Haikyuu One-Shots

Pumpkin Family (Akiteru Tsukishima)

Wizzy: I don't know why, but I like writing about Akiteru as a daddy. It's just so freaking cute. Originally I was thinking of using Kawanishi, but his personality wouldn't fit for this.

"Ew... It looks gross!" Yuki, my five-year-old daughter made a face of disgust as she stared at the orange ball of slime in my hand. She stood on a chair, leaning over the pumpkins on the kitchen table.

"Gross!" echoed her two-year-old brother, Hiro. He stood on a chair beside his sister but wasn't quite tall enough to see into the taller pumpkins.

Chuckling a little, I held out to the glob of orange to them. "Touch it," I said, meaning for them to touch the pumpkin guts. The five-year-old slowly reached out, touching it for a mere second before jerking her hand back, like she expected it to bite her. But after she had seen that it wasn't so bad, she began reaching into one of the smaller pumpkins that were in front of her.

"This is kinda fun!" she giggled as I showed her how to take out the seeds from the orange stuff. Two large bowls sat on the table: one for the seeds and one for the rest of the stuff. In no time at all, little Yuki was getting into it and grinning as she helped to gut the pumpkins. "Mommy, why are we putting all the seeds away from the rest of the stuff?"

"Two reasons." I held up one finger. "We're going to save some to plant for next year." I held up a second finger. "And the rest we're going to eat." Now, it might sound a bit weird to tell someone you're eating seeds, but baked pumpkin seeds tasted pretty awesome. Especially around Halloween time. "But first we've got to get all the seeds out and carve these pumpkins."

Yuki nodded and kept working on cleaning out our five pumpkins; one for each member of our little family. Hiro still didn't seem so sure about it, but once most of the slimy stuff was removed from his little pumpkin, he enjoyed scraping at the inside of it with a spoon and breaking loose what our hands couldn't get out.

"Looks like you've been having fun," my husband's voice said while he embraced me from behind. "I'd help, but I don't like doing this part." Akiteru was the type who liked carving pumpkins, but not the process of gutting the pumpkin. Lucky for him and the kids, I loved that part of it. Although, I kind of sucked when it came to the carving part, so I'd let him take over at that point.

"Daddy!" the kids called out happily as they saw their father, who'd only just gotten home from work.

Akiteru chuckled a little. "Yuki, look at mommy." The little girl looked confused but did as she was told. When I saw it, I snorted in laughter. She had a few pumpkin seeds stuck to her face in random places, the orange guts working kinda like glue and holding them in place. I had to have Akiteru take a picture of it.

Once the guts were out of them all, Akiteru and I traded places. He began helping them with the carving of pumpkins, while I took the bowl of orange slime and the bowl of seeds into the kitchen. I disposed of the guts and then began washing off the seeds. When that was done, I set some of them aside to dry out, to be used to grow next year's. Then I began the task of baking the remaining seeds.

When I returned sometime later with a bowl of freshly baked pumpkin seeds, I smiled at the sight of our pumpkins. As planned, we'd carved them with faces to make a family of pumpkins. There was a big one that was Akiteru, a slightly smaller one that was me, a medium one that was Yuki, and then a small one that was Hiro.

We'd gotten them all just about done at this point, except for the tiniest one. Yuki looked confused again, as she counted them. "Mommy, why do we have five of them? There's only four of us?" she asked, watching me set down the bowl of seeds.

Akiteru and I smiled. The kids didn't know about it yet, but our little family of four was going to soon become a family of five. "That one is for Kaoru." Yuki and Hiro tilted their heads, still puzzled.

"Who's Kaoru?"

"Your new baby brother or sister."