Disclaimer: Gokusen is the property of Kozueko Morimoto.
The silk was nearly as white as her skin. Against it, her hair was the black of a crow's wing, and the silk brocade of the overrobe the red of blood.
There was a flash. Someone had taken a photograph.
Kyo-san's fingers tightened over hers. There was a brief hush in the noise level of the room, and she knew that Kyo-san was glaring.
The nidaime of Uma-no-O had come up, was paying his respects. She wasn't listening, and didn't quite hear whatever polite formula he was reciting. She did, however, see how his eyes seemed to linger regretfully, for the shortest of moments, on her.
There was such a line of people. Kyo-san was growing more and more agitated, so much so that Wakamatsu had to whisper hurried restraints in his ear.
Through his hand, the hand in which he held her hand, she felt his distress.
I'm sorry, Kyo-san.
When the reception was over, she had to get to her feet and stand beside Kyo-san as the speech was made. They had decided that Kyo-san would give it, with her only contributing a sentence or two, which she herself had first suggested. Kyo-san managed very well, though he was much stiffer than he normally was.
"Thank you very much for your good wishes..."
Shinohara-san had not come.
Her body...her entire body had become numb. She barely felt it when Kyo-san helped her stand, when they stood and bowed to their guests, when they walked, through a crowd of bows and respectful gestures, out of the wedding hall and to the waiting car. Wakamatsu saw them inside, closed the door, and hurried around to the driver's seat.
When the door had closed, Kyo-san released her hand.
She looked at him, at Kyo-san, who was looking out the window. The black silk of his kimono made his skin seem paler than it was, and set off his dark hair.
The muscles in his neck stood out. His head was kept carefully turned away.
She thought, in a distant and removed sort of way, that her hand felt very cold.
"Kyo-san," she said softly, and watched the distress tighten his shoulders and neck.
"Ojou," he said—low, grave, hard. The voice of a man preparing himself to die.
She turned away, and looked out her own window.
The hotel was a very classy one, and she could tell that Yasue-san had had a hand in deciding where to go. The hotel staff obviously expected them, and there was a line of bowing maids and the concierge to take them in. She heard them whispering even as she and Kyo-san turned the corner, heard how they told each other, "It's the Kuroda kumicho..."
The room was on the top floor, a first class room usually reserved for celebrities or influential politicians. Yasue-san had arranged everything flawlessly—a few of their things had already been brought in, and a meal had already been set out under silver covers.
Kyo-san closed the door behind them, and for a moment all was silent. She tried to think of something to say, tried to think about something other than This hair is really uncomfortable.
The brush of moving cloth. Kyo-san was walking into the room, over the floor, and to the door that led into the bedroom. He went through, and closed that door behind him as well.
She was left standing there, in the main room, watching their meal grow cold.
I should do something, she thought. There's something I should be doing. Except she was so tired—and she couldn't think of what it was anyway. She supposed she could eat, but her stomach seemed to have gone away somewhere, and she wasn't hungry.
Instead, she walked to the couch, sat down, and looked out the window.
The view was supposed to be a good one, their room was so high up. But the last thing she wanted to do was look down into the city and remember everything that had happened in it that day, so instead she stared up into the sky, a sky purpling in the east and flushing red in the west.
It was so strange, how one little thing could change everything and everyone so effectively. Only it wasn't such a little thing, really, it was a big thing, a thing larger and heavier than anything she had ever encountered in her life before, and she supposed that was why she had not been able to surmount it, not this time.
Not this time.
She supposed that not even she could overcome everything, not really. Not in the end. Hadn't it been the same with her parents?
No one could overcome death. Homeroom teacher or not.
Her hands clenched on her knees, wrinkling the silk. No, not a homeroom teacher, either, not anymore. There was no room in her life for such things now. No room for personal ambitions.
No room for such selfishness. Such foolishness.
Not for an anesan.
"Ojou."
She started, looking around herself. The room had grown dark, the window full of a black sky and pale, faint stars. Why was she sitting in the dark? How long had she sat there, senseless?
Kyo-san was in front of her.
He had removed the haori. He was sitting opposite her on another couch, his face more sober than she had ever seen it before. His hands were fists on his knees.
"Ojou," he said, "I can never ask your forgiveness."
His voice, his tired voice, the voice of a dead man. His head, lowered, his head of thick, dark hair, beginning to go slightly gray at the temples.
When had Kyo-san gotten gray hair?
"Kyo-san," she said, and it came out a whisper. "I'm the one who should beg your forgiveness."
His head came up, then. His eyes were dark, his face white, strained. "Never, ojou!"
It was as if the world was finally coming back into focus. She felt, all of a sudden, how the make-up had dried on her face, how her scalp ached. She saw how she had ruined the silk in the places where she had gripped it.
She saw, in Kyo-san's face, in the way he refused to show it, in the set of his shoulders, how he was suffering.
"I'm sorry, Kyo-san," she said. "I'm so sorry. I haven't thought of you. I haven't thought of you at all."
There was...such pain in his expression. Such agony. "No, ojou. No."
Her heart was a stone in her breast. Guilt made her talk. "All I could think about was how to keep the family together," she said desperately. "I...there was such little time...and the decision had to be made. And I thought...I thought about what Grandfather would..."
She put her hand over her eyes.
They didn't speak for a long while. Kyo-san was so quiet, he moved so little and made so little noise, that she thought several times that he had left. But when she took her hand away, when she looked again, he was still there, and he was looking at her.
"Ojou," he said, and she had never heard him sound like this before—tired, old, and defeated. "Ojou, it is my fault. I should have refused. I should have not let you do this. I..."
His teeth clenched. Anger and shame filled his face.
"I should not have let you sacrifice yourself in this way," he said. "To tie yourself to someone like me, to the gokudo..."
