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Description
"Daddy?"

"Hm?"

You watched him working, curiousity shining in your eyes.

There was something so fascinating about the way your father worked. He would hunch over in his stool, stooping over his desk that was littered with carving tools and squares of leather and sketch sheets. There was a cup on the table, painted with "#1 Dad" and decorated with (f/c) (favourite animals). It was last years Father's Day gift, which you'd given him so he could hold his pencils in. But he had so many that they spilled out of their holder and across the table top.

"Why are you so pretty?"

Uta blinked owlishly at you, face impassive.

But his black sclera and red irises shimmered with something soft and loving.

"It's because you're so pretty. Only a worthy father could create something as wonderful as you," he hummed, voice gentle and calm like it always was. No matter how bold you were, annoying his customers or rooting through his things and finding that clown mask he kept hidden (which he made you swear to keep secret), he had never, ever, not even once risen his voice at you. He was as calm as a Summer's breeze.

You giggled, swinging your legs happily.

Perched up on a table near his work desk, you used it almost as a throne as you sat atop it and observed the customers milling in and out or watching your father work. Other children, passing by outside, were going to spend the day at school but you spent yours with your Dad.

Uta had bought you your own sketch book to occupy your mind.

It was plain and black on the outer cover but on the first page, you'd written your name (with Kaneki's help because reading and writing wasn't your strong point) in fancy letters then drawn your favourite foods and characters from the colourful programme's you watched. Maybe you couldn't understand much academic stuff, like letters and numbers, but drawing was certainly your strong point. It came easy to you and you used it to express the things you couldn't spell.

"Was my Mom pretty?" you wondered.

"She was the most beautiful ghoul ever," Uta said, hand pausing as it sketched the general shape of a persons face. "Or, at least, I thought so. Everyone else found her scary because she had many piercings and tattoos like me but she was very peaceful and generous, which is what made her so beautiful to me. She used to give free food to any homeless ghouls around, pretending it was beef to the humans in the neighbourhood."

"Humans are silly," you said, nose crinkling. "They eat yucky stuff instead of nice things like us ghouls do."

"Their strangeness is what fascinates me," Uta confessed. "It fascinated your mother too. She worked at a bookstore nearby and befriended a human there. They were such good friends that she even met you once or twice when they walked around the park in the evenings. The human eventually found out that your mothers food for the homeless was actually human flesh for ghouls and she reported her to the doves. It was them who killed her, back when you were very, very small."

He'd never told you that before.

Or much about your mother, at all.

And you'd never thought much about her so didn't ask any questions. Mostly because you never longed for her. With Yoshimura and the ghouls at Anteiku and your Dad around, you never felt lonely. You never once craved for a female presence, what with Touka tugging a brush through your hair and painfully forcing out all the knots in your hair and Irimi carefully scrubbing your hair in the bath to keep the suds out of your eyes. Then there was Hinami, your best friend who was only a little older than you. And when Kaneki came along, he would read to you and Hinami and you'd gotten good enough at writing and reading that you could now even spell your own name; which you'd proudly scrawled in your sketchbook.

It was weird to hear about your mother.

"Do you miss her?" you asked.

Uta set down his sketchbook, pushing it aside and making his way over to you. After picking you up, he set you on his hip and rested his chin atop your head. With your nose buried in his neck, smelling the savoury scent of his last meal and the sultry perfume of his cologne. With your index finger, you traced the Greek letters around his neck.

"Yes, but it's not painful. My heart doesn't ache because I have you to keep me happy. As long as I have you, my little (prince/ss), then I don't need anything else. What more could I ask for?"

"Daddy, you're silly," you beamed, pressing against him shyly and throwing one around his neck. Your fingers started fiddling with his hair, running through the dark locks.

"Why am I silly?"

"Because," you said evasively, not having an actual answer. But there was just something so mushy about what he said that it made your heart hurt and your insides tingle and feel funny. It made you blush for some reason. "You're just silly," you said eventually.

"And you're even sillier," he said, picking up your sketchbook that you'd left on the table which you'd claimed as your throne. "Look at this," he said, nodding down at your drawing. "Your proportions are all wrong," he chided.

