He was starting to feel like a mother, sitting up at night and waiting for a kid who'd broken curfew yet again, flickering gazes at the door every so often as if he could will Ginga to get home already if only he tried hard enough.

The kid was practically a teenager, sure, and by the time Crow was his age he had already been an adult, been forced to be, really - but he just because he had been made to fend for himself didn't mean they had to be, too. He was some weird amalgam of parent and brother to them, a relationship so unusual he couldn't describe it, really, but he'd be damned if he didn't do everything he could to make sure they never had to find themselves in danger.

The jingling of keys made him perk up, and as the door swung open, he was immensely relieved to see Ginga alive and whole and undamaged - but almost immediately, hot anger flooded his veins.

"Where were you? I've told you before, you can't just-"

"Lay off me, alright?" said Ginga, but there was no force behind his words. He sounded beaten down, defeated, slumped and staring determinedly at the floor, and Crow's heart sank as he noticed something he hadn't at first, something gold and bright in the bare-bulbed light of the kitchen. He stood up.

"I'm just going to bed, oka-"

"What the hell is that?"

Something in his tone made Ginga freeze. He finally met Crow's gaze, and Crow saw something that looked like guilt and shame and fear and anger all at once. He crossed the row in a few quick steps, caught the boy's head between his hands, and there it was, engraved on his face for the rest of his life, slim and gold and almost delicate for all the pain it would bring him later. A criminal marker.

"What," he repeated, "the hell. Is that."

Ginga squirmed, and he had once again averted his gaze, staring at the hallway that taunted him with the promise of freedom. "I don't see what the big deal is," he muttered. "You have a million of them."

Crow didn't know if the dark twist in his heart was sadness or disappointment or anger at a system that would do this to a kid like him, a good kid who made one mistake and had doomed himself a a lifetime being seen as less than scum from those with the birthright blessing of not hailing from Satellite, but he did know that it hurt.

"I have these so you don't have to!"

Ginga flinched at how serious he sounded, how angry. How helpless. Crow released him from his vicegrip, turned abruptly on his heels and took a few quick, hard paces, running a hand through his hair roughly.

"Crow, I-"

"Just go to bed. We'll talk in the morning. I hope you have a damn good excuse."

He felt useless and frustrated and honestly, he wanted Ginga out of the room before he turned and punched a wall or something equally stupid, anything to take this seething edge off.

It was true. He would take a hundred more markers, let them tattoo every inch of his body until he wasn't a human anymore but a being made of interlacing golden ribbons and laser-made scars, before he would let them touch a hair on his kids' heads.