(a/n "elephants" wasnt a prompt or anything i think i dreamed kazuya was fixated on elephants as a child idk also i was desperate for a title besides "untitled.")

(also i am pretty certain this is the first g-rated thing i've ever written.)

"Tone," - his entire name was difficult for the sprite with its inarticulate miniature lips to form, and he was called instead the chummy "tow-nie," and the baby closed his tiny sticky fists insistently on the skirt of Tonegawa's jacket.

"Yes?" Tonegawa sat on the plush ground amidst the technicolor bears and elephants to address the child. Showing even infant installments of the Hyoudou progeny less than reverent respect was not ...advisable.

Kazuya, suckling one series of his fingers, disinterestedly smeared whatever jelly sweet he had been indulging in across the lapel of Tonegawa's very expensive suit as he collected what he had of words.

"Am I handsome?," he asked at last, a high fair violin-sweet sound that muddled the syllables.

"Yes," Tonegawa assured, unperturbed, quite accustomed to baby caprice.

He did not lie, exactly - actually, the little master was a fantastically ugly child, plump and bulbous and lackadaisically formed, but he carried already shades of his father's air of aptitude, of authority, of majesty, a certain profundity. He might besides, Tonegawa observed in the solid jaw ensconsed in sweet fat infant softness and an aquiline nobility somewhere inside the little lump of nose, become objectively beautiful for a little while as he trespassed puberty. In an amber instant like an antique photograph, Tonegawa saw the man his child would become - and what he would cease to be.

Though he would sooner die than say, sooner prostrate himself before garbage, Tonegawa realized also with perfect clarity that the little master's appearance was not pertinent - in the tomes of Tonegawa's secret tenderness, which recalled who had held his bottle and changed his diapers and bathed him and dressed him and rocked him as a pinkish impotent mewing bundle to sleep in his arms, Kazuya could never be less than angelic in his loveliness.

The elder illustrated this robust affection by drawing the devilishly grinning child close into him in the crook of his arm and confronted the plump posy cheek with a kiss.

Kazuya put his dear fat little arms around Tonegawa's broad throat, stood up on the toes of his beautiful burgundy-brown little shoes, pulled the hairs at the nape of the adult neck quite hard enough to pluck some out and kissed his chin.

"Thank you," the child emitted then, as if confessing a secret, an eccentric courtesy which actually startled Tonegawa. He knew well not to show this. His hands spanned the chubby child's breast and waist at least twice over.

"You're welcome," Tonegawa said.

"I love you," Kazuya said. His cheek he lay on Tonegawa's mammoth bicep. His little fingers with more gentility than Tonegawa frankly thought him capable of touched the jaw of his valet, already a little grizzled by age. "I love you, Tone."

What could he say?

"Where's Dad?" Tonegawa said at last, in a darkly male form of the high soft tone a person indulges a child in, slipping his arm under the baby's rump and hefting him onto his shoulder as he stood. "Do you want to go see Dad?"

"I want an elephant," Kazuya announced, disrupting Tonegawa's academically clipped and slicked coiffure by thrusting a fistful of it into his mouth.

"Let's go get you one."