"Dad, Lisa, this is Aika," Jin said, a nervous smile on his face as he gently guided Aika forward with a hand on the small of her back.

"It's lovely to meet you both, Jin's told me wonderful things about your family," Aika said without betraying any signs of the nervousness Jin was currently feeling. She gave each of them a small hug before looking back at Jin and snorting. "You're acting like I'm a mail order bride you found off a sketchy site on the Internet."

Jin fumbled for a response, but Aika just rolled her eyes.

"To be fair, the site wasn't that sketchy," Aika amended, causing Jin to choke further, and Lisa rescued him with a laugh as she draped an arm around Aika's shoulders.

"You, I like," she said with a wide smile, walking Aika in the general direction of the kitchen. "Has Jin told you about my indestructible skull yet? Not even a brick could make a dent! I remember it distinctly - the day was sunny and hot, not a cloud in the sky..."

Lisa's story trailed off as the two disappeared into the next room, and Jin paused from following them to look over at Namjoon. He met his father's eyes with hesitance, afraid to read whether or not Aika had met his father's approval in all of the ten seconds they'd been in the same room, but he found Namjoon looking at him with a warm expression.

"She seems like a lovely young woman," Namjoon said, and Jin felt his knees shake with sudden relief. He'd always believed Aika to be amazing and wonderful, but hearing it from his father...that meant something. It meant everything, and he hadn't really realized it until now.

"Thanks, Dad," he said, his voice thick all of a sudden. After their recent phone call, he'd thought about how long this event had been in the making, had thought about why he'd waited so long to introduce her to his family, had thought about the people she would have met but hadn't...and so he'd decided to not delay it any further, even though tonight was just his dad and Lisa and not the whole crazy entourage.

"Of course," Namjoon said, his voice colored with understanding. "Did I...ever tell you about the first time I met your mom's parents?" he asked, his words stilted as though it had never occurred to him to discuss it.

"Not that I can remember," Jin said, tilting his head. "How did it go?"

"Horribly," Namjoon said with a laugh before rubbing at his forehead as the anxiety of the moment came back to him. "I somehow managed to upend half a bowl of pasta sauce all over my shirt and on their dog, who proceeded to track it around their entire house...not my finest moment."

"At least you didn't break anything," Jin offered, only for his eyebrows to skyrocket when Namjoon's eyes meandered toward the ceiling, suddenly taking an interest in inspecting something microscopic if not altogether fictional. "Daaaaaaad?"

"It was an accident!" Namjoon said, wincing as his voice jumped up in pitch. "One that, if we're all being honest, wasn't entirely my fault–"

"Hey!" Lisa called from the kitchen, poking her head around the corner as she mercifully spared Namjoon the embarrassment of recounting yet another Namjoon-meets-inanimate-object-gone-wrong story. "Were you boys going to lounge around while the women do all the hard work, or can you get started on setting the table?"

"Of course, we're coming," Namjoon said with a nervous smile before looking over at Jin and pressing a finger to his lips.

"Sure, I won't tell Lisa of some poor inanimate victim you left behind several decades ago," Jin said, draping an arm across his dad's shoulders as he steered them toward the kitchen before leaning closer to his ear. "But it's going to cost you a jar of that special seasoning you get from CostCo," he whispered, and with a nod from Namjoon, the deal was done.

"I always thought it would be Yoongi who blackmailed me in my own home," Namjoon bemoaned. "Not Jin, my firstborn."

"What's this about blackmail?" Lisa asked, bowl set on one hip and her hand on the other. "Reminder about the outrageously attractive and mysteriously indestructible off-duty officer of the law in the kitchen."

"I've no idea," Jin said, tilting his head curiously at Namjoon as though confused before facing Lisa with a shrug. "You know how Dad's getting so old and hard of hearing," he said, mock-whispering the last few words, which led to a squawk of protest from Namjoon and a few lighthearted jabs from Lisa.

And in the corner of the kitchen was Aika, watching with a small smile on her face as though she were confused and amazed.

--

"So, that's my crazy family," Jin said with a laugh and a shrug. "Well, two of them, anyway. But my dad's the strongest guy I know – I have absolutely zero idea how he kept all of us out of trouble or at least mostly out of trouble all those years. And Lisa is crazy and brave and funny and overprotective as hell and I swear it seems like she came straight out of a video game but–"

"They seem amazing," Aika said, leaning her head on Jin's shoulder, and he drew her hand into his own, rubbing circles into her skin before pressing a kiss to the space between her thumb and index finger.

"Do you miss them, your parents?" Jin asked, keeping his voice quiet instinctively since he knew that Aika didn't like to talk about them.

"No," she said out of habit before sighing and squeezing his hand. "Sometimes," she admitted, her voice quiet, reluctant. "I miss my dad. Not so much how he is now, but...when I was little, and he would lift me up to sit on his shoulders, and I felt just...completely invincible, in a way. I felt strong, and safe, and...I think that's what I miss. Feeling that way around him. Feeling that way at all." She fell silent, and not for the first time, Jin wondered if she would go into more detail on what had taken away her illusion of strength and safety in his presence, but as usual, she avoided the topic. "I miss my mom too, but...more her mannerisms, I guess. The way she would answer a phone and sort of tilt her head, or the way she folded hand towels to get a perfect edge...silly little things like that. We were never really close."