Earlier, he had asked for a "second-hand artists" opinion on a mask for Kaneki Ken and you'd decided that the sullen-looking boy needed a cool mask, one with a dinosaur on it or a robot. But you always drew the eyes too high, since drawing them in the middle of the skull didn't look right, no matter how many times Uta had told you it was. And ears seemed too big when you drew them from eyebrow to nose, even if that's how they were supposed to be, so you liked to draw smaller ears and make your own proportions.

"But faces look better that way," you muttered.

"Hm, but if Kaneki put on his mask and his ears didn't fit or his eye holes were on his forehead, it wouldn't look good then, would it?"

"Yes, it would," you huffed stubbornly.

The bell above the door chimed, stopping whatever retort Uta had.

A subtle floral scent fluttered in, the natural flavour of whatever unfortunate human had wandered in. The girl stood by the door looking uncomfortable when her gaze locked with yours since you looked over Uta's shoulder at her, his back facing the human. Her teeth nipped at the silver ring on her full lower lip, sucking it before releasing it then repeating.

"Um, I - I was wondering if you did masquerade masks? Like for school dances?"

You looked up into the black sclera and red irises that your father tended to always keep activated unless he was in public with you, taking you clothes shopping or buying you cool new pencils with cartoons on them and animal-shaped rubbers. When he sent you a sweet smile, kissing your temple, you knew to activate your kakugan too.

Dinner was being served.

.

"Uncle Yomo!" you screeched, running full force at the tall, muscled man and colliding with his leg, latching on tightly. He didn't even flinch, reaching down to pat your (h/c) hair as a way of greeting.

"Aww, don't I get such a warm welcome too?" Itori asked, wandering in the door of HySy ArtMask Studio.

There was a coldness to her that you didn't like.
Something off about her demeanour that made you distrust her.

Once, you'd told Yomo about that gut feeling of yours. He was very perceptive, quite and in the background so he picked up on things like that too. He'd patted your hair, much like he always does, saying you were too young to know the truth. He'd said it like it was a secret, one that Itori didn't know he knew, so you pinky promised that you wouldn't tell anyone - even your Dad.

It was this loyalty of yours that made Yomo so attached to you. And you'd grown attached to him too, loving the silent man's presence. He was so soothing and he always listened, never talking down to you like other adults did.

But you would never feel attached to Itori.

"Don't make such a face at me!" she tutted. "A cute little (girl/boy) like you shouldn't frown like that."

"Get out of my Studio," you ordered. "You're not a paying customer and you're not food so you have no business being here."

"Eh?! Then why can Yomo-kun be here? Unless ... " she crept towards you, the light glinting off the diamonds around her neck as she fluttered her long lashes, "you have a wittle crush on Yomo-kun?"

Your face turned redder than her hair.

"You're barred from here! Get out!" you shouted.

A hand on your head made you flinch.

Looking up, you saw the upside down face of your father looking down at you. His piercings glittered in the artificial light like Itori's jewellery, contrasting with the black ink of his tattoos. From such an angle, his lips looked upturned. But his tone held no such annoyance, as cool and peaceful as it always was.

"(Y/N)," he said. "Don't be rude to my friend."

"What if that friend is an idiot and has bad breath?"

"Even if that friend is an idiot and has bad breath."

You sighed. "Fine then. But make sure she leaves before my bedtime. I want you to read me a story without her adding a gloom to the atmosphere."

"Of course. Now, why don't you show your boyfriend your new drawings while I get us all something to drink?"

"He's not my boyfriend!" you huffed, stomping your foot and marching over to Yomo, grabbing his hand and dragging him over to your throne of a table. Climbing up onto the stool, you shakily climbed from there to the table and plopped down, patting the space next to you. "This is where you can sit."

Yomo surprised you, sitting on the stool and lifting you up, resting you on his lap.

You squeaked, turning pink. With shaky hands, you shyly opened the front cover to the first page with your name proudly written in fancy letters. "L - Look, that's my name, see? Kaneki's been teaching me and Hinami how to read and write better. She's quicker at picking it up than me but Daddy said that's cause she's older. I'm good at writing my name though, see? Do you like it?"

