IDENTITY CRISIS
This was an idea I had in my head for a REALLY REALLY long time (2 years). When my teacher assigned us a short story assignment, I was finally able to write it, so I'm really glad. I originally wrote it with other characters but for fanfiction, I changed it to a Prince of Tennis version which was originally how I wanted to write it. Anyhow, do enjoy (:
Do note: Even though I don't think its counted as gore, but some people will extremely active imagination MIGHT find it disturbing so yeah ...
Disclaimer: Prince of Tennis characters do not belong to me.
She was born under the great arms of God, blessed onto Earth.
Together with Sakura.
It was a time when medical science took a big step in life, new medicines were rapidly introduced, new techniques were urgently advancing, and new ideas were programmed into peoples' minds. There was a sudden uproar for knowledge, the famine for information and the dire need of intelligence. It was not enough, people craved more, and the feeling of wanting something non-existent suppressed all thoughts of contentment. Everybody wanted more, they wanted more, we wanted more, I wanted more, more, more, it wasn't enough.
In all of this exasperated fury, organ transplants were born. It was a second Big Bang, a cosmological wonder, the rise of the phenomenon one could only imagine and not see. There was this glimmer of hope for beasts to relieve their sins, undeserving animals to cling on to the remaining fragments of their life. Transplants gave fakes a chance to save their family, friends, loved ones, sacrificing another.
She was born under the great arms of God, blessed onto Earth.
Together with Sakura.
September nine, Mama felt this tremor in her belly and looked down to see a puddle of water. Her water bag burst. Mama worked hard on the delivery table, grasping the poor nurse's hand and squeezing hard.
One, two, squeeze – one, two, squeeze – come on, one last push! One, two, squeeze – you're doing very well, come on, just a little more… I see the head! The first one is coming out! She's out! She's out! Now the second one, take in deep breaths, breathe in, and out, slowly. Wait! Doctor! She's facing the wrong direction! Her leg is getting stuck! Wait! Prepare the operation table! Come on, hurry up, she's losing blood by the second!
After a din of screams and cries, she was born.
Together with Sakura. Together with the status of half a pair of identical twins.
--
There was this twisted complex sense of distraught, a ball of intricate complexity. Thinking of it made me weary, sapping all the energy I took 15 years of my life to build up.
I loathe it, I really loathed it.
Whenever I look into the mirror, I have to gather this great amount of courage. It was bloodcurdling. Eyes, nose, mouth, ears, neck, hands, body, legs, heart; every strand of hair, every fragment of DNA, down to the very fiber of our being, we were the same. The resemblance was uncanny, eating me up from within. It was achingly throbbing at the edge of my soul, threatening to tear my very existence.
I loathe it, I really loathed it.
"Look at my little girls, aren't they adorable?"
"They are! I can't tell them apart."
"Even as their Mama, I can't either! They look exactly the same!"
"Have you thought of a name for them?"
"Hmm, the older one will be Sakura, pure and innocent."
Sakura. As the name represents, a pure, white Sakura flower, sometimes lovingly pink. Sakura originally was used to divine that year's harvest as well as announce the rice-planting season. People believed in kami inside the trees and made offerings. Afterwards, they partook of the offering with sake. Emperor Saga of the Heian Period adopted this practice, and held flower-viewing parties with sake and feasts underneath the blossoming boughs of sakura trees in the Imperial Court in Kyoto. Poems would be written praising the delicate flowers, which were seen as a metaphor for life itself, luminous and beautiful yet fleeting and ephemeral.
And Sakura is my name.
--
Sakura's sister stood in front of the church altar, her fingers crossed, head bent. The stained glass window above her filtered light from the outside and struck an array of colors upon her shadowed head. Against the dark, her gloomed silhouette shone, highlighting the musky dusk of the church. She raised her little brown head and her eyes met the colorful figure of Jesus, his hands wide in an open embrace.
"Confessing your sins?" a voice rang out from the dim shadows, making her spin around in fright.
Ryoma dug deep into his pockets and stood up, his dark green highlights glowing softly in the dusk.
Grinning playfully, he drew out an old paperback Bible and read, "Thou shalt not lie," snapping the book shut, he continued, "Even if you don't listen to me, at least listen to Him."
She kept her head low, her long brown hair like a bride's veil over her shifty chestnut eyes. Ryoma walked forward and took her hand in his, caressing it lightly. She flinched and drew away, sharp.
"What do you want?" she ventured, her soft spoken voice resonating through the walls of the chapel.
"You're Sakura's sister aren't you?"
"I'm the only one ill-fated enough."
Chuckling, Ryoma took her hand into his again and whispered, "Isn't that enough?"
--
I have never been jealous of her, I really haven't.
