A/N: This is my comeback to serious fanfiction and I hope I've upped my game. As always, a review at the end is appreciated.
Disclaimer: I do not own Pokémon or any of its characters.
Kaze
"Tora Tora Tora!" The chilling war cry sounds from the flight commander, his crisp uniform buffeted by the wind. The tranquil air is split open as falling stars of debris break the water's surface as and pieces of metal fly high into the air, cutting into the sea.
A black haired man expressionlessly follows his closest friend with his eyes as what he knows to be a brown haired man with kind eyes explodes in a firework of shrapnel and aeroplane fuel. His loss is for our victory, he tells himself.
The general gives the command for him to move. He is apprehensive, but you don't disobey an order from the general. He tightens the bandana around his head.
"Papa!" A young boy tugs impatiently on Hanako's apron. "When is Papa coming home?"
Hanako smooths his ruffled hair, as she sits on the ground, fondly reading a letter from her husband. "Soon, my darling Satoshi."
Satoshi gives a joyful jump, and runs out into the garden, his short arms spread wide like the wings of a plane. Hanako opens her mouth to tell him to come in if the air raid siren sounds, but stops herself. The last war ended in 1922, last year. She knew that, but war never truly leaves a person. She lets her son play in peace.
She opens the screen doors wider, the bomb scarred roof next door set against the blue skyline, while the flowers in her own garden nodded in the breeze.
"I hope you will never know war, my Satoshi." She whispers, half to herself, half to her son tumbling happily in the grass, oblivious and untainted by the horrors of war, his laugh seeming to echo in her ears.
7 year old Satoshi sits in his class, fidgeting as his teacher introduces a new student. He folds the crisp white piece of paper, using his short nails to smooth the creases, and grins at the perfect aeroplane he's folded. He aims it at Shigeru's head two desks in front of him.
"Satoshi!" The teacher's sharp voice snaps through his concentration. "Hikari's going to sit next to you. Make her feel welcome, ok?"
Satoshi starts as he notices a girl standing next to him for the first time. Her expression gave away nothing and her blue eyes were impassive. She sat down at the desk next to him, her uniform looking stiff and uncomfortable on her. She stares straight at the board.
"Hi, I'm Satoshi." He says nervously. She doesn't say anything, giving nothing away except for her discomfort by her hand curled in a tight fist.
"Look, I made this." Satoshi shows her his paper creation.
Only now does the girl look at him. She brushes her blue hair out of her face, for the first time a spark of emotion showing in her eyes, though it is gone in a moment, and she looks at him dully.
By now, Satoshi had started to become uncomfortable, and he floundered, grasping at straws as he tried to whisper without the teacher noticing. Satoshi notices she has nothing with her. "You don't have a lunch bag with you. My mama makes really nice food. You can share mine if you want. Doesn't your mama cook for you, too?" He blurts out.
It makes her speak for the first time. "My parents are dead." She says in a monotonous voice. She nods at the paper plane on Satoshi's desk. "That killed them."
Satoshi remembers the day he brought Hikari home. His mother had been kind, and made two portions of food for him to take to school from that day on, to replace the food that Hikari's aunt would not make her.
It had been a year and a few months since that day, and his father still had not come home. His mother received letters regularly, though she still refused to show them to Satoshi, only showing him photos his father sent of him in his army uniform.
A knock sounded at the door. Satoshi rushed to open it. A man in a uniform stands there, looking solemn.
Hanako rushes in, seeing her son standing at the door with an army officer. She shoos her son upstairs, and turns towards the man.
"Is he…is he coming home soon?" She asks, daring to hope.
It seems an age before the response comes. The man shakes his head.
She rushes to speak before he can "So…it'll be a few more months?"
This time he holds a hand up to stop her. "I'm sorry…but your husband is dead."
The hallway spins around and she chokes back a wave of nausea. She frowns at him in bewilderment and shock as she clutches her stomach. "But how…how was it possible?" She's shouting now. "We're not even fighting a war at the moment!"
"It was a practice…the guns were live…we don't think it was suspicious." He tries to speak between her sobs and awkwardly places a hand on her shoulder.
"All this for our country…" She whispers. "Is it even worth it?"
A patter of footsteps sounds at the top of the stairs. "Mama? Are you crying?" Satoshi peers down at her, holding a paper plane.
