You kinda have to start to feel bad for Ritsuka in this chapter. This is when things start to get really screwed up and everything just starts to end up wrong. Send your love to the kitty cat boy!

Chapter 4

A camera. A single, silver camera. He sat there in the park on a wooden table across from the blonde. He was flipping through the pictures on the camera as the blonde stared.

"You call this making memories?"

"That's right. I'll print them out later. Don't throw them away, -----."

His name. His name escaped him. What was his name?

Something cold trickled down his face. Another even colder substance was on top of his forehead. Murmurs were heard all around him, along with the sound of a woman crying. Ritsuke opened his eyes to find himself in his room, lying in his bed, with a bag of ice on his head. Mrs. Haiyashi was sitting on a chair right next to him, crying. There were others in the room, but he couldn't make them out.

"Mother?" mumbled Ritsuka.

Words can't express the speed at which that old woman wrapped her arms around her adopted son nor the feeling of dread that slipped into little Ritsuka's body as Mrs. Haiyashi cried into his pillow. She kissed him repeatedly on the face.

"Mother, stop it!" yelled Ritsuka, but he had no strength to push her away. His head was killing him.

"I was so afraid we lost you too!" wailed Mrs. Haiyashi. "I told you not to leave the house!"

Ritsuka reacted to those words. Lost him too? That would mean that someone else was lost as well. The men in the back of the room became clear as he looked around to try and make sense of everything. One was Mr. Haiyashi, looking quite grim. The other two men were policemen dressed up in their black uniforms.

The police? he thought. Why are the police here?

They conversed with Mr. Haiyashi for just another moment until they walked over to the bed. Mrs. Haiyashi moved aside as one policeman knelt down in front of the bed, holding a clipboard with forms attached to it. He pulled out a pen from his chest pocket and clicked it.

"What's your name, kid?" he asked.

"I already told you, it's Ritsuka!" yelled Mrs. Haiyashi, beginning to cry once more.

"Please, ma'am, let him answer." said the other policeman.

"My name is Ritsuka," said the boy to the policeman who had asked him. "Ritsuka Aoyagi."

"Good," said the policeman. He wrote something down on his clipboard. "And how old are you, Ritsuka?"

"Thirteen."

"Good, good," said the policeman. Again, he wrote something down. "Now Ritsuka, can you tell me what happened today?"

Ritsuka opened his mouth to answer, but nothing came out. His thoughts were all scrambled up. Everything was slowly starting to come back to mind, but it all seemed so weird. Then it all came back to him, like someone hit him in the face with a baseball bat.

"There was someone at the house."

The policeman nodded. "Okay, keep going."

"Me, Katsu, and Rai were going to hold a stake out in case anyone came back to the house while our parents were gone," Ritsuked said slowly. He wanted to try and get everything straight in his words even though they were confusing in his mind. "I fell asleep in the front yard and when I woke up, Katsu and Rai were gone. And two men were there, standing in the road." He shook his head. "I fell asleep again. That's all I can remember."

"That seems to check out," said the policeman that was standing. "You're Mother did find you asleep in front of the house."

"Please, officer, please tell us you can help us find our Katsu and Rai!" said Mr. Haiyashi, walking up to the small group.

"We promise you that we will do everything in our power to find your son and daughter," said the policeman with the clipboard as he stood up. "Though we've already gone up and down the road and asked everyone if they've seen the kids, but no one's seen anyone."

The other policeman sighed. "Ritsuka, did you recognize the two men?"

Once again, he didn't know how to answer that. He stared down at his blanket, cupping his head with his hand.

Mr. Haiyashi pound his foot into the floor. "Ritsuka, answer him now!"

But there was something wrong. Something was wrong with his head. Ritsuka closed his eyes hard to try and get everything to come back to him. It wasn't working. Now he couldn't even remember what the two looked like.

"Ritsuka, say something!" yelled Mr. Haiyashi.

"I'm not so sure!" shouted Ritsuka. His head throbbed even harder. "I don't remember!"

"Please officer, can't we continue the questioning tomorrow when we're all better?" asked Mrs. Haiyashi. She wiped her eyes of tears. "My husband is obviously distressed and I can't stop crying. Ritsuka doesn't look so good either."

Like a queue to a play, Ritsuka's eyes began to feel heavy. He couldn't control what was about to happen to him.

No, not again, not now…

Again, he was in the park with the blonde. He still had his camera.

The blonde smiled. "Since we're enjoying ourselves, let's talk for a while. Wouldn't that create more memories?"

Pain. Something painful.

"No! Without pictures, I'll forget! Not just who I am, but my very existence!"

Ritsuka rolled around in his sleep, but then slowly woke up to the darkness of his bedroom. The door to the room was closed. He looked down at himself and noticed that he was wearing his pajamas. He smiled. Mrs. Haiyashi must have put them on for him. He sat up in bed and looked at his clock. It was nearly ten. To think that he had slept through the majority of the day. It just wasn't like him at all.

"What is wrong with me?" he asked himself, rubbing his eyes. "Why am I having weird dreams? Why can't I remember anything?" He noted his last few words and spun around to punch his pillow. "I can't even remember things that could save my friends!"

Like a child having a tantrum, he threw his pillow on to the floor in frustration with himself. He tugged at his hair thinking that that would help, but it only made things worse. His headache was still there and the pain made it even stronger.

"I'm going to get some pills." said Ritsuka.

He got out of bed and stumbled over something on the floor. It was his clothes. He kicked them to the side. Opening the door to his bedroom slowly, a slimmer of light fled into the room, along with loud noises. Yelling. Ritsuka walked slowly into the lit hallway as he listened to his foster parents fight downstairs. He hung on the railing to the staircase, his cat ears flicking about.