"It's impressive," he hummed softly, resting his chin on top of your head. His beard scratched your skin but in a way that made you giggle and your toes curl up.

"And this is what I'm working on at the moment," you said, flipping on a couple pages to the mask you were drawing for Kaneki. "It's for that new worker at Anteiku, the one that Hinami thinks Touka has a crush on. He always looks so scared and sad so I thought that drawing cute things for his mask would make him smile more."

"Excellent idea," Yomo agreed.

Shyly, you slowly turned to the next page.

"And this is my family portrait. B - but it's only a rough sketch so it's gonna look better in the proper one!"

In the middle of the drawing was a crudely drawn version of yourself, mostly because you'd never payed much attention to the way your hair parted or how you looked overall. But to your left, clutching your hand, was Uta. You'd given up on trying to draw his many tattoos and piercings so drew black squiggles and dots instead.

To his left was Touka, drawn with hands on hips because that's how you always pictured her - scolding someone for something or another. Yoshimura was drawn behind her, arms folded behind his back and a smile on his face because that's how he always greeted you when you went to Anteiku. Kaneki had been drawn in on the far right, as a last minute thing, because you hadn't known him for very long but he was so nice to you that you felt mean leaving him out.

Then, holding your right hand, was a drawing of Yomo. You'd spent a lot of time on him, made obvious by the indentations around him from your drawing, rubbing it out, then trying again. That happened a few times. It was just so hard to draw him as you always envisioned him. He didn't translate as well on to paper as in real life. You weren't exactly sure how to do it perfectly but you kept trying.

"It's beautiful," he said. "I can tell you put a lot of hard work into it."

His fingers lightly traced over the page, as if adding it all to memory. He gazed down at the lines on Yoshimura's face, amazed that a child could remember so much detail that people without an artistic view of the world wouldn't have noticed; such as the heavy creases on Yoshimura's old face or that subtle tilt of Touka's head when she was scolding someone. Then there's the slump to Uta's shoulders that Yomo never noticed before until looking at that drawing.

"Don't ever change," he said suddenly. "Stay yourself forever."

"Okay," you said, holding out your pinky finger. "I promise."

He linked his pinky through yours, cool eyes piercing through you as you tilted your head back to look up at him.

.

"This one or this one?" Uta asked.

"That one!" you said, pointing to the book in his right hand. "We already read the other one, like, three thousand bajillion and twelve times."

"Okay," he said, slipping the book back into its place your bookshelf and carrying the other one over to your bed and laying down beside you. He curled himself around you, like a protective shield, warming you up as he flipped to the first page.

"A long, long time ago," he began. "There was a little ghoul named (Y/N)."

You laughed loudly, realizing he was making his own story up.

"(S/he) was the most intelligent and most talented ghoul in all of Tokyo. The child had a natural flare for art, no doubt due to (her/his) handsome father. Why are you laughing? That wasn't even a joke." You laughed harder. Uta sighed, carrying on. "And even though (s/he) only had one parent growing up, (s/he) never once cried about it or acted out."

"But I like having you a lot, Daddy," you said. "I don't need anyone else."

He shushed you gently.

"This story isn't about you, remember? It happened a long, long time ago. And even though (Y/N) had no siblings to play with or school friends, (s/he) was always on (her/his) best behaviour and helped Daddy out so much in the Studio. Even though Daddy might do some chaotic and destructive things, he will always care for his little (Y/N) very much."

You didn't understand why he was still pretending you weren't who the story was about or what he was talking about, but you just nodded because what else was there to say?

Uta pressed a delicate kiss to your nose, nuzzling you for a moment before pulling away to climb off the bed. He shuffled over to the bookshelf, setting the book back. "Goodnight, precious one," he said, turning the light off and leaving the door open just a crack as he walked out. You were afraid of the doves getting in at night, tearing your family apart just for being ghouls, just like they ripped other families apart and left nothing but bloody remains. So to settle your fear, your Dad left the door open so a little light could filter into your bedroom.

"Night, Daddy!" you called out.

