Title: I claim proud kinship with your race and blood
Author:
tasteslikemiso Characters/Pairings: Ryuuken, Uryuu
Rating: K
Word Count: 280
Notes/Summary: Ryuuken abhorred foolishness, to forgive it so readily in his son would do insult to them both. From the August 11, 2005 prompt for the community
31_days. Prompted by CottonballLOL.
Ryuuken did not see himself in his son. The set of his shoulders, the hard line of his mouth, the spread of his fingers, these were gestures Uryuu had taken up in their time apart.
Ryuuken's own hands held a phone more often than a bow; he busied himself with the practical while his son was dreaming nonsense. People were easier to save when they were alive, he reasoned to an empty room.
He wondered idly if Uryuu would ever amount to anything. Others thought his son clever. He had good grades, perhaps, but not good sense. He played dress-up and cozied up to shinigami. And it fell to Ryuuken to see that he didn't die in the meantime. Saving lives had never been a more thankless task, and Ryuuken was a doctor.
"You have a son, don't you?" a woman said too brightly in his ear. Not his secretary, he thought waspishly before remembering that she had put in for leave the week before. She continued, oblivious to his distaste for the subject, as obnoxious people often were. "I think he may be in my niece's grade, you know she-" And here he ceased to listen to her drivel, as she clearly required no effort on his part to sustain the conversation.
"You have a son, don't you?" Yes, a son. A son, who like all sons, made mistakes and was young and wrong and so very stupid, and fiercely determined to be wrong and stupid in all the ways that his father wasn't. A son who left home to chase shadows in the sky.
"You have a son, don't you?" Ryuuken knew all too well that he did.