A Tale of Two Brothers
IMPORTANT! Read this! DL, DR!
Pairings: NaruMai. My one and only Ghost Hunt OTP.
Genres: Supernatural & Romance
Disclaimer: I will never own Ghost Hunt, 'kay? All rights reserved by all concerned parties.
File 9.2:
Correspondence
"There you are!"
In an instant, as we rounded a corner, Gene came flying out of the dark and crashing onto Naru, while a bemused Lin-san and I watched from the side.
"Get off me."—coldly.
"Aw Noll!" Gene broke away from him, a huge smile on his pale face. Naru scowled and shot him a glare.
"Shall we continue? It's only getting later as we waste time." Naru rubbed his shoulder. "And that was a bit excessive…"
Gene smiled without any apology. "I'm sorry!"
No one believed him, though. As was per usual.
Anyways, we had reached a dead end in between the end of the two halls. A set of double doors, however, stared back at us, the dull silver of the doorknobs worn with disuse and time. I looked at Gene and Naru and saw them glancing at each other, as if confirming something between them silently.
Gene sighed and gently turned the knob of one door. The door creaked open, and we all introduced ourselves into the wonder of the room beyond.
It was wallpapered a dark red, while the carpet was a lighter shade of the same color. Portraits hung on the walls, and a singular feature presented itself in the middle.
A grand piano.
And it looked as if it was still well-taken care of. Naru touched the surface of the keyboard cover with a tentative manner (Gene looked unusually solemn at this) and ran his fingers over the glossy finish. When he drew his hand away, I was startled.
No dust. Not even a traceable speck. After three-odd years of no one maintaining it, shouldn't it be covered with dust now?
"Bing-o," Gene whispered into the silence, and to my surprise, it made Naru smile.
Day 5. 11:19 am.
We were all silent as we stayed in base. Gene was looking so unusually moody that Bou-san feared that he had been possessed by a spirit (yeah, I know, right), but he assured us that that wasn't the case.
"Even I can get tired too, you know," he told us with a colorless smile. It worried me more than I could admit, so I just decided to look out of the window. The others had been feeling out of sorts too, so Mori-san took upon herself to occupy the role of tea distributor. I let her since she insisted, and of course, it was useless to even reason with her.
Naru was already gone by the time we all assembled ourselves earlier for breakfast, but Lin told us that Naru was just in the local library to search for something. What that particular something was, I can't make anything out of it.
I noticed something else, though. That even the sky was a depressing gray.
"It's raining," Gene remarked quietly, and we watched as the first drops finally hit the earth.
He smiled at me.
"I do fear the rain. Do you know why?" He looked up. "Their whispers get louder once the temperature drops. That's part of the reason why I can't stay in England any longer. And now it's raining again."
I watched him for a while before looking away from his bleak depression, and since all of us were out of sorts, I decided to use the perfect opportunity to get a nice long sleep.
The swirling colors are rapidly changing direction.
Onibi are rising from the floor beneath me.
No doubt, I had slipped into another dream.
Everything was getting clearer as I focused on the light, and after a moment, I finally found myself in a… garden.
Roses bloomed everywhere, while chrysanthemums also prevailed in different colors, yellow being the most common. I walked up the path to gaze at the lone butterfly that was perched on a particularly red rose, when someone walked into the garden.
It was the girl with the extremely dark hair and eyes, and she was looking at me disapprovingly.
"Julia, come. Lunch is ready." Her voice was a dark, angry red. "And he won't be coming over for today."
"Is it, already?" I answered blankly, and she scoffed. I felt as if I was terribly snubbed.
"Of course. And Vati told me to have you keep out those vile cats out of the house. They're bad for you." Red.
"No, they aren't," I replied calmly, while something was nagging at my mind. Julia? "I'm sure Vati would understand that they keep me company if I explain it to him myself."
"Oh, of course he would," the girl, Juliet, scoffed. "You're his favorite, that's why."
"Juliet," I told her reprovingly, and she crossed her arms and strode irritatedly off.
I watched her, then hurried close after. I soon reached the mansion, and I hurriedly turned the handle of the door and pushed it open. My heart was strangely beating as though it were flying, while a blush stole across my cheek.
Was he? Was he not?
He was there!