"The boy is lying! He knows exactly what happened to Katsu and Rai!"

"Yes, of course he knows, and he told the police what he knew today, Kohaku!"

"Gina, he wasn't telling all of it!"

"What do you think he's trying to do? Lie? To the police? To us? He answered all of their questions!"

"But he never told them if he knew the people who took Katsu and Rai!"

"What are you saying? Are you saying that our boy is lying?"

"Don't you dare call him our boy, Gina, he's a liar! He knew those people, I saw the look in his eye!"

"Oh, don't start that up! You can't base if he's telling the truth or not because of how he looked! He looked horrible today, he's sick! He fell asleep as soon as the police got through with what they had to ask him!"

"You believe what you want, Gina, but I'm calling up that god damn orphanage to see exactly what kind of a kid Ritsuka is! I'm calling up his psychiatrist too, I'm sure he said something to her! I bet he hated Katsu and Rai!"

"Don't you dare say something like that, he loved them!"

There was a slap and a scream. Ritsuka couldn't believe what he had just heard. He heard movement downstairs and he quickly ran into the bathroom, closing the door. The lights were flicked on. He opened up the medicine cabinet, got the painkillers and popped two into his mouth. He closed the cabinet and looked at himself in the mirror. His face was a bit red in the cheeks. Ritsuka brushed back his hair, but it all fell right into his face again. Just in pure habit, and to calm him down, he opened up a drawer and began to fix his hair with his red brush.

"Father didn't just hit Mother," Ritsuka muttered to himself as he brushed the back of his head. "They weren't just fighting. They weren't just fighting over me. I'm not a bad person. I did nothing wrong."

But when he got to brushing his bangs, he knew the truth. He knew the real truth. He looked himself straight in his reflection's eye as he brushed away his bangs, as his racing mind accepted the fact that his father did hit his mother, that they were fighting, and that it was over him. He threw his brush into the sink. Placing his palms on the counter, he leaned forward closer to the mirror.

"Am I a bad person?" he asked himself. "Did I cause this? Did I do something wrong?"

A voice in the back of his head told him that nothing was his fault, but something else said otherwise. Something else deep down told him that everything was his fault. Something else told him that it was his fault for living. He leaned in even closer until his nose touched the mirror.

"Is this my curse?" he asked. A wave of a familiar emotion over filled him and sent him back into the wall, crying, sobbing. "I'm sorry, Mother, I won't ever do it again! Please don't hit me! Mother!"

Ritsuka sank down on to the floor, still sobbing, covering his eyes with his hands.

"What's wrong with me?" asked Ritsuka once again to the silence. "Why am I acting like this?" He threw his head back. "Somebody, tell me what's going on!"

Something scratched upon the other side of the bathroom door. Ritsuka crawled across the floor and opened it. Shima walked right in and sat down, whimpering. Ritsuka smiled at the dog. But the smile wasn't enough. Shima jumped on him, licking away the tears on his face. Ritsuka laughed a little, petting her back as she continued to lick him. As his hands went through the softness of her fur, his mind went back to the dream he had just had. About the camera.

"Pictures," muttered Ritsuka. "What did I say in my dream? Without pictures, I'll forget?"

Shima jumped off of him and barked. Ritsuka gasped. An idea came into his mind.

He waited until his parents were asleep in their room. When he was sure, he walked downstairs, all the way downstairs, deep into the basement. Down there were the usual boxes full of stuff any family would have; holiday ornaments, family heirlooms, old clothes. But Ritsuka was looking for a specific box. And he found it in the corner of the basement. With Shima right behind him, he opened up the box that was labeled 'Ritsuka's Things'.

"All this was some stuff from my old house with my real Mother," explained Ritsuka, as if Shima really understood what he was saying.

He dug through the few items in there until he found it. He pulled out a dusty silver camera. Flipping it to the other side, he turned it on. Surprisingly, the camera lit up and the area he was looking at appeared in the little screen on the camera. He pressed a button and it led to the camera's memory. The memory card was full of people that he didn't recognize at all. Ritsuka scanned them and tried to remember who the people in there were. There was a girl with pink hair in there smiling, and a boy with long black hair with glasses making a weird face at the camera. There were a few of him in odd poses, but then he found it. A picture of the blonde man. It was just a picture of Ritsuka's face with the blonde's. They looked so happy together. Ritsuka squinted. He flipped through more pictures and the rest of them were of the blonde. The blonde was sipping a cup of tea at a café. The blonde was standing in front of the parking lot of a school. The blonde was sitting down on the floor of what looked like a bedroom.

So he actually knew the blonde well.

"But who are you?" asked Ritsuka. The picture, of course, didn't respond, but he kept on talking to it. "What's your name? What are you to me?"

That's when he made his decision. He turned the camera off, but kept it in his hands.

"I'm going to the place where I came from to figure things out. I'm going to find Katsu and Rai and I'm going to find this blonde."

Shima barked. Ritsuka looked down at her.

"I don't want to go alone," he said. "Would you like to come with me?"

Shima barked again. That was a yes, he was sure of it.

The raven hair cat boy walked along the lonely, moonlit road with a simple pair of jeans and the blue sweatshirt with the fire design on it. On his back, he carried a backpack full of food, dog treats, a flashlight, his camera, and his notebook. Behind him trailed the high spirited Shima. Ritsuka had a set goal in his mind. To find Katsu and Rai. To find that blonde. And to figure out what was going on with his life. And he was sure that all of those answers lay hidden somewhere within the streets of Tokyo.

So Ritsuka has now started to remember...some things. Just he can't seem to make everything out right now. Everything's kinda hitting him in the face as you can see and he's on the verge of some sort of mental breakdown. Do you think that he'll ever get better and that he'll figure everything out? Review please!