Blue Daisy
Chapter 1 A Blue Funeral
HER-
I could feel the nausea spreading, causing aches and pains in every bone, every crack, and every corner of my body. My eyes were closed, lids red and puffy from nights of no sleep. My back throbbed from hours of being hunched over, holding myself up with arms and knees and there was an indefinite twinge in my neck due to my heavy head. There was pain and there was sadness, but no actual illness to speak of. I wasn't actually sick, but it would have been the perfect way to describe how I felt.
I didn't dare try to walk away, nor did I say anything as I opened my eyes. I just stood there like a lifeless doll, feeling numb in my shoes. There was twenty some odd people all dressed in black, but I didn't know anyone here. Even the people that looked familiar seemed to grow more and more disconnected with each time they looked at me. It's funny how, at a funeral, all the people you thought you knew avoid your eyes the same way they avoid a stranger on the streets.
While the preacher droned on in the background, I got countless apologies and condolences from people who I couldn't put a name or face to. (Either because they had avoided me previously or they had decided to hide their faces with hats and sunglasses). Almost half the crowd was made up of John and Jane Doe's. And this angered me.
My brother deserved better than this. But unfortunately this was the best funeral that our small income had to offer. A small, crappy church and a handful of solitary strangers.
We had lived a humble lifestyle in downtown Tokyo; my brother was trying engineer, and I was just out of college with a business major. We were both working jobs that had absolutely nothing to do with what we had studied for and we were also barely scraping by. But even as failures in that aspect, my brother had always taken great care of me and had easily supported the both of us. I remember him quite fondly, but looking at him now was hard.
I turned to look at the open casket.
Soichiro Kurebayashi's face was serene, but pale and frosty in a deathly sort of way. His long black bangs curved off to the left of his thin face and his dark eyes remained closed. Although he was dressed for the occasion in one of his nicer dark grey suits, his mouth was drawn in a thin line, a maroon-colored silk tie wrapped around his neck like a noose.
He was resting on cushy, red satin cloth that made him look like a vampire, and he seemed as though he might sit straight up and tell me some ridiculous story or rumor that he had heard from the crazy cat lady in the apartment above us. That was my brother as I remember him. Fun, free-spirited and silly, never mature but always loving.
People might have described him as being at peace in this very moment, or that he was pushing up daisies in heaven. But I knew that his face had had an indescribable amount of pain written on it when he died, and that there was an injustice curved into those lips of his that the funeral home had forced out.
My brother's death was no coincidence and I intended to find out who was responsible. I had committed myself to a promise that I would avenge his death and find who had pulled the damn trigger.
But I couldn't think things though clearly with all this pent up anger inside. As always there were agents who had assured me that they were investigating the crime scene and whoever had been involved in that late night's shooting spree, but I couldn't help but feel that they were incompetent.
"Jeez this funeral's a fucking bore…"
At first I couldn't believe it. Who had the nerve, the audacity, to say that insensible comment at a funeral? I whipped my head around to beat the shit out of the unforgiveable prick that dared to say that out loud. But when I did, I didn't meet face to face with anyone. "Who the hell?..." Dazed and confused I turned on my heels and headed straight for the car, not caring anymore that people were looking at me bewildered, or that the preacher had stopped in the middle of his sermon to call after me.
"Teru! Teru!"
I just blindly continued away from this awful thing of a funeral.
I knew it wasn't right to leave my brother alone with all those people, but I would be back later to sort everything through. I just needed my own space and time away from those alien beings to collect myself.
Slamming the door of an older limousine model that had been ordered for the funeral, I folded my arms and called up to the driver in a frustrated and heavy-handed tone, on the verge of crying. "Drive me back to my house, it should be back within city limits, somewhere between Izumi and Chuo."
There was mostly silence, then the driver with unusually bright blond hair stuffed in his driver's cap turned around. His face was in a cold and calculating glare, eyebrows furrowed and a piping cigarette caught between terse lips. There was an air about him that convinced me he was an asshole and a look in his grey-blue eyes that assured me I was right.
"Treat me like some obedient dog huh? Why don't you walk yourself home you A-cup, whiney bitch. I've got better things to handle than a girl who can't afford manners."
His lips curled in a sneer, as he pushed his cap upwards with his thumb, leaning closer towards my face. I couldn't help but gag due to the amount of smoke in the car, but I forced myself to meet his gaze.
Rolling down the window I bit back my tears and spat back a saucy retort, throwing myself into the seat as though to act comfortable and hide the fact that I really wanted to cry.
"Please drive me home AND… go fucking bald, whoever the hell you are."
So I have just finished reading a couple of volumes of Dengeki Daisy and have absolutely loved it. Here's a chapter about the story I'm working on, unfortunately it's not a manga that is widely written about here on FF. Compared to Inuyasha or Naruto there's only a handful which is kind of sad!