This is a short one and no real solid pairings of CCS characters. Tragedies are always hard to write, so my trick is to make it happy in the end. I also wanted to deal with characters outside the usual circle of people I write about or see other CCS fanfic writers write about. It's good sometimes to stretch myself out, try knew things, and so on. It will be good, too if I get a lot of reviews for this one. Please, let me know what you thought of this piece; hate it, love it, wish I did something better with it. Hearing from the voices of my readers is especially my strongest motivation to write.
Disclaimer: As always Card Captor Sakura belongs to the O' Mighty CLAMP. I humbly bow down before them.
.August Moon.
.Another Card Captor Sakura oneshot.
.Friendship.
.Family.
.Love.
.On the 15th day of the 8th Lunar Moon they all came together for the first time.
.Physical distance did not make a difference.
It was a common scenario. I was looking over her blood count again just for surety. On the second count I was silently praying that it was not what I thought it was, staring me in the face. I went through the count again and found those same unusual white cells. I told her it was leukemia the very next day; acute leukemia, to be precise, for the medical examiner later on.
"Well, that explains the sicknesses and urge to collapse or faint, doesn't it?" She said calmly as if she was just going through another cold spell.
I probably said something stupid that made her hate me for a minute. I did not like her unorthodox reaction to such a devastating piece of news. I was invariably angry for the next three months, but I never showed it. It was not as if I wanted her to give up on life, but I wanted her to consider my feelings. I wanted her to live.
Nadeshiko was only twenty-seven years old and a mother of two. She was a house wife, gifted with the looks of a pageant winner or a Hollywood movie star. Her heart was always at home and always with her children, though. She had so much to give to the world and her children, but natural law intervened before she could pass on anything else.
Death was the greatest evil, in my opinion. It was about to take away the woman I had slowly fallen in love with. Not the romantic kind of love, mind you, since I had a beautiful wife back home. Nadeshiko instilled in every man the kind of love for beauty, happiness, and life that we gradually lose a grasp on as we grow older and older.
"It's inevitable," Nadeshiko whispered to her husband as she hugged and kissed him. I had to break the news to him, too.
It was settled. She did not choose the treatment.
"Why suffer and put myself in considerably more pain? Didn't you say about 75 percent respond to the treatment? That doesn't seem a round enough number to me. Let's just go with the natural order of things, shall we?"
The idea that a patient of mine would as so much give up a 25 percent chance of long-term survival bothered me. I had to stay in control and adjust to her choice, so that she may leave us in a less disconcerting fashion. Oddly enough, she did not have to discuss the matter at length with her husband. He seemed to agree with her in everyway, no wishy-washy thoughts that kept coming in and out of my mind's eye. In part, the whole quick understanding and communal agreements were parallel to the structure of their well defined marriage.
In the end, I explored her wish. A week before the Mid-Autumn Festival, she requested sleeping pills for her "insomnia." I told her not to get up when the baby cried—just let her husband take care of her—as if that would cure her "insomnia."
I said this when she was still in the hospital just to wipe out some of the guilt heavy in me and just to, for a moment, let us step out of that white world of despair. I was a doctor. I became a doctor to weave hope for life into people under my medical care, not assist them in cutting their threads of life as Moerae did. However, I still wrote her the prescription because I respected her choice no matter how bitter the idea seemed to me. I gave her the instructions; the over dosage just needed to commit suicide when she felt she could no longer handle the pain.
"Thank you, Sensei. When you come to Japan be sure to visit."
Visit you? I held my tongue, so I would not sound so cynical. Besides, I was a dignified man and to add sarcasm in such a despondent situation was not my art. I sewed people up and gave them the face value of being alive. That was my art.
"Bring your little boy along. Sakura likes him."
I saw our children play together. My son was a shy and quiet boy. He was as old as Sakura; three. He spoke to no one, but family members until the faithful day he ran into the tiny sprite, every nicknamed Yin Yin at the hospital. He did seem to enjoy the company of the bubbly girl that resembled Nadeshiko so much.
"I want your boy to marry my daughter someday. Can you make that happen?"
I could not even make her wish to live. How could I make something like that happen? Was not marriage a natural thing, just as me being a worried doctor a natural thing? Leukemia is a natural thing, but a life cut short by my hand and hers did not seem natural to me.
When I was thinking of all this, her little girl stormed into the sick room, holding a yellow lily in her hand. "Look, Mommy! Shao-kun and I picked the prettiest thing for you."
Sakura tripped over her two unsteady feet as she tried to make her way to her mother's bed. She fell, face down, scaring her mother and I to death, so to speak. The person to pick her up was not me though, but my son, who was at her side in an instant.
"Kura-chan, watch out."
"Shao-kun!"
"Kura-chan…"
It was like watching a soap opera performed by miniature people. If I said that aloud people would have called me cold-hearted; not doctor material to bring into work everyday. I did not find their show pretty at all. I found it almost distasteful the moment I saw my son reach out and kiss her swollen, cherub face. I screamed his name in outrage and Nadeshiko laughed so hard she fell into a fit of coughing.
There was no helping it. My boy would have to marry someone like Nadeshiko someday. You marry the first girl you kiss; that was the law. Not that I really cared at all. I was just always in a grumpy mood because I felt useless and completely trounced by a lovely woman.
She was discharged on the eighth of August.
As I sat with my family under the stars, enjoying the slices of moon cakes my wife made, my cell phone buzzed in my breast pocket.
"Hello, Sensei? She's gone…" The caller was Nadeshiko's little boy. The last word made my heart go 'thud.' I died for a minute, hearing that small and strained voice say those words. His father was probably too devastated to make the call himself. I knew it in my heart.
"She was happy for the pain to go away. Thank you, Li-sensei."
Of course she was, Touya.
On the day of the August Moon, Nadeshiko Kinomoto said her final farewell to the world, promising everyone she ever knew a reunion at her favorite spot, on the slope of the green hill where dragons flew over blooming cherry blossom trees.