He lowered his head.
"Kyo-san," she said.
They sat, silent, the dark growing ever darker around them.
She was looking at him. Had he always been so large? Had his shoulders always been that broad? She could see the edges of his tattoo on his neck. And Kyo-san was not a young man, not anymore—when had that become so?
"Kyo-san," she said, "Kyo-san, you must not call me ojou any longer."
He turned his head away.
She remembered him as he had been, all those years ago. A young man, then, bold and reckless, full of laughter and rashness. She remembered when he had first been accepted as the official Kurodo rep, when everyone had begun addressing him as Young Chief. She remembered the first time she had seen in him in his preferred outfit, a rakish figure in a white suit and large black sunglasses, the scar over his eye as eye-catching as nothing else could have been.
She remembered how he used to hold her hand to cross the street, how he used to pick her up to keep her feet dry when they had to go through a large puddle. She remembered how small she had felt then, clinging to his neck as he splashed casually through what to her could have been a lake.
She remembered how, in his arms, she had felt safe, safe for the first time since the policeman had knelt down beside her and told her, There has been an accident.
She remembered how he had continued to carry her, never refusing, every time she asked, until she was almost eleven and she herself had told him she was now too big to be carried like a baby.
She remembered how, at her grandfather's funeral, she had stood next to him, and how he had reached out and caught her when she stumbled.
Kyo-san. The one truth in her life. The rock on which she could always lean, the arm that was always strong enough to bear her, support her, protect her.
And now she had used him, selfishly, thoughtlessly, without once considering his own situation.
Except who else could she have asked to do what he'd done? Who else could she have trusted to take Grandfather's place, to lead the kumi?
Who else could be half the kumicho Kyo-san already was?
Grandfather, she thought, she wailed, she howled, she cried, Grandfather, tell me I was right. Tell me I have done well.
But he wasn't there to tell her anything. Grandfather would never be there again.
And in his place, she had put Kyo-san.
She thought of the house, waiting for their return, the mourning paper the kumi would be taking down. She thought of all the things still left to do to reaffirm the Kuroda family's place in the hierarchy of the yakuza, to show that the death of Kuroda Ryuchiro had not left them weak. She thought of the obligations still to be met, the ceremony of swearing in to be planned and executed.
She thought of the room, the largest room of the house, the room her Grandfather had used, which now would belong to her and Kyo-san.
She thought of the letter of resignation, signed and sealed, waiting to be delivered to the principal of Shirokin High School.
"From now on," she said, "you must call me Kumiko."
She saw his hands clench, saw Kyo-san's hands, those hands that had always been so kind, so open to her, close and grip his knees.
Too late. Too late to go back. Too late to think otherwise, to try other things. Too late for anything but to go on, to endure.
To look Kyo-san in the face and understand how she had used him, and how he had, without a word, without a single look of protest, let her do it.
Because she was, had always been, his ojou.
She staggered to her feet, her legs stiff from sitting so long. She tried to walk toward Kyo-san, but she'd forgotten what she was wearing, and tripped, stumbled, nearly fell—and was caught, as she'd known she would be, without even having to look, by Kyo-san's hands.
The hands that had picked her up when she'd fallen, had brushed the dirt from her scraped knees. The hands that had carefully washed her face with a cold cloth when she'd been sick with measles. The hands that had helped her, gently, out of the car, the morning of their wedding.
The hands on her arms, her shoulder, holding her up.
She grasped at his arms, his shoulders, his neck. She pulled herself up to him, into his arms, ignoring the way he stiffened, the way he tensed. She crawled into his lap as she'd often done, years ago, when she had been a little girl and he her entire world.
She was weeping. She'd begun to weep, and her hair was coming loose, and her make-up was smearing everywhere.
"Kyo-san," she whispered, "Kyo-san."
She put her head on his shoulder, hid in the bend of his neck.
"Please, Kyo-san." She was trembling. "Please, carry me, Kyo-san. Carry me, please."
A little girl, pulling on his sleeve, wanting him to pick her up. A woman in his arms, pleading for him to help her, to hold up the crumbling walls of her life.
She felt the tension go out of his shoulders, felt his chest expand as he sighed. She felt his arms come up, go around her, cradling her in his lap, a hand in her hair, on her back.
She felt it when he gave in.
"Kumiko," he said, low, quiet, into her ear.
He stood up. He lifted her easily, effortlessly, her weight nothing to him. Had he always been so big?
She smelled his smell, not the smell of alcohol or cologne or blood, nor of smoke or women or hair gel, all those smells that had made up the Kuroda Young Chief—but simply the smell that was Kyo-san, the smell beneath all those other smells.
Kyo-san, who had served as her father, her brother, and her friend, and now would serve as her husband.
Kyo-san, who was holding her against him, a woman with messy hair, smeared make-up, and a wrinkled kimono, who was carrying her, high about the ruins of everything that had come before.
Kyo-san, who was walking to the door of the bedroom, who was taking her from the place where she was his ojou, his sister, his child, and to another place where he was kumicho, she was anesan, and they were husband and wife.
Kyo-san, whose hands, as they held her, were trembling.
"Kumiko," he said again, and she heard it in his voice, a thing she had not thought had ever been in Kyo-san to hear—uncertainty.
She lifted her face, her tear-streaked face, and saw, in his face, for the first time in her whole life, something of the truth of what he saw when he looked at her—of how he looked at her, when no one was watching, when no one was there to see.
"Kyotaro," she whispered.
She closed her eyes.
Five hours after their wedding, one month after the death of Kuroda Ryuchiro—
—three weeks after she had told him, "I need you to marry me, Kyo-san."—
—Kumiko kissed Kyotaro for the first time.