tub when Keigo shoulders the bathroom door open. “Bye bye, baby. Bye, Oton. See you soon.”
Keigo snickers, Hayato babbles a nonsense syllable into his father’s throat, and Touya sinks beneath the water.