Naru—no, Gene, I thought with a bubble of confusion before I slapped it off with the waves of excitement that were filling my heart to the brim. He had kept his promise!
"Hello," he said, standing up from the couch, and I smiled back. His voice was a nice shade of blue. It calmed me.
"Hi."
At that precise moment, Juliet entered and smiled at Gene. She looked as if she wasn't particularly happy about seeing me with him, though.
"Hi, what are you doing here today? Did Vati want you over?"
"Oh, no." His smile widened. "I came to take Julia to Akagi. I did promise her last time, so…"
Juliet's smile strained, but she kept it up. "Oh, really? Can I join you? I mean, Julia isn't in the best of health, and maybe I should come along to set Vati at rest…"
I could now see that she wasn't going to let us spend time alone together. I felt frustrated, but I had no choice since he had already affirmed with a nod. How could he know her true feelings? How could we tell her?
The scene suddenly changed, and I found myself seated in front of a piano, pressing the keys that I familiarly knew, although at the same time they were not intelligible to me at all. Still that funny, detached feeling as if I was watching and playing a role at the same time.
A door slowly creaked open, and I didn't turn my head. I knew that it could just be Juliet—
"…!"
A blade suddenly went in my back, and at the next moment, I fell to the floor, paralyzed with shock. Someone pulled the knife off my back roughly and I could feel the warm stickiness of my own blood pool around me, seeping through the carpet and dyeing it a darker red.
"Sweet dreams, Julchen," a voice whispered into my ear as I drifted off. With a nasty shock, I realized that the voice was of my sister.
I was right. It was just Juliet.
I snapped awake, the revelation still shaking me, as I slowly realized that I was Taniyama Mai, not Julia Pfeiffer, that I didn't have a sister, that I didn't know how to even play the piano, and that I was still alive. Sort of.
"Are you alright?" a musical voice said above me, and I looked up wearily to stare into Gene's worried face over me. I gasped in surprise, and he quickly stepped away.
"I'm sorry!" he gasped with laughter as I threw a pillow at him in great annoyance. "I just went to check you more closely is all…"
"Shut up. Where's Naru?"
"So he's the first person you'd ever look for, huh? I'm jealous," he sighed with an irresistible kicked-puppy look. I was staring at him incredulously because of the statement when he smiled. "Just kidding. He's still not back. I was thinking that he must've gotten a bunch of really good stuff about the case. Either that or he just got lost in the reference section and forgot all about the research that he was supposed to be doing—but frankly, maybe that was a bit low to think of him like that too. Anyways, we just have to do what we are used to do around him."
"What?"
"We wait," he said simply, and in those mere two words I immediately felt a spark of faith shoot in my chest.
A silence, in which I noticed how alone we really are in the room. I checked my watch. It was a bit past twelve. "Are they all in the dining hall?"
"Yup." He then cocked his head at me. "Mai?"
"What?"
"You really think about him a lot, don't you?"
I had a shrewd feeling that I knew who he was referring to already, but I just decided to ask. "Who? Naru?"
"No, Lin. Of course, Noll." He was rolling his eyes at me.
I went over and punched him lightly in the arm. "I hate to admit this, but yes."
"That's nice," he smiled. "Back when we were kids, most people felt so alienated from him because of his standoffishness that they simply took Noll's existence for granted."
"Really?" I frowned at this. "He doesn't seem to me to be the type of guy who's content to blend in the background, though. I mean, he's so vain and… and narcissistic…"
"Oh, did you know that narcissism is a psychological disorder?" Gene said with a grin.
"It is?" I replied.
Gene began playing with the hem of his shirt. "Yup. And, like all disorders, Noll's narcissism has developed for a reason. Maybe it's his personal defense mechanism. I dunno, but you make it sound like one." He sighed. "Noll may be a bit self-centered at times whenever it comes to him comparing everyone else's intelligence to his, but most most of the time he goes around and tries to work quietly. I mean, you don't see him going out of his way just to brag about himself, right?"
"Really? I don't think so, that's for sure."
He laughed. "Maybe it's a front so that you guys'll stay away from him. Who knows?"
"Again, shut up."
He laughed. "No one tells Eugene Davis when to shut up and succeeds."
"I had figured that out by myself, funnily enough."