Description
"Daddy?"

"Hm?"

You watched him working, curiousity shining in your eyes.

There was something so fascinating about the way your father worked. He would hunch over in his stool, stooping over his desk that was littered with carving tools and squares of leather and sketch sheets. There was a cup on the table, painted with "#1 Dad" and decorated with (f/c) (favourite animals). It was last years Father's Day gift, which you'd given him so he could hold his pencils in. But he had so many that they spilled out of their holder and across the table top.

"Why are you so pretty?"

Uta blinked owlishly at you, face impassive.

But his black sclera and red irises shimmered with something soft and loving.

"It's because you're so pretty. Only a worthy father could create something as wonderful as you," he hummed, voice gentle and calm like it always was. No matter how bold you were, annoying his customers or rooting through his things and finding that clown mask he kept hidden (which he made you swear to keep secret), he had never, ever, not even once risen his voice at you. He was as calm as a Summer's breeze.

You giggled, swinging your legs happily.

Perched up on a table near his work desk, you used it almost as a throne as you sat atop it and observed the customers milling in and out or watching your father work. Other children, passing by outside, were going to spend the day at school but you spent yours with your Dad.

Uta had bought you your own sketch book to occupy your mind.

It was plain and black on the outer cover but on the first page, you'd written your name (with Kaneki's help because reading and writing wasn't your strong point) in fancy letters then drawn your favourite foods and characters from the colourful programme's you watched. Maybe you couldn't understand much academic stuff, like letters and numbers, but drawing was certainly your strong point. It came easy to you and you used it to express the things you couldn't spell.

"Was my Mom pretty?" you wondered.

"She was the most beautiful ghoul ever," Uta said, hand pausing as it sketched the general shape of a persons face. "Or, at least, I thought so. Everyone else found her scary because she had many piercings and tattoos like me but she was very peaceful and generous, which is what made her so beautiful to me. She used to give free food to any homeless ghouls around, pretending it was beef to the humans in the neighbourhood."

"Humans are silly," you said, nose crinkling. "They eat yucky stuff instead of nice things like us ghouls do."

"Their strangeness is what fascinates me," Uta confessed. "It fascinated your mother too. She worked at a bookstore nearby and befriended a human there. They were such good friends that she even met you once or twice when they walked around the park in the evenings. The human eventually found out that your mothers food for the homeless was actually human flesh for ghouls and she reported her to the doves. It was them who killed her, back when you were very, very small."

He'd never told you that before.

Or much about your mother, at all.

And you'd never thought much about her so didn't ask any questions. Mostly because you never longed for her. With Yoshimura and the ghouls at Anteiku and your Dad around, you never felt lonely. You never once craved for a female presence, what with Touka tugging a brush through your hair and painfully forcing out all the knots in your hair and Irimi carefully scrubbing your hair in the bath to keep the suds out of your eyes. Then there was Hinami, your best friend who was only a little older than you. And when Kaneki came along, he would read to you and Hinami and you'd gotten good enough at writing and reading that you could now even spell your own name; which you'd proudly scrawled in your sketchbook.

It was weird to hear about your mother.

"Do you miss her?" you asked.

Uta set down his sketchbook, pushing it aside and making his way over to you. After picking you up, he set you on his hip and rested his chin atop your head. With your nose buried in his neck, smelling the savoury scent of his last meal and the sultry perfume of his cologne. With your index finger, you traced the Greek letters around his neck.

"Yes, but it's not painful. My heart doesn't ache because I have you to keep me happy. As long as I have you, my little (prince/ss), then I don't need anything else. What more could I ask for?"

"Daddy, you're silly," you beamed, pressing against him shyly and throwing one around his neck. Your fingers started fiddling with his hair, running through the dark locks.

"Why am I silly?"

"Because," you said evasively, not having an actual answer. But there was just something so mushy about what he said that it made your heart hurt and your insides tingle and feel funny. It made you blush for some reason. "You're just silly," you said eventually.

"And you're even sillier," he said, picking up your sketchbook that you'd left on the table which you'd claimed as your throne. "Look at this," he said, nodding down at your drawing. "Your proportions are all wrong," he chided.