She was charming, strikingly attractive. She was like an exquisite looking vase, expensive, sitting on its own display stand, with its elegance engulfing everybody in envy. The village boys, one by one, would line up outside our door, just to get a chance to speak to her. The vibrancy of her personality resonated and swelled so that it surpassed just a pretty-face, but a worthy lady.
Sakura could dance ballet, her little feet pattering against the wooden floors of the studio, her fluffy tutu bouncing along to the peaceful melody. Sakura often imagined she was Odette in the Swan Lake, and the way she danced would draw people into her magical world. She had a sort of silver luminosity that stems from the beauty of her form and silhouette. She was a born star.
But she didn't deserve all that.
There was this day when we were just six. Ryoma hobbled from next door over to our front lawn waving a trinket in his hands. Sakura bounded up to him, excited, her face flushed with redness from the heat. Ryoma took her hand in his and pressed the trinket into her palm. Guess what it is, he asked. Sakura giggled and shrugged her shoulders, wrapping her skinny arms around Ryoma's firm shoulders. He laughed pleasantly and said, open it, I bet you'll be pleased with what you see. And she was. In her sweaty palm she saw a silver trinket in the shape of a ballet shoe, glistening in the sun.
"You'll be a great Odette, Sakura." Ryoma promised.
Leaving Sakura to marvel over her little trinket, Ryoma hobbled over towards me and smiled, reaching out for my hand, he gently held it and whispered in my ear, "I have something for you too."
With that, he winked and hobbled away, smiling himself silly. As I looked in my little palms, and there lay a small plastic heart, painted blood red.
Pierced with an arrow of love.
--
Sakuno was often found at the chapel, kneeling in front of the altar with its stained glass windows filtering rainbows from above, her hands linked in deep prayer. Ryoma found her actions odd. Not many people these days would so resolutely adhere to their religion.
"Hey, don't you have better things to do than coming to church everyday?" Ryoma asked, dangling his legs lazily on the steady wooden benches.
Sakuno didn't answer him, she continued whispering soft prayers that sounded gentle just because they were soft.
"Play with me." Ryoma whined, rushing forward to squat beside her.
"Go away, you're annoying." Sakuno murmured, raising her little brown head. Ryoma pouted and hobbled away to the far end of the chapel.
"I don't get why you pray all the time."
A flash of anger seeped into the kindness of Sakuno's eyes and clouded the muted chestnut. "What do you know?"
"I know you're jealous of Sakura. I see the way you watch her dance. You're jealous." Ryoma stated simply.
"You're jealous too aren't you? With that leg of yours you can't do anything." Sakuno spat, the words sounding spiteful against her tongue.
Ryoma didn't reply for a while and the vacuum of the chapel strangled the thin air, squeezing the life out of her lungs. Finally he answered, his voice laced with sadness, "I know. But you're different. It's vengeance. That's why you turn towards God."
Sakuno turned sharply and glared at Ryoma, the fire sprouting from the shadows and washing her gloom with red. She spoke in a taut manner, as if suppressing the violence in her voice.
"At least I hold hope in these small hands of mine. Without Him, I'm nobody."
Ryoma walked towards Sakuno and grasped her hand, his own coated with sweat. "You know you're not alone. I exist, I am someone you can fall –"
"Hey! What are you two doing?" a cheerful, bubbly voice echoed through the dim walls of the chapel.
Sakuno pulled away hastily and fumbled with the hem of her dress, old and tattered with the holes of life. Ryoma calmly looked towards Sakura and smiled, his eyes empty.
"You looking for me?"
"Yup! Come along, Mama has made some pudding." Sakura giggled, running up to Ryoma and linking her skinny arms with his.
She threw her sister an irritated look and barked, "And you! Remember to wash that red dress of mine, separate it from all of your… clothes."
--
Ryoma and Sakura walked out onto the wild green fields, cleansing their bodies free of the darkness of the church. Spotting those tiny, cheery mimosas, Sakura bounded ahead.
"Slow down! You know my leg can't keep up." Ryoma called out to Sakura, who was picking at the cluster of mimosas, playfully poking them so that the tiny green leaves snapped shut, vulnerable against the wind.
"What were you and her doing?" Sakura asked, spinning around to face Ryoma, her childish face flushed with envy, her lips forced into a pout.
"Nothing."
"That's a lie! You're always looking for her! And it's always me who has to go around searching for you!" Sakura pushed forward and locked him into an embrace. "It's tiring."
Ryoma pulled away and spoke softly, "You have Mama, you have ballet, you have God's blessing, she, she has nothing."
"You're lying!" Sakura released him and screamed, her babyish face surged with rage, "She has you! I have everything but you!"
Ryoma looked on sympathetically and said nothing. Urging out a sad smile, he turned around and hobbled on; his honey colored highlights loomed with graveness.
