This fic popped into my mind, and I couldn't let it go. I'm not going to put it in the romance section, because while there are probable hints of romance (for those that look, it's always there), this is not a story about romance. This is a story about Koushirou's struggle between two different paths of destiny, but I did get really side-tracked while trying to get there.
Like a lot of my fics, songs inspired me to write parts of this. Specifically, Izumi Koushirou's two image songs, Version Up and Open Mind, and one of Heero Yuy's (from Gundam Wing, if you've lived under a rock for a few years) image songs, Take Off to the Sky.
'Eichi' means intelligence, wisdom, and intellect. 'Shikunshi' means gentleman or a man of learning. Thus, Eichino Shikunshi means 'gentleman of wisdom,' if I'm translating right.
Thanks to Tracie, who beat-read most of this and begged for more, and Kay-cha(aa)n, who... did *not* help me title this fic. ^_-
My Heart's Key
by Rb
Adopted.
Even now, even after everything I've gone through, the word still shakes my mind, throws doubt upon everything I've trusted. Adopted. Adopted.
Why I was never told?
Okay, so maybe my parents didn't trust me enough when I was little. Maybe they didn't know my brain capacity was so great. Maybe they didn't think I was capable of understanding. Maybe they didn't think that I might eavesdrop on such a private conversation, obviously not intended for my tender young ears.
I still wonder. At ten, when they finally told me that, biologically, I wasn't their child, I'd just been through the gateway that crossed me over from child to teenager. It happens to everyone, an experience, a turning point. Mine was a little more dramatic than others, but it still pushed me into another world. I guess that's why my parents chose then to tell me; they could sense I'd grown up.
But what if they had waited? What if they still hadn't told me at now, age thirteen? What if I'd still heard them on that fateful night, but they'd never told me, face to face? The what ifs and what woulds consume me, make me into a whirling mass of uncertainties and worries. Would I have confronted them by now? Would I have been brave enough to confront them? Would I have tried to ignore it, still? Would I just sit alone, wondering what to do?
Would I, like I do now, sit restlessly, staring at the stars night after night? Wondering if, like the fairy tale, my parents are guardian angels, looking out for me? Or are all the stars, like the scientists say, simply balls of cold gas that shine with dead light?
Some nights, I'm not sure which I'd rather believe in.
Some nights, I've sat down with my computer, and simply accessed websites that might give me hints to the past. Clicking links to find out more about Eichino Shikunshi, the man who sired me. There's not much; he died before the Internet really got big and started storing so much information. I found his obituary. A few articles about his death. It was sort of a big deal, a professor at the university and his wife, young, with a baby son...
Me.
I have a folder in my room. It's stored in the safest place, locked with a key I wear around my neck, underneath my clothes. It's filled with everything I can find about my real family.
There are no other duplicates to this key. There is no way I can open the drawer without the key.
Adoption. Explanation. Now, forgiveness? Forgetting?
Not yet. Maybe not yet. Maybe not ever.
I ride my bike. I don't know where I'm going to ride it to, maybe to the ocean. I've spent a lot of time at the river, feeling the fresh air wash over me. Remembering. Trying to remember.
I'd give anything to remember what my real parents were like. To know them.
I start to pedal. Faster, faster, the wind flowing through my short-cropped hair. Playing a game in my head, balance, shift the weight, if you move wrong, if you go too fast, if you hit a car or if you hit a rock, you might crash, you might fall, I might fall...I might be hurt, I don't wear a helmet.
Isn't this more fun, Koushirou, than rearranging files on your computer? Than cracking a code? Than being alone, eyes peeled to the screen, zoning out, not letting anyone, anyone, get close? Maybe it's not more fun, but it's certainly more exhilarating. It's more alive.
I'm going too fast. I'm zooming past people, out of control, out of control, Koushirou---!
A shop door opens, the space in front of it lined with flowers. A girl steps out, oblivious to me. I break suddenly, nearly crashing but hanging on anyway.