Earlier, he had asked for a "second-hand artists" opinion on a mask for Kaneki Ken and you'd decided that the sullen-looking boy needed a cool mask, one with a dinosaur on it or a robot. But you always drew the eyes too high, since drawing them in the middle of the skull didn't look right, no matter how many times Uta had told you it was. And ears seemed too big when you drew them from eyebrow to nose, even if that's how they were supposed to be, so you liked to draw smaller ears and make your own proportions.

"But faces look better that way," you muttered.

"Hm, but if Kaneki put on his mask and his ears didn't fit or his eye holes were on his forehead, it wouldn't look good then, would it?"

"Yes, it would," you huffed stubbornly.

The bell above the door chimed, stopping whatever retort Uta had.

A subtle floral scent fluttered in, the natural flavour of whatever unfortunate human had wandered in. The girl stood by the door looking uncomfortable when her gaze locked with yours since you looked over Uta's shoulder at her, his back facing the human. Her teeth nipped at the silver ring on her full lower lip, sucking it before releasing it then repeating.

"Um, I - I was wondering if you did masquerade masks? Like for school dances?"

You looked up into the black sclera and red irises that your father tended to always keep activated unless he was in public with you, taking you clothes shopping or buying you cool new pencils with cartoons on them and animal-shaped rubbers. When he sent you a sweet smile, kissing your temple, you knew to activate your kakugan too.

Dinner was being served.

.

"Uncle Yomo!" you screeched, running full force at the tall, muscled man and colliding with his leg, latching on tightly. He didn't even flinch, reaching down to pat your (h/c) hair as a way of greeting.

"Aww, don't I get such a warm welcome too?" Itori asked, wandering in the door of HySy ArtMask Studio.

There was a coldness to her that you didn't like.
Something off about her demeanour that made you distrust her.

Once, you'd told Yomo about that gut feeling of yours. He was very perceptive, quite and in the background so he picked up on things like that too. He'd patted your hair, much like he always does, saying you were too young to know the truth. He'd said it like it was a secret, one that Itori didn't know he knew, so you pinky promised that you wouldn't tell anyone - even your Dad.

It was this loyalty of yours that made Yomo so attached to you. And you'd grown attached to him too, loving the silent man's presence. He was so soothing and he always listened, never talking down to you like other adults did.

But you would never feel attached to Itori.

"Don't make such a face at me!" she tutted. "A cute little (girl/boy) like you shouldn't frown like that."

"Get out of my Studio," you ordered. "You're not a paying customer and you're not food so you have no business being here."

"Eh?! Then why can Yomo-kun be here? Unless ... " she crept towards you, the light glinting off the diamonds around her neck as she fluttered her long lashes, "you have a wittle crush on Yomo-kun?"

Your face turned redder than her hair.

"You're barred from here! Get out!" you shouted.

A hand on your head made you flinch.

Looking up, you saw the upside down face of your father looking down at you. His piercings glittered in the artificial light like Itori's jewellery, contrasting with the black ink of his tattoos. From such an angle, his lips looked upturned. But his tone held no such annoyance, as cool and peaceful as it always was.

"(Y/N)," he said. "Don't be rude to my friend."

"What if that friend is an idiot and has bad breath?"

"Even if that friend is an idiot and has bad breath."

You sighed. "Fine then. But make sure she leaves before my bedtime. I want you to read me a story without her adding a gloom to the atmosphere."

"Of course. Now, why don't you show your boyfriend your new drawings while I get us all something to drink?"

"He's not my boyfriend!" you huffed, stomping your foot and marching over to Yomo, grabbing his hand and dragging him over to your throne of a table. Climbing up onto the stool, you shakily climbed from there to the table and plopped down, patting the space next to you. "This is where you can sit."

Yomo surprised you, sitting on the stool and lifting you up, resting you on his lap.

You squeaked, turning pink. With shaky hands, you shyly opened the front cover to the first page with your name proudly written in fancy letters. "L - Look, that's my name, see? Kaneki's been teaching me and Hinami how to read and write better. She's quicker at picking it up than me but Daddy said that's cause she's older. I'm good at writing my name though, see? Do you like it?"

