A/N:Updating this as I write episode three! Please let me know what you think. This is my first full-length attempt at Juri and she's an interesting character. :D
Episode Two
The funeral happened on her mother's favorite type of weather: gentle sun, slight clouds, and a warm breeze. A peaceful day. It was perfect.
Except for the sobbing.
Juri didn't pay it much mind. Her eyes had dried yesterday, after the wake. Her father had not cried at all. She wouldn't dare disappoint him any further.
Though after today, she would never wear black again if she could help it. Even her ribbon was black.
Give her summer yellows and light greens again. Give her the hardy family colors again.
It was hard not to fidget, hard to not shift away from her father's strong hand near her arm, hearing the relative she had barely even heard of cry and whisper and make comments about things she could never even care about.
The only ones that registered were those of her grandfather, who was always rather stoic behind an old clock grin until now, but currently was weeping like the cement dam in his chest was bombed. She wished she could reach out to him, or at least offer a tissue, but her hands remained fisted in her lap, bunching the fabric of her dress. Her old grandfather had survived a war, and many battles with few wet eyes, but she was comforted by the fact that this was a field no one knew how to walk.
She didn't really remember when they had gone to see her body burned or really recognize that she was picking bones from ashes. The bones were not her mother. That wan photograph wasn't her mother.
Her mother was just memories of hacking coughs and sticky forehead kisses, proud sweaty fingerprints on her grade reports and sparse hours spent in the spring garden planting her mother's bulbs.
And yet...
And yet what?
Her fingers slipped into her purse, touching the coarse puppet felt and breathing deeply, as if there weren't tears trying to rise.
She finally reached for her grandfather's hand, and let him walk her home. When his tears tapered off, he was silent, and so was Juri.
They didn't get home for two hours, and that was okay because the sun was warm and the clouds were quiet and Juri thought she could hear mother's voice.
...
The rest of her vacation was a blur of learning new things she didn't realize were life lessons you learned at an older age until now.
The first was giving the right kind of smile, even when you didn't want to smile.
It wasn't hard, though she thought it would be the most difficult thing to do. Smiling when you weren't happy sounded like it would hurt your lips. But all it took to do it was to remember that someone else had to be happy for some reason, so you could use their reason to be happy too.
Soon, she became a master at it.
The second thing she realized was that her father was awkward with things like love and affection and had no clue how to raise her. He was a working father, and he was a kind father who tried so very hard, but he was still a father and still a man, and one of the first things Juri had learned from her mother was that men were so much more outwardly clumsy than women and it couldn't be helped that they didn't always get things right. So without much thought, she took over household chores and began learning how to sew.
Following a basic recipe, learning what to buy and how to know when to buy it... that was lesson three.
Lesson four was a failure, always a failure.
She could not stop mourning her mother.
It was easy to not think of the picture in the shrine, to walk past it like it didn't exist. It wasn't easy to walk past the closed door of too many story times in a dark room with painted-on stars. It wasn't easy to ignore the phantom beeps of too many machines and the clacking of dropped pills from clumsy fingers or wet coughs and sobs in the early morning and a constant changing of sheets and fake smiles passed over a dinner table.
The two of them didn't even eat dinner together anymore.
At least she still found comfort in the smell of flowers.
Flowers, cleaning supply scent, the blood from knife cuts at her fingers from a failed carrot cut.
She wanted to cut her hair, shave it off, but her father's eyes kept the scissors from her head.
She knew at night, when the drink was lower than usual and her father's door was shut, that she was a memory he did not want to have.
He should have been okay with it, he knew.
Juri had known too, and look what a difference that made for her.
She loved her father. She loved him and his awkward forehead kisses as she turned off his desk lamp or his books sitting in front of her door. She loved the cookbooks left open each morning and the way he tried to smile at the stories she made up in the backyard despite being a big kid.
She loved her father, but she hated him too.
Because Juri was so very lonely and so very alone.
...
Sometimes she smelled women in their house.
They had strong perfume, walked with heeled shoes left primly at the entrance to their home. They would sit with her father and talk, and give her a polite little smile every time she passed. Business talk, tavern talk. None of it was interesting, not as much as work and quiet chopping and knowing the right smell of the beer.
"Papa," she would say as she left them tea. "Kazuhara-san finished inventory. The sake is low."
The woman's lips would always curl whenever she said anything pertaining to the work, and they would look at her father differently. And she would say nothing more, do nothing but smile.
She was supposed to be a nice girl, a pure girl who stayed out of the way.
Juri knew better.
Her father needed her.
She would be happy if he needed someone else too... because there was only so much she could do on her own. There was only so long she could be alone. But did she want anybody else? Would they be good to her father? To her?
Could she have another-
No. No, no, no.
No other mother, no one. She couldn't have another one, they died, they died too easily.
Everyone dies too easily.
No.
She shook her head, scrubbed her face, banished the thoughts. She had to be strong. She had to be tough.
But girls were weak, women were weak. They couldn't be tough... could they?
Women weren't lions, were they?
I have to try.
If she broke while Papa was still broken...
Juri looked at her puppet, the puppet she put in her mother's chair at every meal she ate at the table, and smiled. It was watery and weak and fake and it hurt to wear.
She went to her mother's shrine, and lit incense to the wan smile. Then, fingers shaking, she took her puppet and placed it below. Her fingers moved to the lighter, as if to burn it too, but.. she flicked her thumb at the lighter and missed. She tried again and her eyes misted over.
"Hehe... too soon," she murmured, and put it down. "I'm sorry, Mama," she said softly. "I'm trying. I'm trying..."
Too many lessons in too little time and no matter how well she acted there was no way she could learn them all.
"I'm sorry," she repeated at the sound of her father sliding the door open.
Then, pulling on a bright smile, she went to the kitchen to start the rice cooker.