"Kiku, don't cry. It's okay. Your okaa-chan is okay." For all her reassuring, though, all he got was a tiny hiccup, the noise equivalent to the squeak of a mouse.

The woman looked over her shoulder to her husband, sitting on the couch. "Chang, go get Yao from school. I'll watch Kiku." He nodded sternly and got up, military medals jangling. Bowing to the boy without a word, he took his leave.

Completely silent with the exception of those heavy boots, clanking against the floor. All children, even his own, were afraid of that sound. Such timid souls were they that they could not even bear to listen to what sounded like marching.


The news on the T.V startled the nation. An attack on Pearl Harbor, the first attack on American soil since the Revolutionary War.

The teacher turned to her class, eyes wide and watering. Looking for that kid with a head of coal.

Her sight slowly set on Kiku, watching the screen with dull eyes, seemingly uninterested. She whimpered.

Her husband had been stationed there.


On December ninth, 1941, Kyoko Honda died.

Her son, Kiku, watched as the life slowly left her eyes. How his grandfather silently cried over her body. He was picked up out of the room by his neighbor when a ear-piercing keen left his grandmother.

Yao carefully tended to him outside. Unlike his mother, he didn't stop the raindrops falling from the boy's stormy eyes. All he could do at this point was hold him, like he had that time long ago, when he had found Kiku lost amidst a bamboo forest in his backyard.

When the boy brought up his hands to hide his face, Yao took him into a powerful hug. The kind his father would probably give him if he still moved on the Earth. There were two reasons for it, however. The first being that Kiku needed to be reassured, for he was still young.

The other was that, after they walked out of the hospital, he didn't know the next time he'd see the boy again.