"Koushirou!" she gasps as I skid in front of her.
Sora-san?!
I hastily jump off my bike even as it stops, and it falls to the ground in a heap. She winces at the noise or the sight, I'm not sure which. "What are you doing here?" we both ask at the same time. Sora laughs a little. I don't.
"Well, I work at my mom's shop now." She gestures at the flowers. "You?"
"I was just riding my bike. No reason, really."
Sora leans down and arranges the flowers in front of the shop as I pick up my bike and set it up straight. After a few moments, she straightens up and turns to me, and I get my first good look at her for the first time.
She's taller than she was the last time I saw her, a good five or six months ago. Her hair's longer, or maybe that's just because it's not constrained by anything, helmet, hairclip, scrunchie. Her eyes seem larger, warmer than I remember.
She's wearing a yellow blouse and a short, dark blue, skirt, perhaps accidentally remniscent of the outfit she wore in the digital world? The clothing flatters the gentle curves of her body and makes it obvious to me that the Takenouchi Sora in front of me is subtly different from the tomboy she was.
Just as I'm unabashedly staring at her, I can feel her eyes gently scrutinizing me. I wonder what she sees. Is she also comparing my younger appearance to how I look now? Is she studying my hair, my clothes, my body, and comparing them to my former self? Is she, too, wondering about the changes that I've been through?
Whatever she thinks, she keeps it to herself and adopts a new line of questioning. "You've been doing nothing, Koushirou?" she asks mildly. "No reason to come here? Cute guys like yourself --" I blush. She winks. "-- don't normally zoom by this shop like all the hounds of Hades were after him."
"I was just thinking." Truth.
"Care to tell me what you were thinking about?" Sora presses, deceptively calm.
"Not really, Sora-san."
She angles her head and looks down at me. I feel like I'm being analyzed like a piece of data. "Koushirou, what's wrong?"
"Nothing!" I snap.
Sora's grin fades. "No, something is wrong." She reaches out a slender white hand and touches my face, tracing under my eyes. I control my flinch. Sora's never been this expressive physically to me, or to any of the other digidestined. "You have bags under your eyes...you aren't sleeping properly. Your face is drawn and tight, you have something on your mind that bothers me. Bad dreams?" she asks sympatheticly. I shake my head, then think a bit about her question.
"Sometimes, I still dream, but...not like they used to be. They aren't full of as much blood and destruction, more like...a feeling of despair that I'm not strong enough to fight. Like I can't make a contribution. Because I'm too weak." My words come out in breathy phases. I didn't know the intensity of my dreams until I talked about them.
Sora looks at me with understanding in her eyes. I have an urge to run away from their expressiveness, but I can't. I'm stuck. "Your problem isn't about the digital world," she says with finality, "it's about something that's been happening to you, here."
"Sora-san..."
"You can tell me."
"No, I CAN'T!" My voice raises to a shriek on the last word, and a few passers-by look at us curiously. Sora stares impassively at me, not accepting my flimsy reasons.
"You won't understand..." I say feebly.
"Try me," she challenges.
I'm stuck. "Okay. Okay. I...I was adopted when I was little." Sora's eyes widen. I haven't told any of the other digidestined about this. It was private, for me alone, not for the team...not even for Tentomon, until he found out. "I was just a baby. My real parents died in a car crash. Izumi-san was a distant relative of my father's, and he and his wife adopted me. I found out when I was little and I overheard my parents talking, but I wasn't informed until right after Vandemon was defeated. My parents finally told me after that. Ever since we came back from the digital world, I've been..." I grope for the right term. "...researching my true parents. And I don't know what to do."
After a moment, Sora speaks. "It seems to me you do know who your parents are."
"Huh?" I look at her, my hard black eyes meeting her soft brown pair. "I know my adoptive parents lied to me. I know they don't want me to know as much as I do know about my real parents. I know I'll never know them. Knowledge, Sora! That's what I need!" My voice is fierce, and so are my words. I even forget to address Sora by -san.
