The Inazuma Scrapbook

What's In a Name?

"He's Kiyama Hiroto. But he used to be Gran too. And once upon a time, he had had another name, even if he can't remember it anymore."

Pretending to be someone you're not, for the sake of someone else, is not healthy. Hiroto can't help it though, not when he is the only one who can help his father with this.

⚽⚽⚽⚽

Once upon a time, there was a child named Kiyama Tatsuya.

(He would lose his name though, and perhaps even his identity, to do what never failed to make him happy: seeing other people smile.)

Tatsuya didn't know why he was standing there, or where he even was. The policemen had explained what was happening to him briefly, but all the four year old could remember was that he would be living in a different place now.

Watching one of the policemen knock on a really big door, Tatsuya wondered where his parents were. 

Did they… Did they give him up? Because he wasn't good enough? But he always listened to what they said, and he never spoke of things he wasn't supposed to. He followed their every rule, so why wouldn't it be enough? Was he really such a bad kid?

(Almost a decade later, the same child — now a middle-schooler standing in front of the remnants of a meteor, basking in its purple glow — would look back, and realise that he hadn't been a bad kid. They had been bad parents.)

The door of the — Tatsuya checked the name plate — Oh… Sama… En? What?

He squinted at the name, trying his best to make out the words, but he couldn't quite read the fancy script. His father was right. He really was stupid.

"—let's…"

Tatsuya turned, blinking at some woman who had answered the door. She stared back, green eyes wide and— were those tears? What had he done now?

"No way…" she murmured, her voice so low that Tatsuya wasn't sure if he was meant to hear it. 

There was a strange thickness to her voice, something Tatsuya couldn't quite put into words back then, but even he could tell that it shouldn't be there.

(He would learn the word for it later in his life. Grief.)

Tatsuya stared at her, only blinking in response. How was he to remove something he didn't even know the name of?

Right in front of him, a tear fell. It was wiped away before it could go too far.

Before Tatsuya could move or even speak, the lady beckoned him inside, and in the same thick voice, she said, "Come on, Hiroto."

(Years afterwards, when the moment was nothing but a blurry memory, Hiroto would remember his father calling him that for the first time instead.

"Father thought I was his real son," he would say with a small, nostalgic smile. "I think even Nee-san cried.")

⚽⚽⚽⚽

He was Kiyama Hiroto. He was Kiyama Hiroto. 

He was Hiroto.

Hiroto. Father's dead son.

The dead son Tatsuya knew nothing about, the dead son he would give anything to be. Father had given him— no, them all everything. Father deserved happiness, and if he had to be Hiroto to make him happy, it was only a small price to pay.