"Heh." He stood up and went over to the window. "Look, the sun's peeking over the clouds again."
"Yeah," I affirmed, and we spent that peaceful moment in each other's company while watching the sky lighten up again.
The door suddenly opened, however, and in came Naru, with a black folder in his grasp and a grim look on his face.
"Come, I've already found out the root of all this evil," was his first words, and I now knew that he had already solved the case.
Gene tried a mischievous smirk on. "Good job, Professor Davis."
"That's right," Naru smirked back, and I knew that the two of them smirking at the same time wasn't good news.
"We shall have this case all wrapped up by the next afternoon," Naru told us once all of SPR was finally settled in the base. "I have come to the conclusion that Julchen will never rest until we put the one at fault before her."
"Nothing is more terrible than a woman's revenge," Gene said knowledgeably, and Bou-san grinned.
"Ne, ne, bouya, you're too young to know that one," he said with an amused look.
"Never too young, that's for sure," Gene replied lazily, and Bou-san snickered.
"But how can we 'put the one at fault before her', as you've so prettily said it?" Mori-san put in, sipping daintily out of a teacup.
"I've already sent for her," Naru said confidently. "She'll be here first thing in the evening."
Bou-san accidentally spat out the tea that he had just imbibed after hearing what Naru just said. "What? Seriously? Was it Takanashi Eri?"
"As for your question, Bou-san, I believe not."
Gene jokingly held up a hand. "High five, little brother."
"Shut up."
"All of you really enjoy ordering me to shut up, don't you?" he sulked.
"But how could you know that it's going to stop all these phenomena?" Bou-san said, looking as intrigued as the rest of us. "And Takanashi was the obvious—"
"To effectively hide something, Takigawa-san, you have to put it in plain sight." Gene smiled benignly from his seat like a mischievous angel.
"Shut up, bouya," Bou-san said jokingly.
Gene gasped melodramatically and slumped in his chair as if shot. "You're kidding me, right?"
My narcissist sighed and steepled his fingers as if debating whether to satisfy our curiosities or doom us with the feeling of ignorance. "Fine, I shall present all of my findings to you." Naru placed the folder that he was holding earlier on the table and opened it. Inside was a collection of newspaper clippings, photographs, and papers. "I asked Hara-san late last night about the possession that she had undergone in the dining hall, and she has confirmed that the spirit there wasn't indeed of Takanashi Eri. However, that doesn't rule her out immediately as Julchen's murderer."
"Why is that?"
"I have my reasons to think that that may very well be the case here, Bou-san. First is the insistence of Franz Pfeiffer about the fact that his second wife wasn't the culprit. Why defend her if she was indeed the killer? Wouldn't his fatherly instincts lash out at the first possible suspect, which was Takanashi Eri, since it was evident that Eri and Juliet do not get along?" Naru pulled out a piece of paper from the folder and perused it. "And that made me confirm one thing. That that someone clearly tried to push off his or her crime onto the first person that would clearly have a hand in the crime."
Gene smiled dryly. "Marvelous, Holmes."
"Hardly," Naru scoffed back, which made us smile. "Also, another thing that I noted was about Gene's information about Juliet's younger twin sister. Julia Pfeiffer, to be exact."
"She had a twin sister?" Ayako looked surprised.
"Gene had a clairaudient trance which handed him the fact. It was the missing link that I had needed. If he hadn't retrieved that information, I would have confused everything and made a jumble of all that facts."
Gene smiled like the Cheshire Cat. "You know, I could totally rub it in your face later!"
Naru deadpanned at him. "Do you know what I was going to say at this very minute?"
Gene wisely clammed up after that.
"And couldn't have we retrieved that information some other way?" Ayako wondered.
"Impossible," Naru said shortly. "Julia was naturally the weaker twin because she was the last in order of birth. It seemed as if she had some sort of chronic disease that prevented her from going out of the house at long stretches of time. Thus, no one outside the family and the house servants even knew of her. However, there was one exception. And that was the gardener's twenty-year-old son, by the name of Arakawa Daisuke."
Gene slyly grabbed his twin's teacup and drank it all.
Naru distastefully decided to ignore the offender, even though his eyes were already narrowed with apparent annoyance. "I assume you'd know what went on next?"
"Er, the girls both fell for Arakawa, I guess?" Bou-san hazarded.
"Correct." Naru finally decided to grace Gene with a look. Gene was blissfully unrepentant. "Now, are you going to say anything?"
Gene smiled. "Nothing. Please do go on."
"I guess." Naru crossed his arms and sat back. "Considering the outcome of it all, there must have been an incident wherein Daisuke began to fall for Julia too. This must have spiked Juliet's extreme envy, and she must have contrived to hatch a plan to get rid of her twin for good, and at the same time not shed any blame on herself.
"She must have then realized how things could be done her way. At this point, I used psychometry on the piano to trace the psychic energy left on the place and what I saw, I coupled with speculation. Disguising herself as Julia, she might have went one night into the room where her sister was currently practicing on the piano, and had stabbed her."
"I should have thought," Gene said with an accusing look.
"The energy left was too faint to harm," Naru told him with a sigh. "Well, this is another, but Franz might have suspected that his daughter was the culprit, although he might've not recognized Juliet for who she really was, and so avoided both scandal and trouble by declaring that Eri, whom Juliet had also framed for the crime because of her hate for her stepmother, is innocent and that his dead daughter must have been the victim of a third person. Juliet, who was still disguised as Julia, could then use Franz's preference to her sister as a means to persuade her father to cover up the business, and Daisuke's attraction to her sister to make him fall in love with her."
"That's horrid," I remarked softly, thinking of the dream that I had. Julia had seen all of the signs of her sister's hate, yet still chose to ignore them and loved her all the better for it. And yet…
"Another is of the confusing news of Franz Pfeiffer's sudden suicide."
"What about it?"
"I went through Yasuhara-san's files again, and I found that the details of the suicide weren't clear. Why would a wealthy man, already in the prime of his life, attempt a suicide without any motivation to do so?" Naru leaned forward to rest his arms and stared seriously down at the news clipping that he had pulled out. "What I found from one of the past neighbors of the Pfeiffers' gardener was that the day right before the suicide, Arakawa Daisuke had suddenly disappeared."
"Ha." Bou-san whistled. "This doesn't even—"
"On the contrary, it makes perfect sense," Naru said. "Why do you think the property was all transferred without fuss to Takanashi Eri's hands? Couldn't Juliet, disguised as her twin sister, have complained of the claims? But why did no one file a protest?" Naru's eyes were glittering dryly.
"Does that mean that Juliet eloped with Daisuke?" John mused with a thoughtful look.
"So it seems," Gene said lightly. "And they must have gotten married."
"Well, that's the end of all my deductions. I then went to the library and searched every inch of the phone book until I found every Arakawa Daisuke in the country (which must've been a lot! le gasp!). I also cross-referenced the computers there, which luckily held Internet connection, and then I called them all up."
"What a thorough guy," Gene grumbled. "You'll go blind because of all of those reading someday soon."
"Well, one thing is clear," Ayako remarked. "That even though Juliet did terrible things, it was still all out of love. I mean, didn't she have the perfect chance to plot to kill her father and take all of the estate for her own? But still, she chose to love a mere gardener's son and eloped with him for the sake of her love."
"First sensible thing you've ever said in, like, months?" Bou-san remarked jokingly, which made Ayako throw her handbag at him.
"Ow!"
"Ne, Naru, who was the ghost in the dining hall? Was it Takanashi Eri?" I asked, but it was Masako who answered.
"No. It was one of the maids." Masako held her kimono sleeve over the lower half of her face and looked over at Naru as if wanting him to confirm her statement.
"Indeed it was." Naru pulled another clipping. "It turned out that Takanashi Eri wasn't even in the house the moment the fire broke out since she was in Tokyo to take care of something unspecified. The screams, evidently, had come from the maid who had never been found. The Takanashi family did leave the day after the reports had been given, but it was totally unrelated to what just happened."
I see. So that's what's happened. I felt enlightened, in a sense.
April, day 6. 4:12 pm.
I accompanied Naru as we waited for Arakawa Daisuke and Juliet by the orphanage gate, feeling the warm afternoon air settle over us like a calming presence. I didn't know what to think of how I felt as I stood by that gate, though. Could I be feeling pure relief, that this case was finally going to be over? Or maybe something not quite permeable?