"It's impressive," he hummed softly, resting his chin on top of your head. His beard scratched your skin but in a way that made you giggle and your toes curl up.

"And this is what I'm working on at the moment," you said, flipping on a couple pages to the mask you were drawing for Kaneki. "It's for that new worker at Anteiku, the one that Hinami thinks Touka has a crush on. He always looks so scared and sad so I thought that drawing cute things for his mask would make him smile more."

"Excellent idea," Yomo agreed.

Shyly, you slowly turned to the next page.

"And this is my family portrait. B - but it's only a rough sketch so it's gonna look better in the proper one!"

In the middle of the drawing was a crudely drawn version of yourself, mostly because you'd never payed much attention to the way your hair parted or how you looked overall. But to your left, clutching your hand, was Uta. You'd given up on trying to draw his many tattoos and piercings so drew black squiggles and dots instead.

To his left was Touka, drawn with hands on hips because that's how you always pictured her - scolding someone for something or another. Yoshimura was drawn behind her, arms folded behind his back and a smile on his face because that's how he always greeted you when you went to Anteiku. Kaneki had been drawn in on the far right, as a last minute thing, because you hadn't known him for very long but he was so nice to you that you felt mean leaving him out.

Then, holding your right hand, was a drawing of Yomo. You'd spent a lot of time on him, made obvious by the indentations around him from your drawing, rubbing it out, then trying again. That happened a few times. It was just so hard to draw him as you always envisioned him. He didn't translate as well on to paper as in real life. You weren't exactly sure how to do it perfectly but you kept trying.

"It's beautiful," he said. "I can tell you put a lot of hard work into it."

His fingers lightly traced over the page, as if adding it all to memory. He gazed down at the lines on Yoshimura's face, amazed that a child could remember so much detail that people without an artistic view of the world wouldn't have noticed; such as the heavy creases on Yoshimura's old face or that subtle tilt of Touka's head when she was scolding someone. Then there's the slump to Uta's shoulders that Yomo never noticed before until looking at that drawing.

"Don't ever change," he said suddenly. "Stay yourself forever."

"Okay," you said, holding out your pinky finger. "I promise."

He linked his pinky through yours, cool eyes piercing through you as you tilted your head back to look up at him.

.

"This one or this one?" Uta asked.

"That one!" you said, pointing to the book in his right hand. "We already read the other one, like, three thousand bajillion and twelve times."

"Okay," he said, slipping the book back into its place your bookshelf and carrying the other one over to your bed and laying down beside you. He curled himself around you, like a protective shield, warming you up as he flipped to the first page.

"A long, long time ago," he began. "There was a little ghoul named (Y/N)."

You laughed loudly, realizing he was making his own story up.

"(S/he) was the most intelligent and most talented ghoul in all of Tokyo. The child had a natural flare for art, no doubt due to (her/his) handsome father. Why are you laughing? That wasn't even a joke." You laughed harder. Uta sighed, carrying on. "And even though (s/he) only had one parent growing up, (s/he) never once cried about it or acted out."

"But I like having you a lot, Daddy," you said. "I don't need anyone else."

He shushed you gently.

"This story isn't about you, remember? It happened a long, long time ago. And even though (Y/N) had no siblings to play with or school friends, (s/he) was always on (her/his) best behaviour and helped Daddy out so much in the Studio. Even though Daddy might do some chaotic and destructive things, he will always care for his little (Y/N) very much."

You didn't understand why he was still pretending you weren't who the story was about or what he was talking about, but you just nodded because what else was there to say?

Uta pressed a delicate kiss to your nose, nuzzling you for a moment before pulling away to climb off the bed. He shuffled over to the bookshelf, setting the book back. "Goodnight, precious one," he said, turning the light off and leaving the door open just a crack as he walked out. You were afraid of the doves getting in at night, tearing your family apart just for being ghouls, just like they ripped other families apart and left nothing but bloody remains. So to settle your fear, your Dad left the door open so a little light could filter into your bedroom.

"Night, Daddy!" you called out.