"Do you think you'll ever try and reconnect with them?" Jin asked, trying to curb the questioning edge to his voice to sound carefully unbiased because he knew it was an issue she didn't want him or anyone to push.

"I don't know," she said, squeezing his hand again, for longer this time. "Maybe, maybe if they...change. Maybe they have changed. But it'll still be different, you know?" She sighed, leaning into his warmth, and her head seemed to grow heavier on his shoulder as though the mere thought of a reunion had physically weighed her down. "Once your trust in someone has been shaken, it never really recovers. It's hard to get past that."

Jin nodded. "I get that. But – and I'm not trying to justify their behavior, okay, just putting this out there – sometimes adults make mistakes. I remember when I was a kid thinking that my dad was this perfect, invincible being. The first time I saw him cry really shocked me and scared me a little bit too, because it meant he could be weak, vulnerable, and if he couldn't be strong all the time, then how could I possibly be? But now I'm an adult, and..." He paused to laugh, and the laughter turned into a sigh. "It feels like all I seem to be able to do lately is make mistakes. So I'm not saying that you're obligated to give them a second chance or that you're supposed to just chalk it up to the inevitability of human flaws, but...just think about it."

Aika nodded slowly, which Jin took to mean that she didn't really buy his words but that she wouldn't reject them outright. "Look, Jin, I get it. I'm a fan of redemptive character arcs just as much as anyone else. If I didn't want to make a good first impression on your parents by dressing nice, I might have worn my Save the Whales t-shirt, but–"

"That t-shirt looks great on you, by the way."

"Good answer. But what I'm trying to say is that not everyone is a redeemable character, you know? And it's not just what they do, it's how their actions affect how you're hardwired for the rest of your life. I mean–" She paused to shake her head, giving a sad little laugh. "My dad wasn't the worst, but he wasn't great either, and as a young woman, all I could think was that if that was how my own father treated me, how could I expect better from any other male, let alone someone who wasn't required to be responsible for me? And so I dated a lot of assholes because I didn't have a male role model to set any sort of standard of decency for how I was supposed to let myself be treated, for what sort of behavior to accept. And that's not really fair, placing all that blame on him – I'm the one who decided to go out with some shitty people after all, and that's on me – but my point is that it's a ripple effect. It's not just what he did, it's how he changed who I am and how I react to other people."

"I understand," Jin said, nodding. "I'm sorry if it sounded like I was oversimplifying things. I just...I haven't always been my best self, and I'm lucky that people in my life gave me extra chances. But I get that your situation isn't the same as mine."

"What about your mom?" she asked after a moment. "Not Lisa, but the woman who gave birth to you. Did you give her a second chance? Even after she walked out on all of you?"

"She's...it's complicated," Jin said, drawing his hand away from Aika's and rubbing at his palm. "She did a lot of things that really hurt me and my brothers. And I can tell that she's changed, that she's wanted to make things better for a while...and I try not to hold that against her, but..." He sighed, dropping his hands to his sides where they swung limply. "It's different because I'm not a kid anymore, you know? I mean, back then, her absence was like this soul-crushing, earth-shattering thing that just tore away at us, but it's different now. My world was so much smaller back then, and now, I just...don't devote as much thought and pain to her. She used to be this big piece of me, back when I only had my family, and now I'm older and hopefully wiser, and she's just...not that big of a piece anymore. It's just a matter of perspective, I guess."

"I get that," Aika said, taking his hand back and swing their entwined arms gently back and forth in the space between them. "But? Did you give her a second chance? You didn't really answer the question, mister," she said, poking at his arm and furrowing her eyebrows in a mock-accusatory stare, her bottom lip pouted out.

"I..." Jin paused, looking up at the sky, at the stars distributed across the inky matter. "I guess I did. More for my brothers than for me. But I'm not as close with her as some of the others are. I think Hoseok talked to her recently, after...after the funeral. I probably should have talked to her too, but I didn't, just haven't gotten around to it. But...I guess there's just this part of me that can't forget what she did, and that even if I've let her back into my life, even if I try to like her or even love her again, it's...it's like I've carved out exactly how much space in my heart I'll allow myself to allocate to her, and I won't ever let it get so big that she could ever hurt me like that again. I don't know how else to put it."

"Do you really think you can put a limit on love, though?" Aika asked with a thoughtful hum as she leaned into his side and joined him in gazing up at the stars, the moonlight illuminating the soft curvature of her lips as they twisted up into a wistful grin before she pressed them to Jin's cheek.

Jin transferred his hand from hers to around her waist, pulling her closer, and as he looked up at the sky, he tried to remember how it had looked from his eyes as a child – so big, so wide, impossibly far away and infinitely complex. And now here he was, twice as tall, five times as old, and somehow less of himself than he'd been all those years ago, and he tried to recall that sense of wonder at the magnitude of the world around him, the sense of awe at the impossible beauty that had been carved out just for his eyes, but even as he tried to trace it, the feeling slipped away, leaving behind only the odd taste of nostalgia and emptiness, the feeling of something missing, something that couldn't ever be reclaimed.

"When you've loved someone the right way – completely, without limits – and had it utterly destroy you, it's almost impossible to prevent yourself from putting boundaries up," Jin answered, and Aika didn't say anything, only gave another hum, and the two of them stared up at the sky in silence until Jin eventually walked her to her car.

--

published 03/25/22 (mm/dd/yy)

2329 words