"Naru."
"Mm?" He had his eyes calmly fixed on the road, but turned them toward me with a curious glance. "What was it?"
"What do you think of this case?"
"Do my feelings about this case have anything to do with you?" What a nice conversationalist he was.
"Of course. It'll satisfy my curiosity."
He watched me with something akin to amusement, before saying, "I don't feel anything but relief to see this case to its close."
Huh? Funny.
"Nothing else?" I persisted.
"Mai, didn't I keep on telling you that you shouldn't get too attached to cases and clients?" he sighed with annoyance. "Satō Asami is merely a vessel wherein this case had been first presented. Then one after the other the facts present themselves. We organize them, observe the phenomena, and record them all in camera. Ghost hunting is based on observation. We don't need to necessarily do an exorcism, but we still do it as a token of appreciation to the opportunity that the clients have presented us. All in all, those cases that we've solved are just mere tools with which to base information from."
"Hmph." I pressed my lips tightly together and looked away from the automaton-feel-a-like beside me, determinedly staring at the mountains in the distance, when the vehicle that we've been waiting for finally arrived. With a delicate pause, it stopped in front of the gates and let a woman out.
She was still young, not older than twenty-three, perhaps, which would make her around Ayako's age (although, well…). She was simply dressed, and her startlingly dark eyes and slightly foreign features alerted me to her identity. She went over to the driver's side window to tell the driver to come pick her up later, and finally turned to approach us.
"Good afternoon," she greeted us with flawless Japanese. Her accent was nearly unidentifiable. "May I see Shibuya-san?"
"So you are Arakawa Julia-san?" Naru asked smoothly, stepping aside to let her in. "It's my pleasure to be able to finally meet you. I am Shibuya Kazuya. I called you yesterday to speak to you about your, ah, sister."
I understood his use of the name Julia. It wouldn't do to have her at her guard already, but I could already see the glimmer of suspicion in her dark eyes.
"You are very young," she replied.
"They all tell me that," Naru said coolly, "but I think that it wouldn't take much age to discover secrets buried in the sand." And gesturing to the building, he said, "Shall we, Arakawa Julia-san? Or should you prefer, Juliet-san? I think it's better if we keep things straight to the point."
She looked alarmed at the sudden address and opened her mouth as if to protest, but I could see the sturdiness of her spirit as she slowly calmed down and closed her mouth with a resigned look.
"You caught me there," she said with a smile, "but I think it'll do me no harm if I do, right?"
And thus, as we entered the orphanage, I cue the phrase 'enter Juliet Pfeiffer'. The true one.
A/N:
GH Trivia: Once Naru gets really angry, he gets straightforward and flat with the person. So as long as Naru is on the sarcastic side, you're safe. Or so Madoka tells Mai.
I'm afraid that everyone telling Gene to shut up had become a running gag in this chapter…:3 And yeah, Mai has referred to Naru in this story as 'my narcissist' about three times already, lulz. Anyways, she was the one who thought of the term to describe his huge ego, so it won't hurt.
I was getting scared of the plot hole fairy. Lol. Anyways, kinda refreshing to write all those chapters with all those little holes that you can fill up at the end. I hope I didn't confuse anyone throughout the story… (sweatdrop) And I lied again and decided to cut out the PK scene and paste it on the next chapter, :D.
And I was too busy Facebooking (read: playing Tetris) that I didn't realize that this chapter was already ready, LOL. ~Caps lock freaking rules. :D
Don't tell anybody else, but I applied for a course in AB Creative Writing in the top university in the Philippines! (claps) I didn't even tell my mom… She's working in the States, which is like, separated from here by a whole chunk of ocean. That's like, what, two thousand miles? Better not rouse the sleeping tigers, ROFL. Wish me luck, fellow writers. Next year, I will be going to college. FINALLY.
Please do review!
Thank you to Jade Starlight, Music-Lover2011, LadyChrystalline, lalaoo and Cremateme for the 'mazing reviews. Boy, you made me cry tears of joy when I read your reviews for the first time! :3 Rest assured that I have read, reread, loved, and worn those reviews thin because of all my return trips to the review page!:3
I promise that I'm going to harass my Yahoo mail for more alerts until it almost gets tired of me until I read more of your reviews! :) Nya