Hanako straightens up. "No, Satoshi… Wait in the living room for me." She bids the officer good day and tries to compose herself. She has to tell her son his father died in a practice. A practice! She almost chokes again.
"So?" Satoshi asks as soon as she enters the room. "Is Papa coming home?"
She ruffles his messy black hair, wondering how obvious her red rimmed eyes are. Despite everything, she thinks carefully about what to say. "Satoshi… your father is home."
He looks around wildly, excitedly. "Where?" He wrinkles his nose in confusion after a moment, after his mother does not answer. "Was he that man? I don't think he was."
"No…" Hanako says, slowly. "He is all around us now. When you need to talk to your father, look in here." She touches the tip of her finger to the left side of his chest. She pushes back a wave of anger that her son would never know his own father.
Satoshi nods, still looking uncertain. "In here…" he repeats.
The grasses in the scorched field are whipped up by the wind as the aircraft swoops low like a massive metal bird, and Satoshi watches in fascination as the plane flies in the air with unmatched freedom and grace.
One of the pilots in his village had brought him out after he begged him. Satoshi's eyes don't leave the moving dot in the sky even as the sun's rays sting his vision. A claw of ambition and passion grips his young heart.
Satoshi wanted to fly.
Hanako watches as her child embraces his wife. She can barely remember the time he swapped his school uniform for an army uniform. Satoshi is 22 now, and he looks her in the eye as he begs her to understand why he had chosen to fight for their motherland.
She listens, trying not to break down. Hikari clings on tightly to her husband. They had grown closer after Hanako was forced to tell an older Satoshi that his father had died. Although Satoshi's ambition to be a pilot had caused a few arguments, it had not stopped them from falling in love.
She had moved in with them when she and Satoshi married, but that peace had only lasted for six months before the cry to war was sounded.
"I'm serving our country now." Her son says to her, trying to sound proud. Hanako sees the uncertainty behind his mask, but what 22 year old man can avoid the commands of the empire without admitting he is a coward?
Hanako merely nods, and prays that her son would return home safe.
"Come home safe." Hikari says quietly, voicing her thoughts.
"You will never know war, my darling Satoshi." Hanako whispers in her head bitterly, mocking the words she once said while the birds outside the door and beyond in the trees flitted about and sang.
Shigeru joshes around with Satoshi at the base, making their way back to the barracks after a day of flying. The brown haired man had recognized Satoshi immediately, and had made his time with the army almost bearable.
"We'll be home soon eh?" He grins. "We've got the war in the bag. We've spent six months in this dump, how much longer are we going to be here?"
Satoshi struggles to share his optimism, but he laughs at Shigeru's jokes and makes all the right comments.
The commander stops them. "You two," he nods at them, "have been chosen for the Special Unit. You leave on your last mission at dawn." He leaves without another word.
"Last mission!" Shigeru looks at Satoshi in delight. "We must be going home soon!"
A tiny blossom of hope starts to bloom in Satoshi's chest as his meets his friend's excited eyes.
By the next morning it had wilted.
Satoshi is airborne.
He relishes the feeling of wind rushing past him, as best as he can. The training had not been kind to him. He was thin, and he had been forced to cut short the hair that his mother used to stroke, that reminded him of home. He had not seen his wife in six months. And he would never see her again.
Shigeru's death in the back of his mind, he manoeuvres his aircraft to lock onto his target. All is still as he hovers briefly above the battleship.
He closes his eyes.
And he plummets.
As the screech of metal on metal splits the sky in half and flames lick the sea, darkness takes over, softer than a sigh.
Hikari watches as her daughter lays a white chrysanthemum blossom at her husband's memorial. Its stone plinth was situation next to the grave of his mother. His body had suffered the same fate as his aircraft.
Hanako's hair was already greying when her son left for war, and she had died without knowing her son's fate, though she had been with Hikari when she found out about the tiny life that grew inside her.
The war was over now. Japan had surrendered after the decimation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs. Hikari had brought her daughter to her father whenever she could, tending to his grave.
Petals from a nearby Sakura tree float down, the grey sky breaking into blue, a plane jetting across the clouds. Hikari's daughter turns to her, her brown eyes questioning. "Where's Papa?"
Hikari brushes her daughter's black hair out of her face and tucks it behind her little ear. She puts the tip of her finger on the left side of her chest.
"In here.
"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower