Chapter 78 Episode 78: Blessings

Kael’s POV

I stand on the narrow step outside her door with my hands empty and my pulse louder than it has any right to be.

The building is the same one I have walked Akira back to more than once. The paint on the stairwell is peeling in long, tired strips. Somewhere above us a neighbour’s radio leaks thin music through an open window.

None of it matters. I have rehearsed the words in the quiet of my own place until they felt solid enough to carry, and still the moment of lifting my hand to knock feels like stepping off a ledge.

She opens the door before I can second-guess the decision.

Akira’s mother is smaller than the authority she carries. Her eyes move over me once, quick and assessing, the same way they did the evening she fed him at her table and extracted his birth date and his opinions on tea like she was simply collecting the necessary facts of someone who might stay. Recognition settles in her face. She does not smile, but she steps aside and lets me in.

The apartment is neat in the way of people who have learned to keep order with very little. I decline the tea she offers because my hands are not entirely steady and I refuse to let the cup advertise it.

We sit across from each other at the low table. The silence stretches just long enough for me to feel the weight of what I have come to ask.

"I want to court your son," I say. The words come out cleaner than I expected. "Openly. With the intention of marriage. I’m here to ask for your blessing before I ask him."

She studies me for a long moment. The quiet in the room is absolute. I keep my gaze steady and let her look. There is no strategy left in me for this part, only the raw fact of how completely Akira has rearranged the future I am willing to build.

"You look at him the way a man looks at something he has already decided to keep," she says at last. Her voice is even. "Even now. Just speaking of him."

I feel the truth of it land in my face. Whatever expression I am wearing, I cannot seem to school it into anything cooler. The lovestruck softness she has named sits there openly, stupid and undeniable.

I think of Akira in the yard at dawn, the focused set of his mouth while he works a defensive pivot I have corrected a hundred times. I think of the way he went to his knees for me without being asked.

I think of the soft, startled sound he made when I first called him baby and he chose to carry the word instead of questioning it. The memories rise so vividly that I know they are visible on me.

Her mouth softens by a fraction. The endearment she finds in my lack of composure is quiet and almost reluctant, but it is there.

"Go on," she says.

I tell her the practical shape of what I am offering. I have already secured a place far from these streets, light, secure, close enough to the things he needs and far enough from the grind that has defined both their lives. The paperwork is done.

The accounts are arranged. I will move her first if she will allow it, and Akira will stay with me in the condo I already keep. Not as a temporary arrangement. As the beginning of the household I intend to make permanent.

I do not dress the offer in softness. I simply lay out the facts the way I would lay out a mission brief, because that is the only language I trust when the stakes are this high.

She listens without interrupting. When I finish she looks down at her hands for a moment, then back at me.

"You would take him out of here," she says. It is not quite a question.

"Yes."

"And keep him."

"Yes."

The word comes out lower than the others. Possessiveness threads through it before I can stop the sound. The more selfish part of me has been waiting for this conversation with an impatience that has nothing to do with strategy.

I want Akira in my space. I want his clothes in my closet and his scent on my sheets and the right to reach for him in the middle of the night without calculating who might see.

I want to watch the small changes in him up close, the way the defensive work is rewriting his instincts, the way the rank he still hides continues to climb, the way he softens when I say his name in the particular tone that belongs only to us. I want those changes to happen under my roof, where I can answer them.

She sees that too. I can tell by the way her eyes narrow, not in disapproval but in recognition of a hunger she understands even if she will never name it aloud.

"He carries things," she says carefully. "Things he does not speak of. Even to me."

The system. The missions. The A-rank reality behind the D-rank file. The progressive design that is still unfolding around him. I feel the knowledge settle heavier in my chest. I will not lie to her, but I also will not hand her details that are not mine to give.

"I know," I answer. "I’m not asking him to put them down before I stay. I’m asking for the right to stay anyway."

Something in her expression shifts. The assessment does not disappear, but it makes room for a quieter calculation—the kind a mother makes when she is measuring whether the man in front of her will still be standing when the unnamed things her son carries finally demand their price.

"You would build a life with him even if those things never become clear."

"Yes."

The single syllable carries everything I have decided in the weeks since he sat on the edge of his bed and told me about the missions. The system can keep its secrets. The elevation can arrive on whatever timeline it chooses. I will build the future around him regardless.

I will stand between him and whatever is coming for as long as my body and my resources allow. The factors that influence his actions, whatever their origin, do not change the claim I am here to make.

She is silent for a long time.

Outside, the thin music from the neighbour’s radio changes track. A child shouts somewhere in the stairwell and is answered by a woman’s tired voice. Ordinary life continues on the other side of the thin walls while I wait for the answer that will determine how soon I can stop hiding the scale of what I feel.

"You may ask him," she says at last. "With my blessing."

The relief that moves through me is so complete it leaves me briefly lightheaded. I bow my head once, deeper than formality requires, and let her see the gratitude I do not trust my voice to carry cleanly.

When I look up again the lovestruck expression she noticed earlier has returned without my permission. I can feel it sitting openly on my face, soft, certain, almost young.

She shakes her head, but the gesture is not rejection. It is the reluctant acceptance of a mother who has decided the man in front of her is foolish in the particular way that sometimes lasts.

"Do not make him wait too long for the question," she says. "He has waited enough in his life for things that never arrived."

"I won’t."

I mean it. The formal ask will come as soon as I can put the words in the right order. Until then I will keep the early mornings in the yard, the careful hands-on corrections, the quiet claim of the name I gave him.

I will keep mapping the changes in him, the improving defence, the climbing capacity he still does not name, the way he leans into my touch when he thinks no one is watching.

And the more selfish part of me will keep counting the days until those changes happen inside walls that belong to both of us.

She walks me to the door. At the threshold she pauses, one hand on the frame.

"He is easy to hurt in ways that do not leave marks," she says quietly. "If you are going to keep him, keep all of him. Not only the parts that are convenient."

"I intend to."

The promise leaves me with more weight than any mission oath I have ever sworn. She searches my face one final time, finds whatever she needs, and closes the door with a soft click.

I stand on the narrow step for a moment longer than necessary, letting the full sequence of what just happened move through me.

Relief remains the dominant note, warm, spreading, almost dizzying. The formal path is open. I can ask him now without the quiet guilt of having bypassed the woman who raised him.

Gratitude sits beneath it, directed at a mother who looked at the soft, unguarded expression I could not hide and chose to find it endearing instead of weak.

Determination follows, clean and sharp. The condo is ready. The accounts are arranged. The only remaining piece is the conversation with Akira himself, and that conversation is no longer theoretical.

Possessiveness rises hard on the heels of the softer feelings. I want him in my space. I want the right to come home to him.

I want to watch the next rank threshold, the next quiet shift in his eyes when a mission lands, the next time he goes pliant and needy under my hands, all of it happening where I can reach him without calculating exits and sightlines.

The selfishness in that wanting no longer shames me. It simply exists, honest and hungry, beside the steadier vow to build a life that can hold him even when the system’s design finally shows its full shape.

Fear is present too, quieter but real. The factors influencing him have not disappeared because his mother gave her blessing. The A-rank reality behind the D-rank file is still growing.

The elevation the system told him to prepare for is still coming. I am choosing to bind my future to a man who is being shaped by something that does not answer either of us.

The risk is not abstract. I accept it anyway. The alternative, leaving the claim half-made while I wait for perfect information, has become unacceptable.

I take the stairs down two at a time.

Outside, the late light is the colour of old brass. I walk the familiar route back toward the complex with the blessing sitting solid in my chest and the next words already forming.

I will find him. I will take him somewhere the walls are thick enough to hold whatever answer he gives. I will tell him that his mother knows, that she has agreed, and that I am done pretending this can stay unnamed.

The lovestruck look his mother noticed is still on my face. I can feel it. I do not try to erase it.

Let him see it too.

I have waited long enough to hide the scale of what I want.