--
Sakura and I lived in the countryside where news rarely comes in, if we were lucky, we could catch old Ben and his truck. Ben did delivery service for other towns outside our secluded patch of village and often his truck would be filled with newspaper wrappings that were to be torn and discarded. Sakura and I would plead with him to let us have them and most of the time, old Ben agreed with a toothy grin, his gold tooth blinding our eyes.
Sakura would flip through the clippings for news on ballet, throwing the ones she didn't need in my face. Even though the paper was crumpled and the words almost illegible, it would still delight me. I found joy in reading the articles, learning about the world outside our secluded patch of village.
One day, after another round of pleading old Ben, we settled down on the fields to read the clippings. I noticed the science section was missing and looked towards Sakura who was furiously flipping through the science section, her finely arched eyebrows dropped sharply into a V shape.
--
Ryoma hobbled onto the fields and greeted Sakura and Sakuno merrily, sprawling on the green grass to face the heavens. He turned and smiled sheepishly at Sakuno, reaching out for her hand and holding it tight. Sakura sat at the corner, delicately tearing an article out from the page. She stood almost too immediately and announced she was leaving. In her hand clutched the rugged piece of paper.
After she left, Sakuno turned to face Ryoma, her hand still tightly held in his, "What did you say to her?"
"I said that you're my one and only." Ryoma cheekily answered, sitting up with his hair covered with bits of green.
"Liar. You know Sakura would never let you go." Sakuno mumbled, her voice, inaudible in the wind.
"Then I'll just have to force my way out." Ryoma tugged at her hand and she fell into his embrace. "Don't worry about her."
--
One day they found Sakura's body dumped by the river, her flesh cut from within and her organs dug out so that her body was left to rot as an empty vessel, void of life.
Her pretty face was intact, the contour of her eyes, that beautiful chestnut brown, the soft velvet lips and that little brown head gloomed with sadness. But her kidney, sadistically severed from the rest of her body, the pieces of flesh left idly around the river. Her intestines, long pieces of meat, wrung out and carelessly hacked at. Her liver, that lump of blood red tissue, sliced off with a butcher's knife so that the watery blood trickled everywhere and made a mess of her snow white skin.
Her heart, violently ripped out, the left of her chest filled with an empty hole, the ribcage bones sticking out in awkward angles and the blood vessels tragically sawed, dangling outside its throne.
Mama and the village cried for weeks. How could someone do this to dear Sakura? How could anyone even entertain the thought of doing so? What did she do wrong? She was a pleasant girl. Pretty, smart, absolutely adorable. She made no enemies, everybody loved her! It was those organ sellers! Those inhumane monsters, all for the sake of money! What happened to this world? What happened to god? Is he blind?
Mama, didn't you know? God left this place a long time ago.
--
The process was artistically pleasing. A work of a master and the creation of his best masterpiece. She was a good piece of canvas; my twin for a reason.
I have never been jealous of her, I really haven't.
The knife gleamed magically under the florescent lights. I walked towards my canvas and shred her clothes off her. Isn't that better? Didn't that give us more space to breathe? Doesn't it feel so much more unrestricted, so much more limitless? I delicately traced her contours with the knife, oops! I accidentally cut you, I'm sorry. I reached her heart and in a fit of anger, I pushed my knife a little too hard. Blood spurt out! Blood red blood. I really shouldn't be so mean to my beautiful canvas, the blood ties are still there. I shouldn't forget that. I really shouldn't.
From the heart, I sliced her body down slowly, pressuring the knife into her snow white skin, and more droplets fell, trickling onto the cool metal table. Stop it dear, you're dead, you aren't supposed to bleed! Look at the mess you're creating. Naughty girl. Hush, everything will be over soon enough. I just need your heart, kidney, liver, intestines. That's all. I'm not asking for too much am I? It's painless. It really is.
I loathe you, I really loathe (love) you.
--
Ryoma pushed open the metal sliding door and a stale, almost unmoving air inched past him. He felt as if he had stepped into a vacuum, the pressure pressed against his ribs, threatening to break his lungs. He cast a glance at the girl lying in the middle of the room. The luminous light hanging above her threw a sort of glowing outline on her petite body, making her look like a fallen angel, peaceful, elegant.
He reached forward to touch her face, his arm brushing against the cool metal surface of the table. Rubbing his thumb over her snow white skin, he felt the chill run through his veins and into his bones. Caressing her little brown head, he wound a lock of her long brown hair around his finger, the silky texture moist and laced with gloom. He leaned in to place his lips gently on hers, his lower lip just hooking lightly onto hers. He held it there for a long time, feeling the vacuum engulfing his body, the silence deafening his ears.
Slowly, he took her hand and placed it snugly into his palm. In that instance, he knew it, he knew it all.
There he felt, the outlines of a small plastic heart.
Pierced with an arrow of love.
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