"Why do you thirst for knowledge so much?" she whispers.
"Because that's who I am, Sora-san. That's who I am. My crest, the weakest crest, the crest of Knowledge, it limits me. I can't depend on myself, I have to learn more, I can't rely on just being myself. I have to go out, I need to know! All of the information that makes up myself, the color of my hair, the color of my eyes -- it's because of my parents. It's because of them that I'm here. And I don't know who they were!"
My voice is cracking, getting higher. I stop. I've just given this dramatic, truly cinematic speech, and Sora's smiling. Smiling?
"What's so funny, Sora-san?" I ask levelly.
"You think your crest is the weakest...I thought mine was, too," she discloses.
Shocked by this revelation, I stare at the brown-haired girl as if I've never seen her before. Perhaps I never truly have. I've always thought of her as a capable, perceptive girl. Maybe that's why I've always been somewhat distant to her, preferring to be in the company of Tentomon and the other older boys that could barely recognize any emotion beyond jealousy.
"I thought my crest could never glow. I thought I was the weakest digidestined because my attribute was so weak...and the more I thought that, the weaker I became. Believe in yourself, Koushirou. Trust yourself, and you can't be weak."
"Easier said than done," I mutter. She nods.
"Yeah. Easier said than done. Easier done together, however, than alone. Listen to the voice in your heart for the answers, Koushirou, and you'll find the things you need to figure out."
Again, I stare at her. Her face is unreadable, but...is that a smile? A wink? What does she mean?
"What are you going to do now, Koushirou?"
"The river...the beach. I'm going to go there," I say without thinking.
Sora smiles. "Good luck, Koushirou, on finding yourself."
"Thank you, Sora-san."
There is so much more I want to say, so much more I want to ask her. How could she ever think that Love was the weakest attribute, when Love is what guides us all, in the end, while Knowledge is something few use -- not even myself, on occasion. Does she know how it feels to be in love, or to love others, and could she teach me how to, because I never learned, or I've forgotten if I did. Does she know how to forgive others, does she know to heal my heart?
I can never ask her the questions I need answered, though, without looking inside myself first.
"Goodbye," we say with one voice, and turn away. Sora goes into her mother's shop, and I pick up my bike and pedal, more sedately, to the river. The sun is beginning to set, giving the sky a parting gift of glorious colors.
I stare at the flowing water for a while, searching for answers within my heart, as Sora suggested. I thought about my parents, both sets. I thought about love. I thought about how I've always wanted to escape, to live within myself, and how I only just realized it doesn't work.
So. Now what?
I touch, half-unconsciously, the chain around my neck. Slowly, I pull it out from underneath my clothing, take it off, and hold the key in my hand.
This key is the key was the past, the biological parents, the suffering, the pain, the knowledge of who they were, what I could have been. Eichino Koushirou.
Could I trade one step of the journey that I've taken to become me, now, here, though, for a life that never existed, except for in my heart? How can I continue to shut feelings off when there's so much to live for?
Can I shut off my potential, though? Can I shut off part of me?
A voice inside of me recalls a half-forgotten lyric. If you lose your dreams, everything's over...
What are my dreams? What do I want, more than anything else?
I want a future. I want to help others reach their potential. I want to be more than what I am now, not less. I want... I want to be able to understand the cryptic messages my heart sends me.
With a sudden movement, I toss the key into the river and watch it swirl away and down, into the embraces of the sea.
I stand there for a moment, smiling briefly at the beauty of the sky, before turning again and riding my bike towards my apartment building and the future I've claimed as my own. My mother will be worried about me if I stay out too late, even in a night like this one promises to be, where the stars twinkle as friendly guiding lights.
Maybe, just maybe, my biological parents are up there in the sky, watching out over me. Maybe someday, I'll be up there, too, sharing my messages for those who want to listen. Will I watch out over children? Loved ones? The only way to know the future is to live in it.
Adopted. Taken in, loved, cared for, wanted.
It's funny how our minds change, when they listen to the experience of the heart.